A Film Canon

 

 

This little film represents avant-garde cinema at its strongest. Initially moving between breathtakingly beautiful abstractions and more realistic, narrativised images, Ray quickly fuses the two, so that the realist strand both approaches abstraction and suggests a number of interpretations of the abstract strand. In particular, the latter's glassy, diaphanous fluidity is construed as so many distortions of the human eye. These are partly attributed to the cinematic medium itself and, more generally, to modernity's impact upon the senses, evoked through a number of memorable images, including a point-of-view shot from a camera reflected in the rear-vision mirror of a rapidly accelerating car. In a more characteristically surrealist move, Ray concludes the film by focussing on the female (sexual) gaze as the agent of distortion. Similarly, the abstract strand increasingly informs the realist strand, imbuing its images with a haunting beauty that resists any final interpretation, instead requiring the viewer to simply register the irreducible strangeness of those images, which include a spectacular pan across an incoming tide (during which the camera slowly revolves, turning upside down), as well as a lone, flickering neon billboard.