Star Of The Sea

Star of the Sea

L’étoile de mer, Man Ray’s cinematic interpretation of a poem by Robert Desnos, is the finest example of a canonical surrealist film, just as the films of Dali and Buñuel represent the later, international phase of Surrealism at its pinnacle. Characteristically for surrealist art of the mid-twenties, the film depends heavily upon the language of its intertitles (which are probably all the lines of Desnos’s otherwise lost poem), but its meaning depends upon the disjunctive combination of those words with images.