Etoile de mer

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Man Ray, film maker of Étoile de mer, began his career as an American painter and photographer. During his lifetime he became a prominent leader in the Dada and Surrealist society and was one of the only Americans to do this. He spent most of his career in photography; this is where he made his biggest impact on 20th century art. “The more commercial aspects of Many Ray’s photography provided him with a steady income. Famous as a portrait photographer, in the 1920s and 1930s he was also one of the foremost fashion photographers for magazines such as Harper’s Basaar, Vu and Vogue” (Foresta 2009). Man Ray was also very involved in avant-garde art. He worked with Duchamp and Katherine Dreier to co-found an organization called the Société Anonyme, which was “one of the first organizations to promote and collect avant-garde art” (Foresta 2009). After a while Ray began to feel like American’s were not appreciating his work for what it is and that never would, but Paris might.
At the beginning of Ray’s career he became very interested in European Contemporary art, so in order to pay for a trip to Paris he sold some of his paintings. Unlike most people who travel to Paris simply for vacation, Ray made it his home and lived there for 20 years. Although he may have been an American, the international Dada and Surrealist groups welcomed him with open arms. Some well-known names in these groups include, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernest, Dali, Paul Eluard, Picasso and André Breton. During WWII Ray was forced to move back to America and lived in Los Angeles until the war ended. In 1951 he moved back to Paris, where he lived out the rest of his life. Seeing as the Man Ray was a prominent leader in the Dada and Surrealist community, it ...

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... To be hones though, the film still confuses me. The most confusing part was the images of all the objects. I watched this scene on repeat several times to try and figure out what some of the stuff was just so I could understand. I still don’t really get it.
After watching it several times, I can say that really the film makes me feel sadness and that Ray and Desnos are trying to say that love can’t be trusted. The man seems as if he is in love with the woman and the woman in liking to the man, but when he leaves she can’t put up with it and moves on. I don’t question that love is really like this, but is that how people women? Are woman so fixated on the idea of having a man in their lives instead of actually falling in love with someone? Or are people of the opposite sex looked at as just another object in the world, beautiful and disposable at the same time?

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