L’Étoile de mer (1928) - film review

As if in a dream, a man and a woman walk along a country lane.  They climb a staircase and enter a room in which the woman starts to undress.  The man says farewell and goes away.  Later, the woman gives the man a starfish in a jar.  In his room, he examines it with fascination, and, as he does so, painted lines appear on the palms of his hand.  The woman returns to the same staircase with a knife, intent on murder, and finds a starfish.  The man meets the woman yet again, in the country, but this time she is accompanied by another man.  How beautiful she was, he reflects, looking at the starfish.  How beautiful she still is...

A significant film from the Surrealist movement of the 1920s, directed by Man Ray, L’Étoile de mer is a perplexing and haunting short film, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou.  Inspired by a poem from Robert Desnos, the film contrasts the beauty of a starfish with that of a lost sweetheart.

The film masterfully employs stark surrealist imagery and unsettling naturalistic photography as it alternates between dreams and reality.  In addition to the obvious references to subconscious sexual desire (which permeate much of surrealist art in this period), the film makes some bizarre connections between the ideal unattainable woman and the starfish of the film’s title.  This includes an inexplicably erotic close-up sequence of a slowly moving starfish.

As in all of Man Ray’s films from this period, L’Étoile de mer has the character of a dream.  Less abstract than Man Ray’s earlier experimental works, the film uses instantly recognisable images in an unfamiliar context, making this a definitive piece of surrealist art.

© James Travers 2002

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