Les Mystères du château de Dé (1929)
Directed by Man Ray

Film Review

Running to 27 minutes, Les Mystères du château de Dé is the longest of the dozen or so films to be made by the prominent surrealist artist Man Ray.  It is also, arguably, his most beguiling and philosophical film, the fullest embodiment of his so-called Cinéma Pur aesthetic.  A companion piece to its author's previous short film L'Étoile de mer (1928), a bitter and poignant ode to the ephemeral nature of romantic love, Les Mystères is a haunting evocation of the twin terrors of our existence - the transience of life and the role that chance plays in the grand scheme of things.

By the time he made this film, Man Ray (whose real name was Emmanuel Radnitzky) had become a prominent member of the Parisian avant-garde, having settled in France in 1921 after a successful start to his career as a painter and photographer in his native America.  The film was financed by the wealthy Vincomte de Noailles, who allowed it to be shot on the grounds of his large villa at Hyères in the south of France.  An avid sponsor of avant-garde artists, de Noailles also supported two other notable surrealist films of this period - Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou (1929) and Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète (1930). 

After an introductory caption, Les Mystères du château de Dé boldly asserts that 'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance'.  This is taken from the poem 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard' by Stéphane Mallarmé, a 19th century French poet who was a leading figure in the symbolist movement.  This notion that chance is an essential keystone of reality acquired a scientific foundation in the mid-1920s when Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac and others came up with a coherent formulation of the theory of quantum mechanics, which has since become a bedrock of modern science.

'God does not play dice' Albert Einstein once famously asserted, but Man Ray (an unlikely proponent of quantum physics) disagrees.  Every action performed by any human being in Les Mystères is preceded by a throw of the dice.  The film establishes its randomness theme at the outset with a shot of a hand of a wooden mannequin holding two dice. (What should we conclude from the fact that the dice are held by an inanimate object?)  There is no escape from the randomness that is imposed on us.  Our lives may seem to follow a steady course from cradle to grave, but in truth they consist of an almost limitless series of decision points, each offering a myriad of possible future outcomes.  It is not the 'what is' that most defines our lives, but rather the far more enticing 'what might be' - the infinite possibilities that lie before us.

Two later films that look as if they might have been inspired by this idiosyncratic short are Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), which both offer similarly poetic meditations on the close relationship between time and memory.  The mysterious nature of the titular château is conveyed to us by a hypnotic montage of tracking shots where the camera pans slowly across the field of view (both horizontally and vertically), a technique that Resnais frequently employed on his early films.  Longer tracking shots within the château, taking us from room to room, often with the camera at virtually ground level, add to the growing sense of eeriness, and the absence of the residence's human inhabitants becomes unaccountably disturbing.  Resnais achieves the same effect in the same way in Marienbad, as does Stanley Kubrick in his classic horror movie The Shining (1980).

When the villa's absent residents are revealed to us - with a dramatic suddenness - their faces are concealed by stockings.  They have no separate identities, they are merely marionettes governed by the workings of chance.  They exist for a while, amusing themselves with their wild gymnastic exhibitionism, and then they are gone.  Their presence lingers in the now deserted mausoleum like a faint lingering echo, which is given a visual representation in the brief coda that ends the film.  A couple arrive at the villa and, after another throw of the dice, resolve to stay.  They embrace and are transformed into statues.

Once again, the workings of chance are made apparent in a final shot of the hands of the wooden mannequin, which reveal two dice that are then allowed to fall down into the void.  And so the game of life goes on, the hand of chance collapsing one wave function after another to cut a single path - our perceived reality - through the endless forest of possibilities.

Film Synopsis

The hand of a carved wooden mannequin holds a pair of dice, as if to remind us of Stéphane Mallarmé's words:  'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance'.  At St Bernard in a picturesque spot of southern France there stands a modern villa built upon the ruins of an ancient castle.  Far away in Paris, two men wearing stocking masks throw dice and decide to set out on their journey.  They drive across open French countryside and arrive at the villa, to find it totally deserted.  The rooms are tastefully adorned with pieces of modern art, but where are the villa's inhabitants?

In a forgotten corner, four recumbent young people, all wearing stocking masks, are throwing dice.  The outcome of the game leads them to head to an indoor swimming pool, where they amuse themselves for a while, swimming and participating in gymnastic displays.  This flurry of activity ends suddenly when the four young people fade from view like ghosts, and once again the villa is deserted.  The next day, a man and a woman arrive at the deserted villa. They happen upon the dice and this determines their fate.  They choose to spend the night in the château, but transformed into statues they end up staying for eternity...