In Transition 2 (May 1927,“La Réalité” 160), Robert Sage quotes Louis Aragon, who wrote: “Nothing can assure me of reality. Nothing, neither the exactness of logic nor the strength of a sensation, can assure me that I do not base it on the delirium of interpretation.” This statement encapsulates the spirit of surrealism, in which the “tightly bordered territory” of realism (161), and conventional concepts of the nature of reality itself, are questioned. The value of logic, of theories, and of settled definitions of meaning are questioned. Sage applies this questioning to art: “The dreams and thought tangents of an imaginative person organized upon paper or canvas do not vulgarly ‘mean’ anything, yet they are no less real than a brick house” (161). What is left after stripping experiences of reason is, in the surrealist view, the thing itself—the experience itself—as it exists in a pre-rational, subconscious form. The artistic result is an expression of hallucinatory or dream-like images, often including the expression of sexual desire.

These elements are present in Man Ray’s film l’Étoile de Mer (1928), in which images of male sexual desire and frustration (and perhaps impotence) are shot through hazy glass. Image follows image as in a dream, with recognizable objects, such as newspapers, and especially the starfish, placed in unexpected contexts.

If we follow the surrealist view literally, it is futile to seek meaning in such images, and yet the psychoanalysis from which part of the surrealist approach derives spends great effort on the interpretation of dreams. If we place l’Étoile de Mer within a post-war context, perhaps the dream can be connected with the same type of tired despair expressed in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s “The Young European” (Transition 2, 9-16), in which the horrors of war have left only “murder and coitus” (17) as viable desires. In Ray, in the end, even desire is frustrated and beauty shattered.