The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice

Two men with stockings over their faces throw dice in a Paris bar and drive south, and at a modern villa more masked figures swim, exercise, play with a ball and throw the dice again. No one is anyone. The house is the subject, its stairways, its pool, its concrete geometry, and the film treats it as a set for a story it declines to tell. The Vicomte de Noailles commissioned Man Ray to film the villa Mallet-Stevens had built him at Hyères, and Man Ray took the title from Mallarmé; Jacques-André Boiffard shot it. Closer to a portrait of a building than anything else in the Surrealist cinema. 1929, twenty-seven minutes, silent.