#yr13

 Once again there is a suggestion of narrative about two travellers exploring a very modern mansion in the hills, but Man Ray deliberately keeps his characters obscured from us by having them wear nylon stockings over their faces. And the two travellers quickly fade from the story and are replaced with other masked figures. So narrative in any conventional sense (identifiable characters with concrete goals and desires) is never really present.

 He also indulges in a lot of expressionistic camera work. Lots of canted (tilted) angles, even having the camera rotate 360 degrees to reveal the grounds of the mansion. He employs very loose hand held framing, and focuses on things like the textures of a sculpture and the abstract shadowy patterns on a ceiling caused by light bouncing off the surface of a swimming pool. He uses high angle moving shots to survey the interior of the house. He uses slow motion and reverse motion in the scenes of the masked bathers in the swimming pool. In other words he uses an array of cinematic tricks to create a strange, dreamlike and disorienting mood.