A century ago, French artists and filmmakers showed the way towards a dreamlike, confrontational, nonsensical cinema, from The Seashell and the Clergyman to Un chien andalou.
As Emmanuel Di Donna says in his introduction to this splendid display of vintage portrait photographs by the indisputably great Man Ray, these works do indeed capture “the essence of Parisian life between 1921 and 1939.” How not already to love the verb “capture”?