The Mysteries of the Château de Dé (Les Mystères du Château de Dé)

Two masked men playing dice in a bar leave, get in a car, and drive to the ruins of a castle on a hill. There. they find a modern chateau filled with contemporary furniture and abstract art. Time to roll the dice.

The longest of Man Ray’s films, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (the version above has apparently been shortened by seven minutes) follows a pair of travelers on a journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, which features a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian. “Made as an architectural document and inspired by the poetry of Mallarmé,” writes Kim Knowles in A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray, “Les Mystères du Château de Dé is the film in which Man Ray most clearly demonstrates his interdisciplinary attitude, particularly in its reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.”