I don't think I've seen this particular film though I'm pretty familiar
with Man Ray's work with both the New York dadaists and with the
surrealists. Tzara and Man Ray executed some photogram-type filmic
experiments such as putting salt and pepper on film stock in this way. From
my experience in filmmaking and photography, however, I do know that it
would be very difficult to duplicate most of the work done at that time
because of the vast difference in film stocks, both for film and for motion
picture. One beautiful technique that Man Ray used in much of the still
work you see of his was the Sabbatier effect -- the re-exposure of film or
light-sensitive paper during development that causes a reversal of tones.
This is very commonly done today and in still photography it is heightened
by the use of developers such as Solarol, made just for this purpose, and
also by the use of high-contrast papers. But Man Ray did mostly film
solarizations and these are very difficult to do, especially since there is
a big difference in film stocks these days.

I tried to solarize 16mm film once in my bathtub. Labs generally won't do
it, at least not the ones I spoke to at the time when I was trying this. I
didn't get the best results, but they were interesting and when individual
frames were isolated and optically printed in sequence they worked nicely.

You could try Man Ray's technique with any film stock, but the small frame
size would be very limiting in terms of the objects you could use.  You'd
probably be better off with a very slow film and you'd want to work with
very short bursts of controlled lighting. You'd do have a lot more control
if you made regular photograms and then reshot them using an animation
stand to "register" the sequence of images for the desired alignment.  If
you definitely wanted to use film for this, you could try sheet film in
8x10 and then have each image (each frame) copied to 16mm film, but this
would be very expensive.

If you do find decide to work with 16mm or 35mm film, be aware that you
cannot develop motion picture film in accord with the development
procedures used for still film, or vice versa. The emulsion of motion
picture film is much thinner than still film so you'll ruin your film if
you make this mistake (unfortunately, I know this from hard experience).

You might also want to call some motion picture film labs and ask for
advice. Unfortunately, most of them don't work too much with
experimentalists, so it could be hard to get someone who knows very much
about unusual stocks.

You could ask on the Photoforum listserv (a search engine should find it)
if anyone knows what kind of film stocks might work for this, though
Photoforum is largely a still photography list.  Gasseirs in San Francisco
sells film stock, so do most film labs. In San Francisco you could try
Monaco Film Labs (though since I no longer live there I'm not sure they're
still open and selling stocks), or you can try Alpha Cine Labs in Seattle.
Yale Labs in Los Angeles is one of the few labs in the United States that
develops black-and-white film stocks (as is Alpha Cine). The Film Arts
Foundation in San Francisco might be able to direct you to an experimental
filmmaker who has emulated this technique.

I hope that at least some of this information is helpful.

katherine

p o m e g r a n a t e s   w e b z i n e ,   http://www.pomegranates.com

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring
explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about
love and what is positive in the refusal of constraint, have corpses in
their mouths."
                                                           -- Raoul Vaneigem




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