During the contraction of Hollywood movie production in the nineteen-sixties that resulted from the rise of television and decline of the studios, many great filmmakers dropped out of the business or were pushed to the margins. One was Nicholas Ray—among the very greatest American filmmakers. When Ray surfaced again, at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton), in 1971, he worked with his students on a movie, “We Can’t Go Home Again,” that differed radically from his earlier films. Since he wasn’t in Hollywood and wasn’t working with a cast or crew from the studios, he didn’t work as directors do there. Rather, he developed an advanced and complex cinematic form to match his personal situation and the troubled times. Putting film images through a video processor, he condensed multiple shots into individual frames; he used multiple exposures, color transformations, shape distortions, and geometric overlays to capture a sense of a mind and a world in turmoil—of a filmmaker and a generation in crisis. Needless to say, “We Can’t Go Home Again” didn’t receive a wide commercial release, or even a limited one. The film screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 but wasn’t picked up for distribution. Ray shot more footage, tinkered with it for a few more years, and then moved on. He knew the fickleness of the business; the Times critic Vincent Canby visited Ray at Harpur, in 1972, and reported that the director “remembered how Hollywood dinner dates, which had been cancelled after the bad reviews of ‘Johnny Guitar,’ were reinstated when the film became a big money-maker.” The canonization of “We Can’t Go Home Again” is long overdue. Ray died in 1979; the version of the film that was restored and screened in 2011, and that’s now available on DVD, is a reconstruction of the one from 1973.
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Goings On
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The New Yorker Documentary
A Teen-Ager’s Quest to Manage His O.C.D. in “Lost in My Mind”
In Charles Frank’s short film, a young man offers a candid look at life with O.C.D. and his experiences with exposure therapy.
The Front Row
Med Hondo’s Vital Political Cinema Comes to New York
The Mauritanian filmmaker, long active in France, reveals the legacy of colonialism in society at large and in the art of movies.
By Richard Brody
Culture Desk
The Oscars: Who’ll Win, Who Should Win, and Who’s Overdue
More than in most years, the doctrine of dueness has dominated the 2024 awards season.
By Justin Chang
Musical Events
How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood
He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone from George Gershwin to James Dean.
By Alex Ross