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Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again at the Venice Film Festival in 2011
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for the centennial of the birth of the great film director
11 | 20 | 2009
world premiere in Venice in 2011
We will finally discover as a world premiere at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in 2011, coinciding with the opening of the celebrations of the centennial of the birth of Nicholas Ray (Galesville, 7 August 1911 - New York, 16 June 1979), the reconstructed and restored, definitive and faithful to the original idea, of We Can’t Go Home Again, the posthumous work of the great American director, an experimental and ‘multi-narrative’ film on the border between film and visual arts, filmed together with young filmmakers of Harpur College (New York), where Ray taught.
We Can’t Go Home Again was conceived by Ray and his wife, Susan, as a teaching tool, for teaching filmmaking through practice and not only through theory. Because "the only way to learn how to make a film, it is through another film," stated Ray.
It's a “laboratory film”, which mixes different expressive languages and different techniques, perfectly in the spirit of the Venice Biennale, laboratory for the future of arts.
For over thirty years, the materials of We Can’t Go Home Again remained on the shelves of a film depository. Susan Ray, in collaboration with the Venice International Film Festival, directed by Marco Müller and organized by the La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, and together with the Festival’s sponsor Jaeger-LeCoultre, is about to finish the editing of the film as it was intended by the director, and will be completely restored for the 68th edition of the Festival in 2011.
Susan Ray is the president and founder of the Nicholas Ray Foundation, designed to honor the pioneering spirit of her husband, saving and restoring his films and archive materials, and supporting innovation and research in contemporary cinema.
The project is of a great extent and includes, not only the restoration of We Can’t Go Home Again, but also the creation of a series of DVDs, an installation, a film titled “Nicholas Ray Master Class”, and the launch of an interactive website.
By analyzing the work of Ray in those different ways, the project aims not only to communicate his importance as a filmmaker, but also to open new ways in preserving and showing films.
Considered "the work of a madman" by some, an avant-garde work by others, We Can’t Go Home Again is an extraordinarily strong and innovative experiment, celebrated by the greatest contemporary filmmakers (Wim Wenders often refers to this film in his Lightning Over Water/Nick's Movie).
Marco Müller showed the two versions (1972 and 1976) when the film was incomplete, within the context of the first complete retrospective of Ray’s work, when he was the Director of the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 1991.
"At the first meeting at Harpur College in New York - says his wife Susan - Nick showed up in the classroom with five pages of script and a schedule which assigned a job for each student of the team for two weeks in rotation: cameraman , screenwriter, makeup artist, sound engineer, light technician.. So, by the end of the school year, each student would have had an experience in every position on a typical film set.”
Soon, however, the intensity of the exchanges between students and teacher while improvising the scenes, turned a simple exercise into something with its own life. From those emotionally authentic images, comes the story of two generations unable to speak with each other, and of a society which has forgotten its origins.
The film uses an innovative technique, called by Ray 'mimage' or 'multiple-image': three, four, or five moving images simultaneously printed on a 35mm film. Ray's goal was to search for the boundaries of those fading images, rather than maintain the sharpness of the frames in order to give a more accurate picture of how the mind really thinks: "not in a straight line," Ray insisted.
Although Abel Gance, Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Frears and Mike Figgis have repetitively used the fragmented screen, the sophistication and emotional power of Ray’s multiple images have not yet been matched, even now that digital technology makes this technique immediately accessible.
We Can’t Go Home Again was conceived by Ray and his wife, Susan, as a teaching tool, for teaching filmmaking through practice and not only through theory. Because "the only way to learn how to make a film, it is through another film," stated Ray.
It's a “laboratory film”, which mixes different expressive languages and different techniques, perfectly in the spirit of the Venice Biennale, laboratory for the future of arts.
For over thirty years, the materials of We Can’t Go Home Again remained on the shelves of a film depository. Susan Ray, in collaboration with the Venice International Film Festival, directed by Marco Müller and organized by the La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, and together with the Festival’s sponsor Jaeger-LeCoultre, is about to finish the editing of the film as it was intended by the director, and will be completely restored for the 68th edition of the Festival in 2011.
Susan Ray is the president and founder of the Nicholas Ray Foundation, designed to honor the pioneering spirit of her husband, saving and restoring his films and archive materials, and supporting innovation and research in contemporary cinema.
The project is of a great extent and includes, not only the restoration of We Can’t Go Home Again, but also the creation of a series of DVDs, an installation, a film titled “Nicholas Ray Master Class”, and the launch of an interactive website.
By analyzing the work of Ray in those different ways, the project aims not only to communicate his importance as a filmmaker, but also to open new ways in preserving and showing films.
Considered "the work of a madman" by some, an avant-garde work by others, We Can’t Go Home Again is an extraordinarily strong and innovative experiment, celebrated by the greatest contemporary filmmakers (Wim Wenders often refers to this film in his Lightning Over Water/Nick's Movie).
Marco Müller showed the two versions (1972 and 1976) when the film was incomplete, within the context of the first complete retrospective of Ray’s work, when he was the Director of the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 1991.
"At the first meeting at Harpur College in New York - says his wife Susan - Nick showed up in the classroom with five pages of script and a schedule which assigned a job for each student of the team for two weeks in rotation: cameraman , screenwriter, makeup artist, sound engineer, light technician.. So, by the end of the school year, each student would have had an experience in every position on a typical film set.”
Soon, however, the intensity of the exchanges between students and teacher while improvising the scenes, turned a simple exercise into something with its own life. From those emotionally authentic images, comes the story of two generations unable to speak with each other, and of a society which has forgotten its origins.
The film uses an innovative technique, called by Ray 'mimage' or 'multiple-image': three, four, or five moving images simultaneously printed on a 35mm film. Ray's goal was to search for the boundaries of those fading images, rather than maintain the sharpness of the frames in order to give a more accurate picture of how the mind really thinks: "not in a straight line," Ray insisted.
Although Abel Gance, Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Frears and Mike Figgis have repetitively used the fragmented screen, the sophistication and emotional power of Ray’s multiple images have not yet been matched, even now that digital technology makes this technique immediately accessible.
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