The Cinema of Nicholas Ray

Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray

October 2 – December 13

TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto

“There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Einsenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

“Notoriously self-destructive but irresistibly alluring—to men and women alike—Ray empathized with the broken and misunderstood, a talent that allowed him to create characters of true complexity on-screen.” — Patrick McGilligan

“Nicholas Ray’s films still exude a connection with audiences, and remain some of the most startling films in contemporary cinema.” — Jenny Jediny

“...the bravado style of the maverick became his principal calling card.”

— Jonathan Rosenbaum

Godard made the famous pronouncement, “Le cinéma, c’est Nicholas Ray,” in his 1957 review of Bitter Victory, claiming that Ray alone was capable of remaking the cinema. This full-scale centenary retrospective, scheduled over two seasons and centred on the recent restoration of We Can’t Go Home Again, features many rare, restored, studio and archival prints of Ray’s films, providing the ideal opportunity to put Godard’s assertion to the test.

In some of the most beautiful, personal and distinctive films ever made in Hollywood, and then in a series of increasingly difficult independent productions, Ray redefined commercial cinema. Even when constrained by studio edicts and economics, the restive Ray produced films that were daringly impulsive and sometimes rawly autobiographical, reflecting his profound understanding of and estrangement from the ethos of postwar America. From the brooding romanticism of his directorial debut They Live by Night and the emotional violence of In a Lonely Place and On Dangerous Ground, through the CinemaScope expressionism of Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life and the epic spectacle of 55 Days at Peking and King of Kings, Ray transformed his love of the forlorn, the vulnerable and the misfit, his identification with the abject innocent and angry outsider into a vision adverse to the coercive optimism and desperate conformity of the fifties. Poetic, pessimistic, high-strung and humanist, Ray’s films are set in a lonely place and on dangerous ground—the wounded psyches of often solitary nomads, strangers who keep looking for a home in a world to which they “have not been properly introduced.”

On October 30, Susan Ray will appear at TIFF Bell Lightbox to present a restored version of their groundbreaking collective feature We Can’t Go Home Again (1973-79), in addition to introducing the full-length restoration of Ray’s classic Bitter Victory (1957).

The Cinemas Is Nicholas Ray is programmed by TIFF Cinematheque Senior Programmer James Quandt. Hollywood Classics is a deluxe year-round series of American films, both canonical and cult, celebrated or unjustly obscure, presented as often as possible in new, restored or rare prints. Hollywood Classics screens every Tuesday and Saturday beginning October 2.