WAKE UP, THE UNIVERSE HAS ENDED: NICHOLAS RAY IN CINEMASCOPE
4/7 - 4/28
"If it were all in the script, why make the film?" - Nicholas Ray
Canonized as one of postwar American cinema’s supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers, Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) was an artist whose candle burned from both ends with furious energy and inspiration. Ray’s films are among the most heartfelt and disarmingly authentic works of the Hollywood studio era, intimate portraits of indelibly three-dimensional characters and lyrical intimations of loneliness and loss. Above all, Ray’s cinema glows with an ardent humanism, a passionate sympathy for the most vulnerable underdogs, those wounded loners and outcasts who stumble nobly across his films. First appreciated by the French directors and critics affiliated with Cahiers du cinema – and especially revered by a young Jean-Luc Godard – Ray was embraced as a cult director, crowned as auteur and celebrated for the searing romanticism, eccentric visual style and single-mindedness which would force him into one conflict too many with the Hollywood establishment. Each of Ray’s films became increasingly hard won victories until finally he was banished from the studios’ kingdom to become himself one of the lonely wanderers who had so captured his imagination. (Harvard Film Archive)
Canonized as one of postwar American cinema’s supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers, Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) was an artist whose candle burned from both ends with furious energy and inspiration. Ray’s films are among the most heartfelt and disarmingly authentic works of the Hollywood studio era, intimate portraits of indelibly three-dimensional characters and lyrical intimations of loneliness and loss. Above all, Ray’s cinema glows with an ardent humanism, a passionate sympathy for the most vulnerable underdogs, those wounded loners and outcasts who stumble nobly across his films. First appreciated by the French directors and critics affiliated with Cahiers du cinema – and especially revered by a young Jean-Luc Godard – Ray was embraced as a cult director, crowned as auteur and celebrated for the searing romanticism, eccentric visual style and single-mindedness which would force him into one conflict too many with the Hollywood establishment. Each of Ray’s films became increasingly hard won victories until finally he was banished from the studios’ kingdom to become himself one of the lonely wanderers who had so captured his imagination. (Harvard Film Archive)
