The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
Directed by Nicholas Ray
“You think you know it all just because you’ve made movies and you’re old? Huh?” If We Can’t Go Home Again is Ray’s response, then the answer is a resounding “I don’t know.” Ray develops possibly the most beguiling of images attributed to a (former) Hollywood director, crossing fully into the avant-garde with this quintessential work of community filmmaking (made in collaboration with and depicting the students of his class at Harpur College). Frames within frames are the aesthetic M.O. here, with multiple images simultaneously juxtaposed against the same screen, pitting political rallies against college tomfoolery, creative frustration with cinema past, never quite clear about the distinctions between performance and reality. The film intermittently turns from the analytic to the phantasmagoric at the point at which these images collide, making abstract variegated collages that unleash the roiling fury one could always sense behind Ray’s Hollywood pictures. Indeed, the intensity in Ray’s cinema is one that emanates rather than strikes, and it is this disquietude that so heavily hangs over this swan song. Does We Can’t Go Home Again cohere into a quantifiable whole? No. Is it the essential final transmission from America’s greatest auteur? Undoubtedly. Eric Barroso (April 22, 7:30pm at the Spectacle)