Nicholas Ray por Tag Gallagher

Nicholas Ray (Galesville, Wisconsin. 1911-79)  Acting, writing and di­recting, in radio, theater, and television.  First film, 1948, They Live by Night.

   French critics such as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and Rivette were lion­izing Ray at a time when Americans were disregarding him.  Partly this disparity was due to Ray epitomizing the desperation of contemporary life, whereas in America during the 50s existential attitudes were only begin­ning to be fashionable.  Partly it was due to Ray smelling like a Hollywoodized version of Elia Kazan, whom New York adored.  Ray had worked with Kazan and shared James Dean with him, and his characters have the same wounded anguish just below the surface.  But Ray made his action scenes bigger-than-life as well, by treating them as choreography, and in general distanced to exasperation the conventions of every genre or convention he touched.  His camera seemed to call everything into ques­tion by the uncomfortable way it meditated over landscapes and rooms (he had studied architecture in his youth with Frank Lloyd Wright).  Ray was not understood.

   Ostensibly, indeed ostentatiously, what were in crisis in Ray’s films were traditional institutions: army and government, justice and schools, the family and sex roles.  But even though Ray had been nourished in radical populist movements during the 1930s, his films are only superficially about what’s wrong with society, and even less about the class struggle and how to fix things.  Rebel without a Cause (1955) starts out about juvenile delinquency but ends up being about the same things as Bitter Victory, a film that starts out about soldiers in the desert, or Savage Innocents, a film that starts out about Eskimos.  And Ray’s antagonists too usually end up confronting a “moral equivalence between their supposedly antithetical natures.” [i]  

   The real drama in Ray, rather than the apparent one, is the Romantic struggle between aspiration and nihilism, between principles and dreams and a hostile, senseless world.  Ray is neither documentary (suburban high school; desert war; Eskimo life) nor fiction (Kazan); he is a yearning, a yearning for transcendentals that maybe don’t exist.  What kind of a uni­verse is it where everything always goes wrong, where I’m so miserable?  Is there anything, in Godard’s phrase, “beyond the stars”? [ii]

[i]  Jonathan Rosenbaum, in  Cinema p. 811.

[ii].  “Au-delà des étoiles,” loc. cit.

[ c. 1994 for a Spanish cinema encyclopedia /  Trafic (part of an article on c. 50 Hollywood directors) ]