I remember a time when, in one of the four cafés on the Trocadéro, someone (some film buff) would argue that X or Y might be the greatest filmmaker in the world, but that Nicholas Ray had made the most beautiful film in the world. Some nights, it was Bitter Victory, other nights Bigger than Life. There was always Nicholas Ray vs. everyone else, as if a privileged link existed between him and cinema, which it was up to us to safeguard. We already knew that his was not an easy career, that it would be destroyed. Even more than Welles, Ray had the profile of the big loser. Except that losing is sometimes winning. Pathos? Facile romanticism? Yes, but we also knew—he said so in an interview in Cahiers—that for him cinema had only just begun, that we had only glimpsed it, that it would surprise us. Strange remarks for a Hollywood filmmaker. Remarks we shouldn’t have forgotten. Presented at Cannes in 1973, rediscovered after his death in 1980, smuggled in and scheduled to be screened in English at the Action-République for a week, We Can’t Go Home Again tells us that we were right. We were right to put him “aside,” for the filmmaker who no longer shoots circles back, posthumously, a cinematic loop. A unique trajectory: he is the only one to have pursued his two favorite objects—cinema and youth—on their most recent adventures. From his exile, from his retreat, at the beginning of the seventies, he was the only filmmaker of his generation to bear witness in vivo to what youth and the cinema were becoming. And not because, for lack of anything better, he surrendered late in life to “experiences,” but because he is one of those filmmakers who can only be contemporary. Which is why Godard liked him so much. Which is why, in our imagination, Ray didn’t age, any more than cinema did. We Can’t Go Home Again is simply another Nicholas Ray film, dated 1973. Another film about youth, post-’68 youth, chatty and generous, drugged-out and pragmatic, violent and sentimental. Another film about education, Ray’s great theme, with, this time, the filmmaker presented onscreen for what he is: a name, a faded glory, the film professor who made, once upon a time, Rebel Without a Cause. Another film about fathers who aren’t fathers, who fake the Oedipus complex, imitate their death, tie knots that can no longer be severed. Ray, the Gordian filmmaker: at the end of the film, he hangs himself in front of his terrorized students, in the dark of night, in a hayloft. The off-camera voice of the hanged man murmurs to one of the youths, “Take care of each other.” How can we not think of They Live by Night? Another film about the impossibility of return, about headlong flight, about the lack of a home. But this  film is unique: in it a filmmaker disintegrates and recomposes the very material of his film. The screen is colonized by smaller images that vibrate, coexist, blur. Cries and confessions float on a black background but that black background is sometimes the shadow of a house, with a roof, the kind that children draw. No longer a house for characters, but a house for images “that no longer have a home”: cinema. You can’t go home again… in 1977, the first Semaine de Cahiers was in full swing in New York, at the Bleecker. I learned that Ray—who was teaching a block away—had just left the theater during the screening of Number Two. I ran after him. We were introduced. He didn’t like Godard’s film: too severe, intellectual, self-destructive. I chuckled to myself. He himself, he added, had made a film like that, before Godard, but the reels had been lost somewhere, while re-editing. In 1980, his widow, Susan Ray, came to Paris with the film in tow. She wanted to finish it, reassemble it, add some things, in keeping with Ray’s wishes. Was she correct in doing so? I’m not certain. What is certain is that no cinematheque in the world should sleep soundly knowing that it doesn’t have a copy of We Can’t Go Home Again in its bunker.

(Cahiers du Cinéma #310, April 1980)

"Nick Ray and the House of Images" appears in The Cinema House and the World, which has just been published by Semiotext(e) , and is available to purchase from the Metrograph Bookstore.