Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Film Pick of the Day: We Can't Go Home Again & Don't Expect Too Much at Belcourt
Posted by Jim Ridley on Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 12:57 PM
We Can't Go Home Again & Don't Expect Too Much
Where: The Belcourt
When: 7:30 p.m. Tues., Dec. 6
If you’ve attended The Belcourt’s superb Nicholas Ray retrospective from the studio-approved successes of Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place through the troubled waters of his bleak war drama Bitter Victory and his 1958 Metrocolor fever dream Party Girl, you don’t want to miss the finale, which accompanies the movies’ poet of wounded masculinity and alienation to the startling end of his career.
We Can’t Go Home Again (a title that, as has been noted, would serve almost every film Ray ever made) is a radical 1973 experimental feature starring and directed by Ray in collaboration with students at Harpur College in Binghamton, N.Y., employing split screens, primitive video manipulation and period snippets of political unrest. In its wandering eye, bleeding-raw technique and narrative fragmentation, it makes something like Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls look like — well, Party Girl. On one viewing, it (mal)functions simultaneously as time capsule, emptied wastebasket and furiously impulsive creation.
For viewers of the entire series, the true reward in this one-night-only double feature may be Don’t Expect Too Much, an illuminating documentary about the movie’s making directed by the filmmaker’s widow Susan Ray (seen discussing the film in the clip above). It opens a window onto the one-of-a-kind project’s creative chaos and arguably debilitating freedom — and like We Can’t Go Home Again and the more obscure entries in this film fanatic’s wish-list series, it’s something you’ll likely never have another chance to see locally on the big screen.
Comments (0)