In 1971, Ray, at the invitation of experimental filmmakers Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs, took a teaching post at SUNY Binghamton in the fledgling film production department. The major project to come out of the period is this film, an experimental meta-narrative centering on a teacher (Ray) and his students (played by his real-life students), who are all engaged in creating their own small stories inspired by their mentor. Remarkable for its technique of using several simultaneous images at once and featuring profound contributions from many of his students (most notably Tom Farrell), Ray continued to tinker with this wrenching, highly personal labor of love until his death in 1979.
Appears in: Bigger Than Life: The Films of Nicholas Ray
Genres: Experimental, Documentary
Other Films by Nicholas Ray
Johnny Guitar
Widely cited as an allegory for the anti-Communist hearings overseen by the House Un-American Activities Committee that led to the Hollywood blacklist of 1955, Johnny Guitar is one of the fiercest Westerns ever made. Vienna (an unforgettable Joan Crawford), a saloon owner in a small Arizona town, walks a fine line between the conservative townsfolk, …
Lightning Over Water
Ray, dying of cancer, fought hard to make this last film, a document of his final days in New York City. Wenders, by then a close friend of Ray’s, comes to New York after being on location shooting a noir in Los Angeles. What follows is Ray, with Wenders’ tender assistance, reminiscing about his life …
King of Kings
King of Kings, Ray’s second film for MGM, is truly his “epic” (featuring narration by Orson Welles!), a lavish historical ensemble drama chronicling the life of Jesus Christ (Jeffrey Hunter), but still very much a Ray film in its intimate focus on individual crises. The film’s main temporal focus is the lead-up to Jesus’ crucifixion, …
Party Girl
A latter-day mob tale made for glamorous MGM—ironic, at that most softboiled of studios—Ray follows the gritty gangster classics of the 1930s by crafting the center of Party Girl’s story on mafia lawyer Thomas Farrell (Robert Taylor), who has a sterling record defending crooks and murderers. Farrell, in the course of his work for archetypal …
On Dangerous Ground
Injecting atmosphere and detailed character development to an already very strong script by A.I. Bezzerides, Robert Ryan stars as Jim Wilson, a hardboiled-as-can-be New York detective sent upstate to investigate a murder. What Wilson happens upon, however, is far more complicated, as the murder-suspect Danny (Sumner Williams) is mentally ill, and Wilson is quickly paired …