Lampi sull'acqua - Nick's movie

Painful but beautiful, poignant but disturbing, this film is unmissable for anyone loving Nick Ray's spirit and features. This director was not a Hollywood yes man, the common boot licker facing the moguls. His entire director life was a dog fight, and because he was a very sensitive and brilliant, intelligent but fragile man, he became a drug and many other substances addict, including sex and women. That slowly destroyed him. In this film, you watch him dying, filmed by his friend Wim Wenders. Useless to say that is not for all audiences, only die hard Nick Ray's or Wenders fans. It's more a document than a fiction feature. It's better to watch it on DVD with the director's comment, with all the indications and explanations; useless to see the "naked" movie, as it better for most of regular, ordinary movies. The thing that moved me the most was Nick's eyes, glance, the eyes of someone very intelligent, someone certainly not full of emptiness. The eyes of someone very alive. Very lucid. And believe me, this film is eveything but peeping tom oriented. No, Nick Ray totally agreed to be filmed, and not dying alone. So painful. RIP Nick.

this is a film i forced myself to watch in order to complete a speech in german about wim wender's amerkiabild. it is all about the death of a cancer ridden man. that is about all of the plot i could figure out.

the images, as is usual with wender's films, are striking and pungent to the hollywood-movie-goer senses. the scenes in this movie are about the slowest i have ever seen. i did find a few rewarding scenes here and there scattered throughout the chaos. the graduate monkey, the speech at vassar college, and the alarm clock scene to mention a few.

that is about all i know on this one.

i give it two riders of the apocalypse.

Not being in the habit of viewing snuff films I experienced what was, for me, a strange, rather unique emotion roughly five minutes into this documentary. Put into words it was, "I should not be watching this." And this feeling only deepened and broadened as the doc continued. I know the subject approved of it and that it was done with his full cooperation but I still felt as if it was obscene for me to be watching it. Even in our voyeuristic, surveiled world, where everything, it seems, belongs to someone or something other than oneself, some things are simply too private for sharing. Such as a real person's actual last, cancer ravaged moments. So I pulled the plug right after the "Lusty Men" clip which is definitely something I should be watching.

Two video versions of this film exist, both roughly the same length. The first was released by Pacific Video on VHS in 1987, the second just this month (1/03) by Anchor Bay on DVD. According to Kathe Geist's book "The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris France to Paris Texas," Wenders was so depressed by the filming of "Lightning" and Ray's death that he handed the footage over to his editor, Peter Przygodda, who spent a year fashioning it into a version shown at Cannes; apparently this is also the version released by Pacific Video in 1987 and which I first saw around that time (and have watched many times since). Wenders supposedly found this version obscure and depressing and re-edited, adding a voiceover (his own) and superimposing passages from Ray's diary; this is the version just released on DVD, and is considered by some the definitive edition. But I find Wender's criticism of the initial cut confusing, for it's the LATTER cut (his own) which is murky and depressing. Nick Ray's final scene, for example ("Cut...Don't Cut.") is tortuous (we're watching a man dying), and there are sequences edited so bizarrely as to be almost incomprehensible. The first cut, in contrast, has a narrative flow and progression that make it easier to absorb, though it's still tough going as we witness Nick Ray's suffering. Also, Wender's narration in the 2nd version (absent in the initial cut) actually adds little to the film. The first version is unfortunately out of print but is worth tracking down because it's the superior one.

This is not a movie for Wenders fans as much as it is for Nick Ray fans. In fact, I wouldn't recommend it unless you felt connected to the director. And I don't mean that you've happened to rent Johnny Guitar, In a Lonely Place or They Live By Night. See it if you saw a theme in Ray's work, one that made you go back and learn about his life. See it if you re-watched his films, trying to understand every cut and what it told you about the man behind the camera. See it if it bothers you that he will never make another film. Because in Lightning over water Nicholas Ray invites you to share his death with him, and, if you see it, you must be prepared to grieve. I saw this movie late one night in my college dorm room (a college with a featured role in the film, but that is merely tangential). I didn't let anyone watch it with me. The previous summer my grandfather had died in the same drawn-out manner. He was surrounded by family from the time of his diagnosis to the time of his death. Wenders and his crew are Nick Ray's family -- a love of the director's work is the blood connecting them. Wenders carries a camera with him because he knows that others -- even those who never heard of Nicholas Ray until he was dead for 18 years -- have the same blood in them. Wenders gives us the chance. But it is Nick Ray who we come to see.