We Can't Go Home Again

More than a decade after directing his last feature film, "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) director Nicholas Ray (as Nicholas "Nick" Ray) accepts a job teaching for the State University of New York at Binghamton. Believing his students will learn about film by filming, Mr. Ray and the class set about making a documentary-styled feature. They move in together, off-campus. Ray tapes the students and they tape Ray. They begin tentatively, wondering about each other and sharing random thoughts. The era's rebellious youth and tendency toward protest forms background static...

Ray sometimes wears a black eye-patch. A full frontal nude female walking into your eye view from atop a stairway is a memorable image. Tom Farrell shaves his beard in anguish. The main story involves suicidal tendencies. "We Can't Go home Again" is best when mixing two to five related images in split screen, but too often isolates only a fourth of the screen. Nobody explains much about filmmaking. Most of this will appeal to those who participated; it is a student film, after all. My take is that Ray is looking back on the startling 1960s and trying to see where he fit in, but couldn't...

**** We Can't Go Home Again (1976) Nicholas Ray ~ Nicholas Ray, Tom Farrell, Ned Weisman, Danny Fisher

After crashing and burning with a couple of Hollywood epics director Nicholas Ray was in desperate need for work and from the looks of things a way to cover his bar tab when he took on a professorship in an upstate New York University and along with his students made this ambitious work of near total incoherency.

The film's form is a series of multiple disparate projections linked only by the fact they are sharing the same screen though I believe there are some attempts to sum up the chaotic times with a visual onslaught of youthful angst and insecurity goaded on by a dissipated over the hill film maker of Rebel Without a Cause. There's riot footage, frontal nudity by a student who refuses to put her pants on and someone taking David Crosby's advice in an overwrought mawkish scene shaving his beard. There is also the patch eyed visage of Ray in various states of consciousness trying to figure out a way to hang himself; "I made a dozen westerns and I can't tie a decent noose".

I was a film studies major around this time at another college and we more or less were doing the same experimentation (I recall writing on film stock) but with less hallowed Profs the likes of Ray (though we did have an instructor that resembled Lee Remick) . Our youthful exuberance matched his students but I can only imagine how buoyed they must have been under the guidance of a Hollywood legend, especially with the cool demeanor of a Ray. So bad as the finished product of We Can't Go Home Again is something tells me the journey for these kids made it more than worth the trip.

There is a controversy about "experimental films." Well, Some sustain that this film isn't, but I have to make my point. This is an experimental film, and is by far only an experimental film, no less, no more.

It searches to be deep, but rarely succeed in be understandable. Maybe, it's just a chance to find another form to show a story, but the story was so poor, so dumb, that this new narrative lose all his chance to convince. Some people find sense in this film, but I believe that they commit a common mistake: to take the unreasonable and stupid for complexity and deepfulness. Well, you may remember the Anderson tale, the The Emperator's new suit. Don't be misguide by the theories of some people. This looks like a documentary, and is fine, but it has a 70 games of colors and filters, but the plot... well, there isn't.. the story.. well, it's just dumb... and the theme... well, it's like everything and nothing, like the Emperator's new suit.

Nicholas Ray cut two different versions of this film over the course of almost a decade, and unfortunately only the earlier cut, considered the inferior one, survives. Nonetheless, this is a mind-boggling film made with his students at SUNY Binghamton, a film which challenges most cinematic conventions of narrative (and technique) without coming off as merely "an experiment". The final "shooting" of the film alone is worthy of an essay: instead of optically printing and collaging the material, which was shot on various formats (35mm, 16mm, video), Ray and his dedicated crew actually rented a soundstage, set up a series of different projectors, and literally _performed_ the film live on a screen surrounded by an intermittently changing photographic "frame". The result completely prefigures the emergence of "film performance" artists in the decades to follow and surely makes WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN the only feature film by a major director to be constructed in such a fashion.

Furthermore, as a time capsule of late-1960s/early-1970s politics, sexual dynamics and freedom from convention, it's essential. Partially improvised and partially scripted, it can come off as a glorious mess at times, shot through with madness, but the overall effect is devastating. A very real-life electricity informs nearly every sequence; it's almost painful at times. WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN would be the final statement of a brilliant, neglected director, but more importantly, it's one of the most audacious features to be made by a director of films such as REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. A masterpiece.

We Can't Go Home Again (1976)

** (out of 4)

This semi-documentary turned out to be one of the last films from director Nicholas Ray, best known for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE but that masterpiece was a long time ago and it's clear the man wasn't in the best of times. Ray, apparently needing money, decided to start teaching film at SUNY Binghamton and this film was basically his project for the students as they would film him and he would film them. This is one of the experimental films that really isn't about anything as we just get all sorts of scenes thrown together and probably for no good reason other than to be different or surreal. I will say that Ray manages to make the film surreal because it never makes any real sense. I'm sure those who are against all surreal moves might say that none of them make sense and their only real purpose is to make as little sense as possible. What we get to see is a group of very small vignettes by members of the cast who act out a series of events. There's a minor love story between a couple of them but it's hard to make out any real connection as everything is broken up so much. The one thing the film isn't afraid of is nudity because there's quite a bit of it. I'm guessing these film students agreed to go the extra mile because of Ray's filmmography but I'm curious how many of them regret it and especially after seeing the final film. There's even a strange sequence where one of the students walks with Ray as they discuss how each lost an eye. WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN is certainly a very strange film and it's only remotely interesting because of how weird it actually is. I can't say I'd ever watch the movie again but I think it has enough curious moments to make it worth viewing once.