Nicholas Ray

I’ve always loved the films of Nicholas Ray. Below are clips from his movies JOHNNY GUITAR and BIGGER THAN LIFE.

Do you see how Ray instilled a poker-faced parody of Hollywood conventions inside the films? A kind of “irony”. You may not see it initially. Look at how he subtly pushes up the stylization of the acting (considered the norm then), set design, colors and even music at times. Indeed, sometimes he is utilizing Hollywood conventions, sometimes he is using “parody” to distance the audience from the material and sometimes somehow the films are doing both in stunning and wild combination to masterful effect.

Jean-Luc Godard declared “The cinema is Nicholas Ray”. And watching a lot of early Godard, you can see how Godard would use similar techniques of “alienating” and distancing the audience. The big difference is that, with Godard, the use of irony is used to draw attention to its own technique and as an affront to status quo. With Ray, on the other hand, the technique is less artful, more agile. His uncontrollable emotions are ready to burst out in every frame but he had an obligation as an entertainer and as a hired hand and these intuitively conflicted works were the result. Also, Ray would never admit to this but I also believe he realized how dated Hollywood filmmaking (and narrative filmmaking) was and would eventually be perceived so his language of filmmaking was built to last past the period.

It is this egolessness and timelessness that make his work so great.





* Some interesting biographical notes. Before filmmaking, Ray studied architecture briefly under Frank Lloyd Wright before leaving Taliesin due to "creative differences". After his career, he served as mentor to Jim Jarmusch (STRANGER THAN PARADISE, DEAD MAN) and Wim Wenders (PARIS TEXAS, KINGS OF THE ROAD) and used his leverage and creative input to help get them both started.