We Can't Go Home Again

Subtitled 'A Film By Us', this began life as a practical exercise in film-making in which Ray and his students sought to redefine/reinvent cinema (much as Godard, years earlier, had predicted he might) through on-going experimentation. A disjointed narrative (assembled from an often bewildering plethora of simultaneously projected images, shot on 35, 16, 8mm and video) attempts to explore the sexual, social and political unrest in America in the late '60s. Certainly it's something of a mess, but there's no denying either Ray's unsentimental sympathy for the plight of the young, or the raw emotional power of scenes in which students act out their own real-life psychodramas. (The film ran approximately 90 minutes when it was first shown in Cannes in 1973. It was later re-edited by various hands about half a dozen times, and new material was shot, but evidently the film never reached a definitive form beofre Ray died.