Nicholas Ray Research Articles

Abraham Lincoln in the Hollywood cinema

Abraham Lincoln is a towering figure in American popular consciousness, one who acts as a rich and complex motif and metaphor across its cinema history. This essay is broad-ranging in considering Hollywood’s Lincoln but places particular emphasis on ‘classical’ representations. Its primary aim is to consider the cinematic uses of Lincoln (Lincoln as embedded in the style and rhetoric of a range of films) but a minor thread running through is why Lincoln and which Lincoln is called upon at different points of US movie history. The essay distinguishes itself from previous accounts by combining the analysis of the flesh and blood incarnation of the president’s peculiar physicality with a consideration of the literal and metaphoric solidity of the Lincoln memorial. A final section conveys the sixteenth president’s symbolic power by, paradoxically, revealing it in films that are not even about Lincoln. Lincoln is one of the Greatest Men of Vision™ in US history. In It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) and Bigger than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956), a portrait and a verbal invocation, respectively, connect to themes of hubris and the tensions that ensue when the visions of frustrated ordinary men go too far.

Filmowe reprezentacje ostatniej wieczerzy jako locus theologicus (trzy wizje biblijnej sceny)

The cinematic scenes of the Last Supper were treated as a challenge to visual theology. As the Last Supper, which in the films about Jesus of Nazareth (and, of course, the gospels) is the culmination (and also a turning point as an event ending Jesus` earthly activity), it is possible to see the essence of the theological message of films referring to the gospel in its presentation. The scenes of the Last Supper from three films were subjected to a comparative analysis, each of which is an individual director`s vision. These are The King of Kings (1961) by Nicholas Ray, The Passion of the Christ (2004) by Mel Gibson and The Thorn of God (2015) by Óscar Parra de Carrizosa. The selection criterion was the importance given in the films to the scenes of the Last Supper and their mutually diverse representations. It has been shown how the established new transmission of visual theology modifies the meanings determined by classical theology, basically not deviating from the framework set by it.

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray (streaming on Amazon) Sunset Blvd, directed by Billy Wilder (streaming on Amazon) White Hunter, Black Heart, directed by Clint Eastwood (streaming on Amazon and YouTube) Barton Fink, directed by Joel Coen (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Trumbo, directed by Peter Askin (streaming on Kanopy) Dreams on Spec, directed by Daniel Snyder (streaming on Amazon) Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Mank, directed by David Fincher (streaming on Netflix). In the Hollywood of old a well-defined hierarchy of power and prestige extended from studio moguls at the top down through unit managers and producers to directors and established stars, then to ordinary actors, and below them, finally, to screenwriters, the necessary but otherwise unimportant wordsmiths who crafted lines for stars to speak and studio moguls to sneer at. From the 1930s through the 1940s a lot of wordsmiths, among them highly regarded reporters, playwrights, and novelists like Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Herman Mankiewicz, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and Scott Fitzgerald, headed west to make easy money by writing scripts, only to find that film-industry money came with a price, namely the incomprehension, disdain, or outright hostility of picture people. In the last sad year of his life Fitzgerald distilled his unhappy scenario-writing experiences into a dozen or so stories about an old alcoholic hack, Pat Hobby, still trying to scratch out a living in Hollywood. One of the stories, “Mightier Than the Sword,” sees Pat and another scrivener yelled at by a big-shot producer: Goddam writers! . . . What do we pay you for? Millions—and you write a lot of tripe I can’t photograph and get sore if we don’t read your lousy stuff! How can a man make pictures when they give me two bastards like you and Hudson. How? How do you think—you old whiskey bum? The producer promptly throws them out of his office and off the lot. So much for the might of the pen as compared with that of the sword. Interestingly, old Hollywood liked to depict fictional screenwriters in movies, low-positioned as they might be in the studio pecking order. After all, comedy or melodrama might be wrung out of their eccentricities [End Page 459] or disillusionments. Unquestionably, melodrama is wrung out of the experiences of the fictional screenwriter Duke Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, from 1950. Humphrey Bogart plays Steele in what is generally regarded as one of the finest performances of his career; Gloria Grahame is no less impressive as Laurel Gray, the young actress-wannabe who falls hard for him. There are really three storylines here. First and least interesting, a murder mystery: did Steele seduce and then strangle a naïve hat-check girl? Certain clues point in his direction, but it is scarcely giving anything away to reveal that he is innocent, and finally proven innocent by a deus-ex-machina confession from someone else. Second comes the story of Steele’s uncontrollable anger. His outbursts may have to do with his drinking or being suspected by the police, but fundamentally they derive from built-up resentment at the whole Hollywood scene. Even when not enraged, Steele can be controlling, at times boorish, so that one sometimes wonders how Laurel can be drawn to him. Eventually she becomes terrified by him, his sudden fury at an innocent beach party, his lashings-out at another driver on the highway (could this be the first instance of road rage ever screened?). The third and by far most compelling story focuses on Steele as screenwriter. We watch him lost in concentrated thought, scribbling away, piling up pages of dialogue for Laurel to type. Many movies involving screenwriters feature getting-it-down-on-paper processes like this, often via montage sequences. In a Lonely Place, unusually, shows the mental work which precedes getting it down on paper. A genuinely startling moment from early in the film presents Duke imagining how the murder of the hat-check girl might have taken place, detail by lurid detail (note the melodramatic light Ray casts on...

Cortisone in Popular Culture: Roueché, Ray, and Hench.

In this article, the authors offer a new perspective on how the administration of Compound E (ie, cortisone) to a volunteer Mayo Clinic patient with rheumatoid arthritis and the patient’s subsequent miraculous improvement led not only to a major, successful clinical trial but also a Nobel Prize. The early and late side effects as an undesirable outcome of treatment of corticosteroids would soon follow. Corticosteroid side effects became known in popular culture, first through an indepth article in The New Yorker by medical journalist Berton Roueché, and later through a major fiction film, Bigger than Life, directed by Nicholas Ray. The film used cortisone as a plot device to “unmask” what the filmmaker perceived to be the lie of middle class prosperity in America of the 1950s. Bigger than Life is also a cinematic argument against the use of cortisone. Dr. Philip Hench was also connected to Bigger than Life, and the Ray-Hench connection is further explored based on newly found material. The discovery of “wonder drug” cortisone and its potential side effects—all carefully described in the Roueché article but exaggerated in Nicholas Ray’s film in the 1950s—show how medicine can be portrayed in popular culture.

No Exit: Class Anxiety and Gothic Suburbia in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life

:Bigger Than Life (1956) complicates the popular understanding of social demotion as the source of postwar bourgeois anxiety. The film daringly reframes suburban anxiety in class terms, severing the middle class from the ideal of upward social mobility and positing a suburbia where privilege has turned into entrapment.

Moving Texts: A Hermeneutics of the Gospel According to Hollywood

AbstractThe Hollywood Jesus epics re-visualize the gospel story against the anxious backdrops of secularization, cultural pluralism, and moral skepticism. While these epics are often derided for their lack of theological insight, cultural awareness, or aesthetic taste, this article argues for a re-appreciation of the genre's internal pluralism and hermeneutical significance. Focusing on Cecil B. DeMille'sThe King of Kings(1927) and Nicholas Ray'sKing of Kings(1961), it reflects on the epic as a tradition-forming moment in the Jesus story's reception. Both DeMille and Ray offer competing interpretations of Jesus, thus illustrating how the genre functions as a site of christological and hermeneutical reflection. Against this backdrop, I argue for a reinterpretation of the genre and, further, proffer a hermeneutical exploration of cinema more broadly as a central moment in the dialogue between Christianity and popular culture.

The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn

ABSTRACTWhat would or could a psychoanalysis beyond the human be? And who—and how—might we who call ourselves human be or become in turn? In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1916–1917) famously declared psychoanalysis to be the third great blow to human self-love delivered at the hands of science. First, the Copernican revolution revealed that the earth was not the center of the universe “but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness.” Then Darwin and his contemporaries undermined the ground upon which “the human” had asserted a fundamental difference from “the animal.” And now, psychological research has tripled down, giving “human megalomania” its “third and most wounding blow.” “The ego,” Freud wrote, “is not even master in its own house.” In passages like this, we get a glimpse of a psychoanalysis beyond the human–animal boundary. Nevertheless, the force of anthropocentrism returns again and again in Freud’s body of work, as when he consigned human animality to a prehistoric past or linked it to the baser instincts that human civilization needs to overcome. But what if, instead of running away from the animal in us, we were to dwell with and alongside the nonhuman? Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and cultural theorist Nicholas Ray, this essay traces the sounds and scents of the nonhuman animal in and for psychoanalytic theory.

Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture by Stella Bolaki

Reviewed by: Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture by Stella Bolaki A. Elizabeth McKim Bolaki, Stella. Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016 Pp. vii+ 255. £24.99 paperback; £70.00 hardcover. Stella Bolacki's Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture is a "critical interloping" (13) into the field of medical humanities, which developed in the last few decades of the twentieth century as medical professionals began to incorporate perspectives from the humanities and social sciences into the practice of medicine in an effort to humanize what was perceived as its increasingly scientific and technological focus. Whether from the perspective of sociology, philosophy, literature, or medicine, the medical humanities have often centered on the literary illness narrative and the doctor-patient relationship. One of Bolacki's goals is to enlarge the field of narrative by including photography, artists' books, performance art, theatre, film, animation, and online narratives. Another is to redress what she sees as "limited," "instrumental," and "reductive" (3) methods of analysis in the medical humanities by creating "more sophisticated and interdisciplinary readings of health, illness and medicine" (3), bolstered by contemporary methods in literary and cultural studies. She argues for "the need of more cross-fertilisation and mutually illuminating conversations between contemporary arts and media practices/scholarship and the fields of illness narratives and the medical humanities, as well as between medicine and broader culture" (14). To that end, Bolacki analyzes a series of artistic expressions in a variety of media. In Chapter One, "Re-Covering Scarred Bodies: Reading Photography," she focuses on the works of Jo Spence and Sam Taylor-Wood, both of whom created representations of their experience of breast cancer. The works of both artists, Bolacki maintains, "resist existing and often reductive narratives about women's health […] and create opportunities for the proliferation of feminist subjectivities" (48). Chapter Two, "Artists' Books in the Medical Community," focuses on the work of Martha Hall, who created books that are "part narrative, part object, [and] part performance" (53). Bolacki argues that the books created during a decade-long experience of breast cancer that eventually metastasized serve both to empower and communicate, by "transforming the empty space or distance between [doctor and patient] into a space of proximity, and the silence (or the words on the page) into a form of contact through touch" (84). Chapter Three, "Performance Medicine and Radical Pedagogy," focuses on the work of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Performance encounters, Bolacki suggests, "address […] questions of social justice, democracy, human rights and community care which are often missing from medical ethics/humanities discussions" (89). Chapter Four, "Collaborative Film as Terminal Care," carries on the theme of [End Page 684] performance and shifts the book's focus from individual to collaborative projects. Bolacki examines Wim Wenders's Nick's Film/Lightning over Water (1979-80), a documentary that deals with the cancer and death of his friend, the film's director Nicholas Ray. According to Bolacki, the film is at once an aesthetic object and the record of a painful shared experience. Chapter Five, "Messy Confrontations: Theatre and Expert Knowledge," focuses on Lisa Kron's play Well (2004), which traces the playwright's and her mother's experiences with allergies. The play shares with Wenders's film an inherent contradiction between the authentic and shared account of personal suffering and the shaping of that account into art. Chapter Six, "Animated Documentary and Mental Health," focuses on a series of short documentaries called Animated Minds (2003), which were collaboratively created for the purpose of increasing awareness of various forms of mental illness. The films combine actual personal accounts with animation, and the project as a whole "negotiates a […] tension between concealment and visibility" (22). The Afterword considers the recent proliferation of illness narratives in social media, which lack the deliberate structuring of the verbal and visual narratives considered in the rest of the volume. Bolacki traces the strengths and weaknesses of the various types, from personal health blogs to Facebook and Twitter updates. Bolacki's book presents a powerful argument for considering illness narratives across a wide range of media and for opening them to...

Ray/Godard

A videographic reflection on the similar visual sensibilities of directors Jean-Luc Godard and Nicholas Ray.

Film as Film in the twenty-first century: the function and evaluation of diegesis and disruption

The recent death of V.F. Perkins will bring renewed attention to his body of work, including his seminal text (and only full-length book), Film as Film.1 His work first came to attention via his contributions to Movie, a journal he cofounded in 1962 with Ian Cameron, Mark Shivas and Paul Mayersberg (and soon to be joined by Robin Wood), yet it was only with Film as Film, originally published in 1972, that Perkins fully set out his philosophy and methodology of film criticism. Although he reviewed and refined some of the positions taken in that book over the years that followed – some important revisions are contained in his 2005 piece ‘Where is the world?’ – he never deviated from its central vision. That vision involved a passionate commitment to a method of interpretation that combined vivid imagining of the fictional world with close attention to artistic techniques of signification. A single sentence from an article originally published in Movie will perhaps serve to demonstrate this vision in microcosm: ‘Much of the meaning of [Nicholas Ray’s] King of Kings is contained in its intricate pattern of looking, glancing and staring’.2 We cannot, according to Perkins, fully appreciate the meaning (either as noun, in the sense of that which a film conveys, or as participle, as in how a film goes about being meaningful) of a fictional film without both imaginatively inhabiting its fictional world and paying close attention to its formal patterning.

Seductions & Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory, Culture ed. by John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray

Seductions & Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory, Culture ed. by John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray

Method Acting, Autonomy, and the Curious “as if” of the Postwar Subject in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause

Method Acting, Autonomy, and the Curious “as if” of the Postwar Subject in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause

The New Old Face of a Genre: The Franchise Teen Film as Industry Strategy

The New Old Face of a Genre:The Franchise Teen Film as Industry Strategy Elissa H. Nelson (bio) Films like The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985) and American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999), American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989) and Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) are often the type that comes to mind when thinking about the teen film genre. The narratives usually revolve around the personal trials and tribulations of teenagers living mostly ordinary lives, with the occasional exceptional circumstance or, in the case of horror, supernatural situation, propelling the action. Allowing for a comprehensive analysis of the genre, definitions of the form often take an inclusive approach; that is, teen films can be considered those that feature teenage characters. Ranging from teen comedy to teen horror, teen romance to teen fantasy, this definition accounts for a variety of subgenres and genre hybrids.1 The teen film is also a reliable production trend, often employed as a way to tempt the youth audience back to the theater when attendance drops. Every so often, a teen film will be a surprise box-office hit, leading to a production cycle of similar films over the following years.2 Since the early 2000s, however, even though admissions and per capita ticket sales are down according to MPAA reports, it seems there haven't been many generic teen films released that have achieved box office success, and no batch of popular related titles appearing thereafter.3 Small-scale films of the genre are still being released, but to less fanfare and with less frequency, prompting the question, where did the teen film go? [End Page 125] Upon closer inspection, though, another type of teen film has actually been quite successful, especially since the mid-2000s. As part of larger franchises, films like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004), the first in the series when Harry is a teen; Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007); TMNT (Kevin Munroe, 2007); and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) all feature teen characters in primary roles in large-scale films that tell epic stories. The films are part of series that follow high-concept formulas, build on already-known properties, and exploit synergy to promote related products in ancillary markets—all strategies previously used in blockbuster filmmaking more generally to attract wide audiences. What's notable is that these tactics are being combined with storytelling elements emblematic of the teen film, leading not to the dwindling significance of the genre, but rather to a new production cycle and another iteration of the form. As hallmarks of the convergent media era, these franchise teen films combine multiple styles and modes of filmmaking, and in the process, expand common perceptions of the genre. Considering repeated filmmaking trends helps to contextualize the current moment. Historically, one of the strategies Hollywood relies on when there are threats of audience attrition because of competition from new media is to increase production of teen films. The hope is that by making films with young actors in lead roles and by telling their coming-of-age stories, two essential elements that are hallmarks of the teen film genre, the films will appeal to the most reliable audience segment: the youth demographic.4 Indeed, the two most prolific periods of teen filmmaking occurred during the 1950s and the 1980s, and a smaller though notable production bubble appeared in the late 1990s.5 There are four prominent similarities among these three time periods: 1. New entertainment technologies were starting to gain traction and were vying for the youth demographic's attention: television in the 1950s; home entertainment, including VHS and cable, in the 1980s; and new digital media, including DVDs and the Internet, in the 1990s. 2. The United States was in periods of sustained economic growth, and teens were perceived as having disposable incomes. 3. Although there were the occasional big-budget or prestige teen films produced by major studios, such as Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), most were lower-budget genre films that often focused on teens in everyday situations (or with...

‘Because He is Different …’ The Ambiguous Hermeneutics of Nicholas Ray's King of Kings

The Heythrop JournalVolume 56, Issue 2 p. 261-271 ARTICLE ‘Because He is Different …’ The Ambiguous Hermeneutics of Nicholas Ray's King of Kings Paul Clogher, Paul Clogher Waterford Institute of Technology, IrelandSearch for more papers by this author Paul Clogher, Paul Clogher Waterford Institute of Technology, IrelandSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 October 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12226Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume56, Issue2March 2015Pages 261-271 RelatedInformation

Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men and Cowboy Cinephilia

Critics love cowboys. More to the point: Male critics love cowboys. The contribution of female film critics and feminist film theory to scholarship on the Western is considerable, but the perceptio...

Lonely places, dangerous ground: Nicholas Ray in American cinema

Lonely places, dangerous ground: Nicholas Ray in American cinema

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean, Nicholas Ray, and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.

Cinematic Approach to Teaching the Synoptic Problem

For ten years I taught an undergraduate Theology course called “Hollywood Jesus.” This essay is an outgrowth of that course, and is based on a research topic that I often had students explore in papers. Utilizing the first two miracles in the first three Hollywood Jesus movies (Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927), Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), and George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) this essay argues that these three Hollywood Jesus films are nearly as closely intertwined as the Synoptic Gospels themselves. Viewing these films in conversation with each other can raise students’ awareness of how the Synoptic Gospels themselves might be inter-related, and how they might be reshaping their sources for changing circumstances. My thesis, in part, is that the changing location of the films’ miracle stories reveals an increasing movement in American culture towards a privatization of religious experience—one that moves from the public arena, to the home and “the church.” While the gospels themselves do not exhibit this same movement, nevertheless, careful attention to the different gospel texts reveals comparable socio-political and theological changes. For students, “seeing” the similarities and differences in the cinematic representations can turn into “believing” that similar strategies might be at work in ancient written texts like the gospels.

Book Review: Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director

Book Review: Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director

Juventude transgressiva: sobre o advento da adolescência

A fim de investigar as condições históricas do aparecimento da adolescência, o artigo analisa o filme Juventude transviada, de Nicholas Ray. No que concerne à operação psíquica adolescente, penso que ela vincula-se à morte do corpo da infância. Porém, isso não coincide, de uma forma unívoca, com o advento da puberdade. É preciso que enfraqueça algo que protege o jovem da injunção social de inscrever um traço na cultura, para que o púbere torne-se adolescente. A hipótese deste trabalho é de que um abalo na função paterna é o fator responsável pela constituição da adolescência. No entanto, tal hipótese deixa como resto um problema crucial: a que mutações culturais corresponde esse abalo? É nessa perspectiva que interessa perquirir o aparecimento da categoria social adolescência. Neste artigo, tal evento é compreendido como um efeito da crise das sociedades disciplinares, em meados do século XX.