Author Susan Ray

Susan Ray

Susan Ray is a writer and the president and creative director of The Nicholas Ray Foundation. Sheoversaw the restoration of her husband's singular last film, We Can't Go Home Again, and made a documentary, Don't Expect Too Much, about how Ray's film was made and his relationship with his students. She's now completing a novel-memoir and launching the third film of three in the Ray Centenary Project, ACTION!, a master class with Nicholas Ray in filmmaking as a way of life. Previously she introduced and edited I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies (University of California Press, 1993) and has published a number of shorter pieces on film and pilgrimage.

To the Viewer: On Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again

Susan Ray

March 2013

Feature Articles

It’s taken almost four decades to bring you Nick’s last full-length film We Can’t Go Home Again, and not for lack of trying. Why so long? We couldn’t find the funds. We didn’t need much compared to what most mo...

Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation

Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist

The New-Ark: trying to disavow anti-blackness

Claustrophobia and Intimacy in Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Her Smell

What’s in a Cone? Barbara Loden’s Wanda Between Weakness and Resilience

Come and See The Painted Bird: A Filmmaker’s Plea

Thresholds of Work and Non-Work in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s People on Sunday

Wellman, Wajda and Restored Italian Divas: The 28th Cinema Ritrovato Festival

The 34th Cinema Ritrovato Has Full Resuscitation under COVID

Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival

Lest We Forget: the 31st FID Marseille

A Vitalising Cinema in an Agitated Age: The 58th New York Film Festival

Locarno 2020: The Open Doors Experience

Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival

The Perfect Conditional: Philippe Garrel by Michael Leonard

Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson

War, Community, and the Cinema: Front Lines of Community: Hollywood Between War and Democracy by Hermann Kappelhof and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris

Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan

The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller

Engaged Vision: Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave, by Steven Ungar

Reagan at the Movies: Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, by J. Hoberman

Modernist Realism: Redes (Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1936)

Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and Alexandria…Why?

At Home Among Strangers (Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1974)

German Yearnings, East and West: The Sons of Great Bear (Josef Mach, 1966)

Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s The Land (1970)

Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964)

A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov, Alla Surikova, 1987)

Mamoulian, Rouben

Scott, Tony

Menzel, Jiří

Wise, Robert

Fernández, Emilio “Indio”

Fei Mu

Huston, John

To the Viewer: On Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again