dvd reviews:

LIGHTNING OVER WATER
Anchor Bay Home Entertainment ($24.98)

In the spring of 1979, as legendary filmmaker Nicholas Ray lay dying of cancer in his loft on the corner of West Broadway and Spring in Manhattan, a film crew led by Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) moved in and started shooting. Intermittently, over several weeks, various pieces of documentary and fiction were shot on film and video, culminating in the crew's recording of their own wake for Ray aboard a Chinese junk in New York Harbor after the director finally succumbed to the disease in June. First shown at Cannes in 1980 as Nick's Film, in a version prepared solely by editor Peter Przygodda (while Wenders was busy filming Hammett), the film was poorly received and a disappointed Wenders immediately recut the film himself from scratch, incorporating text from Ray's personal diary that had been given to him by Ray's widow. Rarely screened and long out-of-print on video, this is the version that Anchor Bay brings to us as Lightning Over Water, and the film should be a melancholy revelation to anyone interested in either Wenders or Ray-which should be everyone.

Beginning with a sequence of shots deliberately mimicking the opening shots of Wenders' own The American Friend, in which Dennis Hopper ascends the steps to Ray's loft, Wenders now comes to call on his own ailing American friend. Wenders was thoroughly criticized at the time for his perceived exploitation of the terminal patient's condition, by those who apparently took literally a line overhead in the film's final moments, "Would you kill someone to get a great shot?" As the Bernard Eisenschitz biography makes clear, however, Ray was the project's originator and struggled, despite his advanced physical decay, to play an equally creative role in the filmmaking (though it is clear from all accounts that he could not). "Back then [the 1950's] he was more handsome than any leading man in Hollywood," wrote Samuel Fuller of Ray, and it is tempting to see the film merely as a meditation on the profound wreckage that his body had become in its final months. Ray himself unashamedly bares this body before Wenders's camera, or seems powerless to defend against it, and his deep, moaning cough permeates the soundtrack. Needless to say, there is an aura of necrophilia in the proceedings that many will find discomforting if not unwatchable, especially during Ray's final moments on camera, when the pain seems to be wearing away at his very sanity. Nevertheless, a wry, lucid, and even poetic mind can still be glimpsed just below the surface, as in this exchange with Wenders in which he coins the title phrase:

Ray: "What are you working on?"
Wenders: "Hammett"
Ray: "What's the budget?"
Wenders: "Ten million."
Ray: "That's very unpretentious. For one percent of that I could make… lightning over water."

Seen today, the film is easily recognizable as the first of Wenders's many self-conscious fiction and documentary explorations of a highly personalized film history and of the filmmaking process itself which The State of Things, Tokyo-ga, Lisbon Story, A Trick of the Light, and The End of Violence continue (He even reprised his role of godson to an incapacitated master with Antonioni's Beyond The Clouds). 35mm film footage of Wenders and Ray is frequently intercut with primitive grainy video of the two between takes or the crew setting up a shot. In his audio commentary, Wenders indicates the corporeal nature of the project when he says he thought of the video as "a cancer eating the film." But the film is just as much an attempted final statement from Ray. We can easily see the film's crew (including Ray's wife, Susan, and live-in assistant, Tom), crammed as they were into a tiny SoHo loft, all donating their time out of admiration for the director, as just another of the surrogate family/communities that we so often encounter in Nicholas Ray's films.

It is sorrow for Ray's unfinished role as a filmmaker (he titled his memoirs I Was Interrupted) and ongoing source of inspiration to the various New Waves (Wenders springing from that of 1970s Germany) that the film seeks to indirectly evoke. Unlike Chris Marker's Tarkovsky project One Day in the Life Of Andrei Arsenevitch-another personal film made with the director's cooperation from his deathbed-Wenders is too personally and presently involved in his life to deal with the qualities of Ray's cinema in any kind of analytical fashion, but this doesn't come across as an omission. He does treat us to a lovely, much-celebrated sequence from The Lusty Men and almost an entire reel of We Can't Go Home Again, Ray's ongoing 1970's opus made with his students at SUNY Binghamton and his only feature-length project after leaving commercial filmmaking.

However staged parts of it may be, Lightning Over Water is still a documentary (or at least a document-ary), and meaning in documentaries is often created by the incidental pieces of reality that leak through. One such piece of reality is the news of John Wayne's death, overheard from a radio broadcast in Ray's hospital room. Before the film's premiere, Hitchcock would be dead as well. Which makes it obvious, if it weren't already, that Wenders is mourning cinema as well as a friend. These days, death-of-cinema lamentations are a dime a dozen, but none are as moving as this fiercely sensitive farewell to a man who was cinema in the flesh.
(Also included is an informative audio commentary by Wim Wenders and the complete videorecording of a lecture given by Nicholas Ray at Vassar College, seen in part during the feature.)