Capital Celluloid - Day 295: Monday Oct 24

We Can't Go Home Again (Ray, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.30pm
This film is also on BFI Southbank on Thursday 27th at 6.30pm. Details here.

We Can't Go Home Again is screening as part of the London Film Festival. Here is my general introduction to the festival. Over the length of the festival I will pick a film a day. I am as confident as I can be that this is the pick of the movies within the parameters I have set - the movies you are likely to get a ticket for and the ones you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to the festival.

One of my favourite critics, Geoffrey Macnab, has written about this film for the Guardian. You can read that here.

Chicago Reader review:

'Nicholas Ray ended his Hollywood career with his most expensive production, 55 Days in Peking (1963), and followed it ten years later with his least expensive, an experimental and politically radical independent feature made with his film students. Each movie is a shambles, though if I had to choose between them I'd probably opt for this one, which is certainly the more original. Ray and his students play themselves in docudrama situations that culminate in Ray's (fictional) suicide, and often he combines several images into crowded frescoes. The film reeks of countercultural alienation and anguish, and when it premiered at Cannes in 1973, Ray spoke of trying to make “what in our minds is a Guernica” out of such materials as “a broken-down Bolex” and “a Mitchell that costs $25 out of navy surplus.” He tinkered with the film for years, and the 1976 date commonly assigned to it refers to a second unfinished version, which, lamentably, is unavailable. It's upsetting in many ways, but as a document of its time there's nothing remotely like it.' Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here is a more detailed piece on the film by Jonathan Rosenabum on his website.


Here is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't worry if the film is sold out as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each screening. Here is the information you need to get those standby tickets.

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