MEMORIES FROM CINEMA

Nicholas Ray’s world

at Il Circolo dei Lettori - Torino

14 photographies
Exhibit by Susan Ray and Alberto Pezzotta

Exhibit layout by
Luca Volpatti

Mostra realizzata grazie alla collaborazione della

The exhibition by Susan Ray and Alberto Pezzotta for the Circolo dei Lettori, presents a collection of original photographs and screen shots hither o unseen by the public of Nicholas Ray, the worldwide known filmmaker of Rebel Without a Cause.
Now, these photos, which, in keeping with this year’s theme of imperfection, provide us with a shocking yet overwhelmingly human portrait of the “best damn filmmaker in the world” who “never made one entirely satisfactory film” (his words).
We find the creator of great masterpieces for a modern cinema founded in the tragedy of existence, the auteur of Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, teetering on the brink of ever recurrent but consistently rejected perfection. This rejection is a product of his anarchic “personality”, both highly destructive and marked by an “absolute” sweetness, made manifest in the kiss given to his wife on his last birthday, August 7th 1978
And three years previous to this date, Ray wrote about himself and his character, which was at once harsh and entirely tender: “The lines in my face, the wrinkles in my neck that show when the head is relaxed or drowsing towards derangement [...], these little bits of the facade, like gargoyles, permit me to say that I’m old, an old man with one eye (of all things) and a stiff or sagging cock beneath the belly and above the burning feet. Old? I have not told the story of my heart.”
Indeed. The story Nick told is our own and that of the potential for our own existence.