
1. A Park—Night
A man aflame is running directly toward camera.
This image, which comes from Nicholas Ray’s initial treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the head of almost any of Ray’s movies, since it so clearly embodies something of their central impulse: a blind urge to break away, to move, to escape a catastrophe that cannot be eluded, a burning already closer than one’s skin.
The treatment continues:
An officer and a bench sitter run toward him, taking off their coats, then begin smothering the flames. As they do, we cut to: a wide-eyed youth of fourteen or fifteen who has been staring at the scene and who now runs behind the trees and disappears.
And with that, both the burning man and the observer disappear from the script, leaving behind a hanging question: Why does the burning man burn?
Since we’re firmly in expressionist territory, there are two possible answers: either an outside force has set him ablaze or, as with Krook in Dickens’s Bleak House, some internal agent has simply unleashed the fire he has always carried inside. Is it the world or is he himself the catastrophe? Ray’s films rattle between these alternatives. The image that he finally chose to place at the start of Rebel—James Dean brought face-to-face at gutter level with the spasmodic cymbal beat of a toy monkey—leans toward the former interpretation (the world as mad mechanism), but the burning man would read rather differently if he dashed into the long, dark street at the opening of In a Lonely Place. There, his tortured trajectory might seem only the outside figuration of a fire that burns submerged in Dixon Steele’s angry, wounded eyes, reflected in the rearview mirror.
Many of Ray’s films begin with this sort of emblematic image, and the first shot following the credits of Bigger Than Life offers a smaller scale but no less dramatic variation: Ed Avery’s hand launches out to perform a habitual action, to pocket the watch that regulates his day and his life. A perfectly banal gesture become suddenly heavy and difficult, as the hand clenches midroute and retreats to his neck. Ray’s driving concerns can seem flat and abstract when summarized, and the films themselves are sometimes top-heavy with explicit statement. What saves them from toppling over is the kind of tactile immediacy evident in this shot, the way it draws on the viewer’s own, unacknowledged, processes of physical empathy to signal in a single arrested movement that this world we’ve only just entered is lined with invisible traps, and that every action is shadowed by the potential for pain. Read more 
Categories:
Film Essays
Recent Comments
“I prefer his contemporary films. They often mirror plays based in history so it's the best of both worlds. They also retain a certain grittiness for the modern viewer as there is an absence of historical . . .”
—John Forse on Today’s Kurosawa Giveaway, 30 minutes ago
“Being a westerner, I have an equal appreciation for both. His historical films are fascinating in there difference to the history I have grown up knowing and they are also intelligent escapist films . . .”
—Dan Sessoms on Today’s Kurosawa Giveaway, about 1 hour ago
“I prefer, to the best of my knowledge, his contemporary films. I still have a wide variety of Kurosawa classics to explore for the first time: including the famed Stray Dog. I will say though that . . .”
—Neil Lumbard on Today’s Kurosawa Giveaway, about 1 hour ago
“I think the answer to the question depends on the time of day I'm considering it. Ask me at 10pm and the answer is 'historical'. Ask me at 10:15pm and it may well be 'contemporary'. Ask me at . . .”
—Mark Gowdy on Today’s Kurosawa Giveaway, about 1 hour ago
“It's an embarrassment of riches to be honest. The greatest filmmaker of all time has no weakness in his excellence in directing contemporary or period films. Surely Kurosawa is probably best remembered . . .”
—Bill Melidoneas on Today’s Kurosawa Giveaway, about 1 hour ago