We Can't Go Home Again (1976)

 Though he would appeare later in films as both actor and documentary subject, Nicholas Ray's last film as a director was the appropriately titled 'We Can't Go Home Again'. Through a more then decade long decline in which Nic's erraticism made him essentially unemployable in both Hollywood and European film making, he managed to land a job as a professor at small Binghamton University in rural south central New York. Ray made this film along with his students over several years in the 1970's. There are multiple cuts of the film, I think the one I saw was the 1976 cut.

Basically the film is very meta, depicting Nic and his students as versions of themselves attending his classes and getting to know each other. Seems like no script, just improvising. The film is edited together in an unusal fashion, with multiple shots often appearing on the screen together, sometimes over lapping, sometimes distorted. Actor and Ray family friend Sterling Hayden on seeing the movie at a foreign film festival, reportedly told the director's wife the film was best viewed while high, to which she responded, why not, he  certainly filmed it high.

Going into this I was expecting a mess, and it's a mess, but it's a creative and oddly endering mess; perhaps best received in small douces. I feel pretty confident that Ray slept with at least one of these students, I wonder if she's showed this movie to grandchilden. ***