The Thinking Machine #50

Nicholas Ray - Notes on Style

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for De Filmkrant every month.

In 1948, with the release of They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s debut announced a new style or manner of narrative filmmaking within America: a cinema of risk and discombobulation based on a deliberately unstable equilibrium of shots, cuts, scenes, gestures, events and performances. Ray was part of a generation investigating new models of character psychology, new models of acting and behaving, new social inputs – and a new language of framing, staging and editing to capture all of that volatile experience.