Nick’s Film: Lightning Over Water

Sunday, September 20 - Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Digital projection

“Fittingly made on very dangerous ground as a celebratory last testament to an idea(l) of cinema that died along with Nicholas Ray. Developed haphazardly over the last two months of Ray’s life, as a roughly improvised collaboration between the maverick Hollywood veteran and his German Friend Wim Wenders, it documents rawly but honestly the paradoxes of lives devoted to conjuring the sort of privileged moments the title alludes to. Ray, degenerating physically day by day, sustained by an irrepressible imaginative vitality; daily striving to reinvent cinema as Godard long ago predicted he would. Wenders, at an interim impasse on the protracted production of Hammett, constantly doubting his own methods and motives, unsettled by his own gestures of tribute. Two exiles trying to help each other find their ways back home, like Robert Mitchum in The Lusty Men. You needn’t be steeped in film lore to appreciate the extraordinary emotions on which all this is strung. Even with its painful contradictions and discomfitures, it’s that current rarity: one for the heart.” – Time Out (London)

Part of the retrospective “Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road”

• Country Sweden/West Germany
• Rating NR
• Year 1980
• Running Time 91 minutes
• Director Wim Wenders

IFC Center does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. In addition to the synopses, trailers and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches.