Lightning over Water. 1980. West Germany. Directed by Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders. With Ray, Wenders, Tom Farrell, Susan Ray, Ronee Blakley. North American premiere. 90 min.
During a brief respite from his ill-fated studio production Hammett, Wim Wenders collaborated with the director Nicholas Ray (Rebel without a Cause, In a Lonely Place) on a film about the final weeks of his life. Suffering from terminal cancer but defiant to the end—“I knew that he wanted to work, to die working,” Wenders recalls—Ray lectures college students about The Lusty Men and previews his latest film, the experimental We Can’t Go Home Again, in his Soho loft. Shot by Ed Lachman, Mitch Dubin, and Timothy Ray on film and video, the film’s ghostly images threaten to disintegrate or fade away—an expression, it would seem, of Wenders’s own ambivalence about capturing Ray in such a vulnerable state. Ultimately, however, Lightning over Water testifies to an enduring and unsentimental friendship, transcending mere portraiture to confront, in the starkest way imaginable, the uneasy ethical question of how to represent the dying.
4K digital restoration by Wim Wenders Stiftung at BASIS Berlin Postproduktion laboratory, using the original negative, with funding provided by the Film Foundation and Förderprogramm Filmerbe (FFE); courtesy Janus Films.