What attracted critical minds
like Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and others to Nicholas Ray and his oeuvre — bored stiff as they were by the risk - averse, respectable, and ultimately neutered «cinema of quality» — was the stamp of the personal and the element of danger they discerned in his films, whether that meant the improvisatory handling of actors with a touch deft enough to coax remarkable performances out of even non-professionals; the «superior clumsiness,» cited by Rivette in «Notes on a Revolution,» resulting in «a discontinuous, abrupt technique that refuses the conventions of
classical editing and continuity»; or the purely visual flourishes Ray relished — ranging from the sweeping, vertiginous helicopter - mounted shots in They Live By Night to disorienting, subjective POV compositions
like the «rolling camera» during a car crash halfway through On Dangerous Ground, its very title indicating the
source of Ray's critical appeal.
A poultice of garlic could have a natural antibiotic effect, and a rosehip tincture could deliver a whopping dose of vitamin C. Knowledge of herbs came both from the
classical sources preserved and studied in monasteries (
sources like the Greek Dioscorides herbal encyclopedia, De Materia Medica) and from local herbariums.
His new show, «Bright Young Things,» now on view at the Lehmann Maupin gallery, draws on
sources from
classical still lifes, art deco motifs and early 20th - century artists
like Cecil Beaton, Marie Laurencin and Nils von Dardel.