Lightning Over Water (aka Nick’s Film): Docu Chrnonicle of Nicholas Ray’s Illness and Death

Lightning Over Water
Lightning Over Water
	Film poster

A chronicle of Ray’s last days, due to terminal cancer in 1979, the film is barrated in a touching mode by Wenders.

End result is a pecular film, partially an homage to Ray, a director who had a strong influence on Wenders’ work, and partially a probe into his eartbreaking decline and inevitably pending death.

Excerpts from Ray’s 1952 rodeo tale, The Lusty Men, starring Robert Mitchum and Susan Hayward, and his unfinished final work, We Can’t Go Home Again, are featured.

The sequence was shot at Vassar College, where Ray presented the film and then gave a lecture.

Ray’s influence on Wenders includes Ray’s “love on the run” subgenre as well as his photography.

Ray appeared, alongside with Dennis Hopper (who had made his screen debut in Ray’s most popular picture, the 1955 Rebel Without a Cause) in a minor role in Wim Wenders’ acclaimed film, The American Friend.

Wenders’ sci-fi Until the End of the World is named for the last spoken words in Ray’s 1961 Biblical epic, King of Kings.

Jim Jarmusch, Ray’s personal assistant at the time, and later a notable indie filmmaker in his own right, can be briefly glimpsed sitting at an editing console.

When Wenders goes to Vassar to attend a lecture, a brief one-man performance is seen onstage, Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” about an ape who becomes a man.

In the film’s last sequence, Ray is in the hosoital, recoumntimng his experience of being diagnozed (“a little too late” he says) of cancer, the operation, and its aftermath.

Intersersed are Ray’s philosohical observations about life, and the importamce of telling the truth (“it can be very exciting”).

With an eye atch over one eye, Ray looks very frail and can barely articulate his thoughts, occasionally breaking into song, while realizing “it is not very funny.”

At one point, highly aware of his fatal conditions, Ray charges Wender with “you’re making me sick to my stomach.”

He says, “O.K., I am finished, what are you going to do?” to which Wenders replies (offscreen), “I am going to cut.” “Cut, Cut,” the directors exclaims.

The film’s assistants and editors have a toast to Nick’s life, while the camera reveals stocks of film flying off a camera that’s placed on a boat.

After Ray’s death, Peter Przygodda edited a 116-minute version that played Out of Competition at the 1980 Cannes Film Fest. Wenders was dissatisfied with this version, and re-edited the film with Przygodda to create a shorter (90 minutes) director’s cut.

American indie filmmaker Jon Jost, who had worked on the project, wrote that Ray was suffering from severe mental decline during the production, accusing Wenders and Ray’s widow Susan of making Ray struggle beyond his already limited physical capacity.