Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that Nicholas Ray alone seemed capable of 're-inventing' the cinema; with this film, made in the early 1970s when he taught film at New York State University, the former Hollywood maverick seems to have attempted just that. With the frame often incorporating four or five separate images shot in diverse formats, the film mixes documentary footage and Nam June Paik's abstract colour sequences with improvisations by Ray and his students; based loosely on personal experiences, these dramatise Ray's premonitions of death, his relationship with his needy young colleagues, and their place in a turbulent America. It was a remarkably ambitious, emotionally raw reworking of many of Ray's preoccupations: generational conflict, the pain felt by society's outsiders, the need to belong yet be true to oneself. Though it anticipated experiments by Godard, Mike Figgis et al, the film has been little seen since its Cannes premiere. Happily, Ray's widow Susan has now overseen a digital restoration – by the EYE Film Institute, Netherlands, and the Academy Film Archive – which crucially includes a narration by Ray omitted from the 1973 version.

Geoff Andrew