DVD Review: Lightning Over Water
Published May 31, 2007
The DVD is part of Anchor Bay’s The Wim Wenders Collection, which also includes 1989’s Notebook On Cities & Clothes, and 1977’s The American Friend, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. This film, shot at a 1.77:1 aspect ratio, comes with a commentary by Wenders, yet it is not at all illuminating, for Wenders still seems to be down over Ray’s death, although a quarter century has passed. He rambles incessantly, and there are long pauses where nothing is added. Why Anchor Bay did not let someone like Norman Hill, who aptly prodded Werner Herzog in their DVD commentaries on his films, do a similar thing here, is a mystery. Especially since Herzog never needs prompting whilst Wenders clearly does.
Worse, what little Wenders does say is just a recapitulation of most of the information that the actual film’s voiceovers by Wenders tell us. The only interesting tidbits gleaned are some anecdotes about Ray’s alcoholism, and a brief shot of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, before he started his own career, who helped on the editing of this film. There is no theatrical trailer, and, other than talent bios on Wenders and Ray, there is merely the extra of a bizarre 38 minute video of a lecture Ray gave at Vassar College, which is briefly seen in Lightning Over Water, called Nicholas Ray: Especially For Pierre — dedicated to the film’s producer Pierre Cottrell. The old man is mainly incoherent and rambling, as well as clearly not in his right mind. As example, he states that the only things verboten in the Q & A session with the students are queries about James Dean. The next clip shows that he is answering questions on Dean, then saying it wears him out. Huh?
The film was shot both in film and video, but this mixed media adds nothing of consequence to the meaning nor import of what it captures. I guess the video adds a bit of realism to Ray’s decline, but the fact is that there really is nothing here besides such a minor addition.
Let me sum up the film this way: imagine sitting at a funeral home and listening to strangers ramble on about the neighbors and old friends of a loved one that you know nothing about. And to top it off, the storytellers are dreadful at their craft, and furthermore never complete any of the tales. Worse, there is no connection to the audience for they are telling tales only they know anything about. Thus the viewer feels no empathy for Ray nor Wenders. Even more annoyingly, there are some shots that are so amateurish and badly composed that one has to wonder if Wenders deliberately screwed up his film to try to ‘show’ that he was so upset that he could not do his job properly; in a sense employing faux amateurism to try to cynically manipulate viewers into jerking tears over his dead friend.
- DVD Review: Lightning Over Water
- Published: May 31, 2007
- Type: Review
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Documentary, Video: Art House
- Writer: Dan Schneider
- Dan Schneider's BC Writer page
- Dan Schneider's personal site
- Spread the Word
- Like this article?
- Email this
Save to del.icio.us
Comments on this articleComments
And those who quote cliches comment on posts they cannot understand.
Although I disagree with the evaluation of Rebel, your review is otherwise excellent. Gavin Lambert took John Houseman, a friend of Ray's, to a screening of Lightning Over Water. Lambert asked Houseman what he thought. Houseman simply said, "Repulsive."
Well, first of all...geez, we are just so completely, totally far apart on this whole Das Neue Kino thing. Herzog is a wonderful director, yes, and I haven't seen a lot of his work beyond Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, but those films are not leagues beyond Wenders (whose In the Course of Time, Alice in the Cities and The State of Things are absolutely stellar works of the period) or Fassbinder, who dominated German cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s with Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Ali: fear Eats the Soul, Death of a Holy Whore, The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the BRD Trilogy and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Lightning Over Water is an excellent anti-documentary about a great American film director as told by his German compadre. It's grim, it oversteps it's bounds, and it's made with love. It is, yes, often painful to watch, but what I loved about it was the way Wenders was calling attention to the documentary form, and how fake it is, how it manufactures reality, and how you have to go behind the scene and beyond the form to get at the truth of a man's life.
I take it you're not into Ray. "After Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without A Cause, the James Dean teenaged sudser, are there any real films of note that Ray directed?"
To which I can only scream: "Have you ever heard of In a Lonely Place, which is one of the key works of film noir?"
How about On Dangerous Ground? Saw that recently on TCM and I suddenly understood why Ray appealed to Wenders: he's less interested in plot than he is ambience and character. He's great at establishing mood and place, which is what made those clips in Wenders' film so fascinating eventhough I hadn't actually seen the films.
Rodney:
Glad that you love the film, but it's a bad film objectively. At least Tokyo Ga had some pointlessly interesting sidebars in a film supposedly about Ozu. This film is all about Wenders. And he's pretty much a cipher as a person.
'the way Wenders was calling attention to the documentary form, and how fake it is, how it manufactures reality, and how you have to go behind the scene and beyond the form to get at the truth of a man's life'
If we can only get a translation into French this will read like some of the Cahiers du Cinema nonsense.
It's perfectly clear. May it just needs to be close-captioned for the intelligence-impaired.
Psychobabble is clear in any lingo- it's just silly.
But, feel the love.
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/64650)
Rebel Without a Cause is nowhere near greatness?! Fool.
Those who can, do; those who can't, blog.