Kritiken

I want to focus on few of the moments from Nicholas Ray'sRebel Without A Cause, which is re-released in the UK this week on a beautifully restored digital print, that, upon initial inspection, do not appear to make much sense. For some, these moments would likely stick in the critical craw and end up in the column marked "cons". Yet, the "errors" in Rebel… – the bits that don't quite add up – could be argued to be the key constituents of its greatness...

Rebel is very much a film of jumps, jabs and pivots, dynamic shifts in perspective on a cut, lightning negotiations of physical or psychological space (or both at once)... It is a film of visions, alternately magical (the deserted house pointed out by Plato from the overlook outside the Planetarium), terrifying... and both at once (the immensity of the heavens and the destruction of the universe in the Planetarium).

I saw Rebel without a Cause one again yesterday, August 7th, Nicholas Ray's birthday. I noticed many other cinematographic details I hadn't noticed before, of the kind best left for the self-proclaimed experts – but I did notice again how, throughout the whole film, Jim/James Dean is always filmed ‘above' the other characters, creating a topography on the screen which draws us to the different strata of the drama of each character.

It's a movie about people denied a framework and vocabulary for coming to terms with themselves and their environments. Luckily, this confusion does not infect the movie's craft.

We make an _absolute_ move forward: we have eliminated that distance which we had so cautiously kept between the characters and ourselves. Their reasons are our reasons, their honour our honour, their madness ours. They have, to use a modern turn of phrase, emerged from inauthenticity. By merit they have acquired the dignity of tragic heroes, which we could not quite discern in them at first.