We Can't Go Home Again / A Night at the Opera

In-person: cartoonist and illustrator Nathan Gelgud.

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

We Can’t Go Home Again

U.S., 1973

If the theater workers in Nathan Gelgud’s book Reel Politik made a movie, it would look something like Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again. Beginning in 1969 and throughout his tenure teaching at Harpur College in New York, Ray recruited students to contribute improvised scenes to an audacious, idealist act of collective filmmaking that Ray wove into an ever-evolving, split-screen tapestry of the times. On its decidedly kaleidoscopic surface, Ray’s ostensible final feature contrasts sharply with his studio career — Rebel Without a Cause (1955), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954) — even as its intensely personal, deeply empathetic and confessional tone resonates with the qualities that made Ray an exemplar Hollywood auteur.

DCP, color and b&w, 93 min. Director/Screenwriter: Nicholas Ray. With: Nicholas Ray, Richard Bock, Tom Farrell.

A Night at the Opera

U.S., 1935

As ever with the Marx Brothers, it’s the delirious moments in between the plot points that make the experience. And of course, everyone will have their own favorites. For one of Nathan Gelgud’s reel revolutionaries, in A Night at the Opera it’s when the boys, on a steamship crossing the Atlantic, join a gathering of Italian immigrant families on the upper deck for a feast of spaghetti, music and dancing. It’s a beautiful sequence of abundance, togetherness and joy that she recalls in moments of doubt or despair. “I think the world could be like that,” she says. “And that keeps me going.” Amen.

DCP, b&w, 91 min. Director: Sam Wood. Screenwriters: Morrie Ryskind, George S. Kaufman. With: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx.

—Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm