Nicolas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again Multiple Windows in a Delirious Time Machine

This chapter analyzes the film We Can’t Go Home Again (1972–1976), which the American director Nicholas Ray realized in collaboration with a class of students he taught at the State University of New York in Purchase. The film exemplifies the ability of cinema to provide access to an “elsewhere” and “elsewhen,” analyzed by Anne Friedberg in her book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. This chapter claims that the film’s use of multiscreen projection can be illuminated through Friedberg’s notion of the virtual window, developed in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Thanks to the collaboration on the film of video artist Nam June-Paik and the employment of techniques associated with the contemporaneous practice of “expanded cinema,” We Can’t Go Home Again is an important precursor to contemporary digital media.