1.

What is emblematic about Nicholas Ray's recurring images

at the beginning of films?

This image, which comes from Nicholas Rays initial

treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the
head of almost any of Rays movies, since it so clearly
embodies something of their central impulse: a blind urge
to break away, to move, to escape a catastrophe that
cannot be eluded, a burning already closer than ones skin.
Many of Rays films begin with this sort of emblematic
image, and the first shot following the credits of Bigger
Than Life offers a smaller scale but no less dramatic
variation: Ed Averys hand launches out to perform a
habitual action, to pocket the watch that regulates his day
and his life. A perfectly banal gesture become suddenly
heavy and difficult, as the hand clenches midroute and
retreats to his neck. Rays driving concerns can seem flat
and abstract when summarized, and the films themselves
are sometimes top-heavy with explicit statement. What
saves them from toppling over is the kind of tactile
immediacy evident in this shot, the way it draws on the
viewers own, unacknowledged, processes of physical
empathy to signal in a single arrested movement that this
world weve only just entered is lined with invisible traps,
and that every action is shadowed by the potential for pain.
2. Explain the opposed tendencies in Ray's films and how they
work

3. Why Kite refers to Bigger than Life as Ray's most controlled

film?

Bigger Than Life may be Rays most controlled film, so it seems

only right that it harnesses that discipline to the story of a slow
slide into breakdown, fragmentation, and paroxysm. Ray lays his
groundwork carefully, establishing in the first section of the movie
a world so dominated by variations on gray that any strong color
reads as an event and sets the mind scurrying on barely
acknowledged, subtly paranoid paths, looking for rhymes and
connections.