In 1971, a decade on from quitting Hollywood after his struggles with alcohol, drugs and gambling made him persona non grata, iconoclastic director Nicholas Ray (In a Lonely Place, Rebel Without a Cause) has accepted a teaching contract at a state university in Binghamton, New York. He develops a strange, intense relationship with a group of students and begins collaborating with them on the semi-real documentary project that would become this film— a wild, experimental masterpiece that was still incomplete at the time of Ray's death in 1979. Shot on 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and video, and employing split screen, superimpositions, rear projection and the colour-saturated distortions created by Nam June Paik’s video synthesiser, We Can't Go Home Again is a dizzying sensory experience that ricochets from sexual politics to the societal ills of the Vietnam era, tracking a generational gap and deconstructing the art of filmmaking itself.

When he premiered this work-in-progress at Cannes 1973, Ray described it as an attempt “to make what in our minds is a Guernica.” His earlier more structured, stable explorations in narrative multiple-dimensionality have here taken on a literal form of imagery he referred to as mimage, a bold formal exploration perfectly suited to the freewheeling approach We Can't Go Home Again takes to documenting student life in the turbulent early 70s. The final edit and restoration were completed by his widow Susan decades later and emerges as an angry, chaotic portrait of affection and pain that, as Jonathan Rosenbaum put perfectly, “resembles a scream”. Ray had a theory that we find ourselves most attuned to a 90-minute film because it's the duration of a dream cycle, and here he captures the essence of a dream: slippery and mercurial, filled with subconscious desires and fears.