Digital collections

Letter from Nicholas Ray to Joaquín Zabala

August 2024

The North American moviemaker Nicholas Ray – declared by Jean-Luc Godard to be the filmmaker with whom true modernity began – visited the San Sebastian Festival on two occasions. The first was in 1964 as a member of the International Jury of the event’s 12th edition – coinciding with the premiere in the Official Selection of America, America (1963) by his mentor Elia Kazan. A decade later, he would return as president of the International Jury with full honours: the programming of a retrospective season dedicated to his work and the accompaniment of a monographic publication. For this tribute, Ray himself wrote a letter to Miguel de Echarri with a proposal for the season from which he omitted the inclusion of films such as A Women’s Secret (1949), Flying Leathernecks (1951) and Run for Cover (1955). Despite the desire to screen his most experimental work, the anthology film We Can’t Go Home Again (1973), on which Ray continued to work until his death in 1979 and whose team, a group of students from Harpur College would complete it posthumously, the Festival did not include it in its programme.

The festival archive records a letter from 1965, sent from what was then the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, in which Nicholas Ray depicts an exciting scenario: during his time at the San Sebastian event in 1964 he would have met and decided to work with the cameraman who was to accompany him on his following project. A film that never came to be.

At a time of great ideological tensions caused by the Cold War, Nicholas Ray, distanced for years from an industry that forgave everything except dissidence, had set up home in Belgrade; largely due to the offers that the Serbian production company Avala Film had made to him. From the catalogue of proposals, Ray started to work intensely on the feature film The Doctor and the Devils, the project that led to his rejection of the invitation to attend the 13th San Sebastian Festival. Finally, for several reasons, most of them related to the financial problems of Avala Film, the movie never saw the light.

In the ten years falling between the filmmaker’s two visits to the San Sebastian Festival, Nicholas Ray was barely able to shoot a single feature-length film, and yet these documents reveal and outline that other history of the cinema: that of unfinished or incomplete films, that of festivals as fertile places for future collaborations and projects, that of the cinema that might have been.

 

Document
Letter from Nicholas Ray to Joaquín Zabala

Identity statement area
ID: 42042
Catalogue number: AO1965-1967.0723
Location: M01.B04.C01
Classification scheme: 4.1.4. International directors
Title: Letter from Nicholas Ray to Joaquín Zabala
Date of creation: 1965-05-08
Level of description: Simple documentary unit
Extent and medium of the unit of description: 1 document

Context area
Producer: Nicholas Ray

Content and structure area

Conditions of access and use area
Conditions governing access: Conditions governing access
Conditions governing reproduction: Conditions governing reproduction

Control area
Preservation: Anna Ferrer, Andrea Sánchez
Cataloguing: Edurne Arocena (Ereiten)
Digital collections

Letter from Nicholas Ray to Joaquín Zabala

Letter from Nicholas Ray to Joaquín Zabala (1965) San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Letter from Josefina Molina to the Festival organisers (1978) San Sebastian Festival Archive [+]

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Program for the 11th edition of the Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil et du Val de Marne (1989) San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Letter sent by Antonio de Zulueta y Besson to the Cineclub Irún accepting to collaborate with them (1960) San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Survey on the Kursaal Centre (1993) San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Description of the piece “Lavabo” by Isabel Herguera and Mikel Arce Sagarduy (1983) San Sebastian Festival Archive

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Letter from Guadalupe Echevarria to Luis Gasca, director of the Festival, with the proposal for the creation of the Video Festival (1982) San Sebastian Festival Archive

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Letter from Alfredo Guevara, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Culture of Cuba and founder of ICAIC, to Luis Gasca, Secretary General of the Festival (1977) San Sebastian Festival Archive [+]

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HLetter sent by VALIE EXPORT to Festival Director Miguel de Echarri (1977) San Sebastian Festival Archive [+]

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Festival magazine’s special issue (1959) San Sebastian Festival Archive [+]

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Handwritten letter from Jean Cocteau to Antonio de Zulueta y Besson (1959) San Sebastian Festival Archive [+]

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ACommunication with the director Pierre Clémenti (1979-1980) San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Accreditation of Pilar Olascoaga to attend the 40th edition of the Berlinale (1990) San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Poster for the II Cinema Training Week (1955). San Sebastian Festival Archive. [+]

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Handwritten note by Pedro Almodóvar (1980) San Sebastian International Film Festival Archive [+]