In 1991 the Rotterdam festival screened several films by and on Nicholas Ray under the title Nicholas Ray in Context. This retrospective was based on two pieces of writing: Bernard Eisenschitz’ comprehensive biography of Nicholas Ray and Thom Andersen’s essay ‘Red Hollywood’. The retrospective was, as Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the accompanying text, ‘an attempt to rediscover a tradition in both the America cinema and in American history that four decades of amnesia and inadequate understanding have helped to obfuscate.’ Rosenbaum was referring to, for instance, the influence on film practice of McCarthy’s communist hunt in the fifties and the resulting falsification of film history that still applies today. Thom Andersen: ‘The victims of the Hollywood blacklist have been canonized as martyrs, but their film work in Hollywood is still largely denigrated or ignored. Red Hollywood considers this work to demonstrate how the Communists of Hollywood were sometimes able to express their ideas in the films they wrote and directed.’ Red Hollywood is a collection of film fragments and interviews providing a survey of this page torn from American film history through several themes: myth, war, class, sex, hatred, crime and death. It includes interviews with e.g. Abraham Polonsky, Alfred Levitt and Paul Jarrico, and films in which John Berry, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Cy Endfield, Polonksy and Jarrico were involved as director and/or writer.
