Summary
Lightning Over Water is a collaboration between Wenders and Ray to document Ray's last days due to terminal cancer in 1979. The film is partially an homage to Ray, who had a strong influence on Wenders' work, and partially an investigation on life and death. Ray's influence on Wenders includes Ray's "love on the run" subgenre as well as his film noir photography.
Excerpts from Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) and his unfinished final work We Can't Go Home Again are featured. The sequence with the former excerpt was shot at Vassar College, at which Ray presented the film and then gave a lecture, which itself is excerpted.
Ray appears in a minor role in Wenders' film The American Friend . Wenders' science fiction film Until the End of the World is named for the last spoken words in Ray's 1961 Biblical epic film King of Kings .
The crew is extensively seen onscreen. Jim Jarmusch, Ray's personal assistant at the time — and later a notable filmmaker in his own right — can be briefly glimpsed sitting at an editing console.
When Wenders goes to Vassar to attend a lecture, a brief one-man performance is seen onstage, Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy", about an ape who becomes a man.
Production
After Ray's death, editor Peter Przygodda edited a 116-minute version without Wenders's involvement that played Out of Competition at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders was dissatisfied with this version, and he re-edited the film with Przygodda to create a shorter director's cut. [3]
The American filmmaker Jon Jost, who worked on the project at an early stage, wrote that Ray was suffering from severe mental decline during the production, accusing Wenders and Ray's widow Susan of making Ray work beyond his physical capacity. [4]
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