A sense of desperate experimentation combined with naked self-revelation—both no doubt fueled by Ray's feeling of impending death—make this legendary film, created by Ray and a group of Binghamton students, a crucial document both in the director's filmography and in the history of American independent cinema. From the post-sixties terrain of American sexual and political unrest, the film fashions a vast, exasperating fresco of psychodrama, paranoia, and protest, recorded in various formats (35mm, 16mm, 8mm), mixing glimpses of such counterculture icons as Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman with scenes of Ray and his students debating, shooting the film, and going to extraordinary lengths to finish it. (One young woman offers to prostitute herself for the necessary funds.) The film was greeted by some critics (mostly French) as Ray's most personal and revealing work since Rebel Without a Cause, and dismissed by others as chaotic and indulgent. Jonathan Rosenbaum aptly describes it as “cinema at the end of its tether.”
—James Quandt