NEW YORK, NY.- Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.

The subject is date rape, and it could not be more topical. In a rare theatrical run, a new 4K restoration of the movie opens Friday at Anthology Film Archives.

At 16 years old, in 1962, Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages and analyzes the rape. In the film, it’s 1962 again and the actress playing Martha (Michele Manenti), innocently adventurous, takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. No matter how self-possessed she believes herself to be, she winds up isolated in a loft, where she is cajoled, bullied and ultimately raped by a far more self-assured predator (Jim Carrington), who separates her from her friends.

Coolidge interviews the performers on-screen as well as directing them and encouraging them to improvise. The assault is the movie’s central scene, but nearly as compelling as the long takes of Manenti wrestling with Carrington as he urges her to “just please relax ...” is the sight of Coolidge watching the struggle, her hand over her mouth.

The performances are multifaceted. Manenti herself was raped as a teenager and discusses this in the film. In critiquing his character, Carrington calls him “uneducated” (a polite substitute for jerk) and comes off nearly as glib, yet honest in his identification with the rapist. Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s boarding school roommate and confidant, is cast as her teenage self and recalls her own feelings at the time as well as her thoughts on reenacting them.

Coolidge frames “Not a Pretty Picture” with her own expressions of vulnerability. It begins with a school recital performance of the most achingly pure of folkie love-songs “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sung by Coolidge and shown in long shot from the perspective of two smirking boys in the audience. It ends with the filmmaker acknowledging the shame she felt and the lasting damage that the rapist inflicted.

Born of trauma, given a cautionary title, this is a movie of steely determination. Coolidge takes possession of her narrative, and the result is heartfelt and ruthless. In one of its few contemporary reviews, British critic Jill Forbes expressed horror at Coolidge’s evident “satisfaction” in restaging her assault, which she found “morbid.” (She also called the filmmaker a “brave woman.”)

Coolidge had attracted attention with an earlier documentary about her family, but “Not a Pretty Picture” led a curiously circumscribed existence. Its New York premiere at the Whitney Museum in March 1976, was apparently ignored by The New York Times and, seemingly, the Village Voice, which, in something surely crazy-making for the filmmaker, ran a long article the following week headlined “Rape Fantasies of Women.”

“Not a Pretty Picture” was shown mainly in media centers and at festivals, including the Second International Festival of Women’s Films, later in 1976. It ultimately got Coolidge the assignment to direct a commercial youth film, “Valley Girl” (which, although indifferently reviewed in 1983, has since developed a cult following thanks, in part, to the presence of Nicolas Cage). Coolidge has enjoyed a long, productive career, but she never made another “Not a Pretty Picture” — neither, to be fair, has anyone else.

Although hardly unusual, the film’s story was closely echoed by Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in 2018, where she stated that Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee, had sexually assaulted her in the 1980s. History might have changed had the committee been conversant with Coolidge’s film. Indeed, the scenes where Martha fears that she might have been made pregnant should be required viewing as well. Sometimes art is more than art.

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‘Not a Pretty Picture’

Through Feb. 8 at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.