![]() ![]() ![]() |
James Gray A-Z
|
A for
A-Z
|
What better place to begin this lexicon than the alphabetic lineage in cinema writing? I first encountered this strand of cinephilic expression in Peter Wollen’s ‘An Alphabet of Cinema’. Delivered as the Serge Daney Memorial Lecture at the Rotterdam film festival in 1998, the essay was later published in New Left Review and also collected in Wollen’s invaluable Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film. (1)
Here are some particularly memorable entries from Wollen’s lexicon: A for Aristotle (‘the first theorist of film’); B for Bambi (associated with a traumatic childhood memory for Wollen, a ‘hidden war film … released in August 1942, at the onset of the Battle of Stalingrad’); I for Thomas Ince, ‘who should get the main credit … for creating the institution of Hollywood’; Q for Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinema?; and Y for Les yeux sans visage (Georges Franju, 1960), ‘the look dehumanized. In another form, it is Vertov’s camera-eye, the camera that comes alive like a robot, stalks through the city … hurls itself at the audience, filming the spectator, reversing the gaze, as in The Passenger [the 1975 film Wollen co-wrote for Michelangelo Antonioni] …’
James Naremore’s piece ‘An ABC of Reading Andrew Sarris’ is a lovely tribute to the critic that combines entries that one might expect (Auteurism, Bazin, Lists) with surprises that make unexpected connections, like W for (Oscar) Wilde: |
1. See Peter Wollen’s ‘An Alphabet of Cinema’, New Left Review, no. 12 (November-December 2001). Also in Paris
Hollywood: Writings on Film (London and New York: Verso Books, 2002), pp.
1-21.
|
Both are iconoclastic, both are fond of epigrams and paradoxes, and both validate the pleasures of performance. Two of Sarris’ favourite directors – Ophüls and Sternberg – are among the cinema’s greatest aesthetes and might have been admired by Wilde. The key difference, it seems to me, lies in Sarris’ implicit belief in nature or in a world not made by art (even if it is a world of the director’s emotions). Notice also that he is resolutely opposed to Camp interpretation. (2) | 2. James Naremore, ‘An ABC of Reading Andrew Sarris’, in Emanuel
Levy (ed), Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic (Langham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), pp. 175-183.
|
Finally, Toronto-based James Quandt, to whom I’m grateful because his programming and writings were a formative influence on my own cinephilia, has used the A-Z template on at least two occasions. His programme notes for a Nicholas Ray retrospective in 2003 had a section of entries through which to view the oeuvre of this director, such as Architecture, CinemaScope/Colour, Eisenschitz, Gloria Grahame, Hands, Kienzle, X-Ray and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (3)
Quandt also authored an hour-long audiovisual essay called ‘Jacques Demy A-Z’ in which the section on B (to cite just one of several interesting entries) belongs to Robert Bresson. (4) Using images and sounds persuasively, he draws affinities between Bay of Angels (1961) and Pickpocket (1959): how Claude Mann and Martin La Salle are both ‘intensely interior’ actors; moments in the two films that echo each other; their use of certain spaces (crowded trains), specific techniques (such as voice-over) and certain gestures (the transfer of money via openings such as windows). |
3. James Quandt, ‘Nicholas Ray A-Z’, in Cinematheque Ontario Winter 2003 Programme Guide (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2003), pp. 26-27.
4. James Quandt, ‘Jacques Demy A-Z’, in the DVD The
Essential Jacques Demy (New York: Criterion Collection, 2014).
|
My own attempt at a lexicon here is inspired by reading Jordan Mintzer’s marvellous book Conversations with James Gray, which collects interviews with the filmmaker and several of his cast and crew. (5) | 5. Jordan Mintzer, Conversations with James Gray (Paris: Synecdoche, 2012).
|
B for
Brighton Beach
This neighbourhood in Brooklyn acquired the name ‘Little Odessa’ after a wave of Russian-Jewish immigrants arrived in the 1940s and 1950s. Gray himself is of Russian-Jewish descent, and set his first feature, the gangster/family drama Little Odessa (1994), in Brighton Beach. He tells of spending time there as a teenager because it was easy to find places where he could drink underage: |
You’d go there and see mafia types who were totally out in the open. They’re not like the Italians, who are tremendously warm, almost musical – at least by their depiction in the movies, but also through Italian culture. The Russians are the opposite: they’re deeply private, worried about the State, and definitely not the warmest people. (6) |
6. Ibid., p. 52.
|
Gray’s Two Lovers (2008) also takes place in Brighton Beach. The laundry where Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) works is Brighton Cleaners, a real-life business. New York is one of cinema’s most filmed cities, yet not all of its neighbourhoods are equally represented on film. In a way, Brighton Beach stands in for all the spaces of this city that have been deemed by cinema to be insufficiently iconic.
We need an entire history of films that
traces the counter-iconic tradition
of setting and location. I like to think that for every Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011) – which opens with a pretty but
utterly familiar montage of the city’s landmarks and locations – there is an Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, 1974) that traces a personal and varied picture of a big city (in
this case, Munich). Gray’s depiction of the city is not expressionist in the
manner of Fassbinder; instead, it is documentary-realist and unobtrusive while
quietly capturing its character. The director remarked after he made Two Lovers: ‘Brighton Beach is so ugly
that it’s beautiful. History is an accumulation of detail, and I want to make a
film with a sense of it’. (7)
C for Cinephilia
|
7. Cynthia Lugo, ’Two Lovers
(James Gray, 2009)’, The Cynephile, 29
January 2010.
|
|
8. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 11.
|
To this day, it’s remained very much my taste, which is part
truth, part spectacle. It had red meat, but it also handled moral questions. It
seemed philosophically grand, but at the same time it was not without
entertainment value. It’s an interesting movie because, in a way, it’s fascist.
But it’s also extremely sophisticated because it’s inviting you to acknowledge
that everybody has a part of that inside them.
Nowadays, cinematography has become good in lots of good
Hollywood films, so you don’t realize that Apocalypse
Now was the first time an American audience had been shown that kind of use
of light, the movement of the light, the way Marlon Brando was filmed in the
darkness. (9)
|
9. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
|
I
associate cinephilia with a special attunement to the medium-specific properties of cinema –
despite the fact that cinema itself is a synthesis of multiple media. And so,
when I read Gray’s sentiments about his first encounters with Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), it instantly made sense: ‘I
began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms –
painting, photography, music, dance, theatre’. (10)
There
is an amusing account by James Caan of Gray’s
personal cinephilia actively disrupting his filmmaking: on The
Yards (2000), Gray would sometimes be so elated by a take that he would
laugh out loudly – thus destroying the take. (11)
Like
other cinephilic filmmakers, Gray is fond of
borrowing from or quoting his favourite films. One example is the drug den
scene in We Own the Night (2007), during
which we see Joaquin Phoenix disappear into the darkness, and of which Gray
says:
|
10. ‘Relying
on his Own Tastes: James Gray on “Two Lovers”’, IndieWire, 13 February 2009.
11. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 107.
|
I ripped that shot off from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), where the Lady Macbeth figure comes out of the darkness with an urn. The whole idea was that he might be walking into his own death. (12) | 12. Ibid., p. 137.
|
Finally,
Peter Labuza’s entertaining conversation with Gray on
the Cinephiliacs podcast helps illuminate the
director’s cinephile side. (13)
D for Disco
|
13. ‘Episode
#61 - James Gray (Nights of Cabiria)’, The Cinephiliacs,
5 July 2015.
|
|
Bogart
and Casablanca Records were also the subject of Mecca, the first screenplay Gray ever
wrote, when he was 21. It was optioned by Universal Studios in 1991, and Rob
Weiss (of Amongst Friends [1993]) was
named to direct – but the project was later shelved. In 2013, it was announced
that a Neil Bogart biopic called Spinning
Gold, to be produced by and starring Justin Timberlake, would begin
production. (14) No news of it has surfaced since. Further, it does not appear
to have any connection to the Gray screenplay.
One
more connection to disco: the Brooklyn nightclub El Caribe, owned by the
Russian mob in Gray’s We Own the Night (2007). Phoenix plays its manager, Bobby Green, likely of Russian-Jewish origin,
having changed his name from Robert Grusinsky. Often
mentioned in stories about Neil Bogart is the interesting fact that he was a
Jewish kid from Brooklyn who fell in love with a music rooted in African-American and gay cultures.
|
14. Pamela McClintock, ’Spike
Lee in Early Talks to Direct Neil Bogart Biopic “Spinning Gold”’, in Hollywood Reporter, 30 October 2013.
|
A
word that crops up frequently in interviews with Gray – and one that clearly
carries an enormous personal weight for him:
|
It [the idea for a new film] starts, usually, from what I
want to express emotionally.
The movie [The
Immigrant (Gray, 2013)] is not afraid of emotion at all.
I just try to do an emotionally honest film as best I can.
Everything I’ve done and everything that has been done
that I find interesting has been a move, as close as possible, to emotional
identification. I’ve said it before: authentic emotion, the most direct way to
our emotional core. Anything that gets in the way of that, I find harmful. (15)
|
Emotion in Gray’s films emanates primarily from characters and their life situations.
But his cinema is superior to what we normally think of as ‘character-driven’
films. This is because Gray (like Eric Rohmer) surrounds his characters with a mise en scène that is subtle and thoughtful, yet
insistently expressive. It is these traits that have led to Gray being tagged an
overtly ‘classical’ filmmaker. (He often, and understandably, chafes at this
characterization: no artist wants to be put in a box.)
I want to propose something else: that Gray wants to be thought of
not so much a classical filmmaker as a classic one. In other words, as an artist whose work is for the ages, undimmed by time. There is an artistic conservatism in this position, a
turning away from overt experimentalism, distancing devices and
self-reflexivity. To my deep ambivalence, he says:
|
15. See the following:
Zachary Wigon, ‘A
Really Amazing Interview with James Gray, the Director of “The Immigrant”’, Tribeca Film, 16 May 2014; Adam Nayman, ‘Words
Matter: James Gray on “The Immigrant”’, Cinema
Scope; Adam Cook, ‘Love
and Sincerity: A Conversation with James Gray’, MUBI Notebook, 5 October 2013.
|
I've always felt that if you look at what lasts, in cinema and in art in general, it tends not to be a modernist or postmodern approach with ironic distance and narrative dysfunction. It would be easy for us to find self-reflexive poets from post-Virgilian Rome, but nobody reads them except for graduate students. In the end, what matters to us is story, it's how we make sense of the birth/death/life cycle. I'm obsessed with trying to find details of peoples' behavior and see how their behavior affects the story itself. (16) |
16. ‘A
Really Amazing Interview with James Gray, the Director of “The Immigrant”’.
|
The French-celebrated American filmmaker is now a venerable
tradition in cinema. That Gray was part of this tradition was driven home to me
when I read a story from Cannes by Dennis Lim in 2007. He reported that
|
boos erupted during the closing credits [of We Own the Night]. American critics seemed to be the most vocal in their disapproval. A dismissive review in Variety deemed the film ‘exceptionally conventional’ and likened it to ‘an O.K. television movie’. But it also had its champions – notably among European, and most of all French, critics. The French daily Le Monde concluded its rave by proclaiming Mr. Gray ‘one of the great American directors of our time’. In a recent interview in Manhattan Mr. Gray said: ‘Apparently I’m the dramatic version of Jerry Lewis. Someone wrote that I’m the object of Gallic fetish’. (17) |
17. Dennis Lim, ‘An
Auteur for a Neglected New York City’, New
York Times, 9 September 2007.
|
The preface to Mintzer’s book is penned
by none other than French super-critic Jean Douchet,
who makes this provocative distinction between ideas and thought in Gray’s cinema:
|
[My] father used to tell me: ‘Everyone can have a hundred
ideas a day. But what counts is to have one idea, and take it as far as
possible each day’. In other words, to have a thought. And the more I think of
it, the more I believe that art is, in fact, thought. It’s the manifestation of
our imagination through thought – not necessarily the rationality of thought,
but the magnitude by which thoughts can express both our conscious and
unconscious selves. Plenty of filmmakers have ideas, but few have a thought.
For instance, Quentin Tarantino has lots of ideas, and
from time to time he has a thought, but it’s not an immense one. […]
With each film [Gray] returns to the same thought over and over again: No matter what we do, our pasts are inescapable. It’s the very definition of tragedy – the past, and the Gods, weigh upon us with all their might. All of James Gray’s films consist of one or several characters looking to escape their pasts and liberate themselves, knowing all the while that they will never do any such thing. If Visconti in The Leopard (1963) employed the maxim: ‘Everything must change so that nothing will change’, in James Gray’s movies the maxim could be: ‘We want everything to change, but we know that it cannot’. (18) |
18. Conversations
with James Gray, pp. 12-13.
|
F could equally stand for Family. Douchet again:
|
The past in James Gray’s world means Family – Family in
the sense of a mother, father and/or brother, but also family in a larger sense
that reflects American society as a whole, with its notions of good and evil,
and the ideas that every good deed carries its own evil within it. While family
may provide the foundation of love, it also suffocates us with its one original
sin: it curtails freedom.
In The Yards, Family is defined by the broader clans of politicians and contractors, with each character shuffling to find their place as they march toward their doom. In Little Odessa, the Tim Roth character escapes his family by eliminating them, while in We Own the Night, the Joaquin Phoenix character is relentlessly brought back to his family, where he winds up replacing his father. And in Two Lovers, the mother played by Isabella Rossellini lets her son go, knowing however that he’ll soon return, that he’s incapable of leaving home. (19) |
19. Ibid., p. 13.
|
As much as I love and admire Gray’s films – and this A-Z lexicon
is motivated by those feelings – I harbour a couple of reservations about his
work. One is that he leans toward a certain aesthetic conservatism – the
earlier entry on ‘Emotion’ captures my feelings on this point. But my larger
reservation has to do with the place of women in Gray’s work.
In his first three movies – Little
Odessa, The Yards, and We Own the Night – Gray was already
displaying a remarkable ability to attract wonderful women actors: Ellen
Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Vanessa Redgrave, Charlize Theron, Eva Mendes, Moira Kelly.
All these women deliver superb, nuanced performances – but they all play characters who are powerless witnesses, mostly watching the action
from the sidelines. Things happen around them and to them. And there is an odd
disconnect between the charisma and intelligence these actors emanate onscreen,
and the quietism and passivity of their characters.
|
With Two Lovers, women
start acquiring a certain prominence in Gray’s cinema. The characters played by
Gwyneth Paltrow (Michelle) and Vinessa Shaw (Sandra) are memorable and crucial, but the film nevertheless centres on
Leonard, remaining with him to such a remarkable degree that everything we see
and learn about these two women is from his vantage point. Reinforcing this
impression is the stark dichotomy with which we are encouraged to view these
two women. Michelle is mysterious, emotionally volatile and unreliable, while Sandra
is her opposite: generous, forgiving, reassuringly domestic and emotionally
available. (To his
credit, Gray admitted in an
interview that despite its two key women characters, the film was still ‘sort
of spiraling up a man’s ass’.) (20)
Gray went on to put a woman centre stage in The Immigrant. Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) is the title character and beating
heart of this work. She arrives in 1920s New York from Poland with her ailing
sister, and Bruno (Phoenix) opportunistically takes her under his wing, selling
her into prostitution. But when she turns to her religious faith and performs
an astonishing gesture of forgiveness for all his violent and heinous actions, the film, in a bizarre turn, becomes all
about his redemption. Gray is clearly
ennobling Ewa’s gesture; he wants us to be sincerely
and un-ironically moved by it: Look at
how this wicked man was saved by an act of love and absolution by a noble,
God-fearing woman.
He has spoken of this gesture:
|
20. ‘Love
and Sincerity: A Conversation with James Gray’.
|
[Ewa] delivers Bruno, she forgives him no matter how awful
he’s been and that even he can be redeemed, so that the film had to end with
him, because she has passed this torch of forgiveness in a way. See,
forgiveness, the interesting idea about it, people say ‘how could you
forgive so and so, he or she did such a horrible thing’ and my own thing is
that forgiveness empowers the person who does the forgiving. If a Holocaust
survivor forgives a Nazi, it doesn’t empower the Nazi, it empowers the victim.
The victim has the power to do that. (21)
|
21. Ibid.
|
Now, one might argue that Gray is, in a sense, reflecting a
reality that likely existed at the time the film is set. And that
actions such as Ewa’s were perhaps not unusual
at the time. But this is where his aspiration to making classic art – i.e., art that ‘stands the test of time’ – backfires.
Every film must be conscious not just of the time in which it is set – but also
of the time in which it is made. In other words, The Immigrant speaks not just of 1920s America – but also to the world
of today. And the momentous narrative gesture of forgiveness that the film
pivots on – and exalts – seems exactly wrong-headed at this moment in time and
history. Today, when sexism, racism, xenophobia and hatred of every stripe have
inscribed themselves into the fabric of everyday American life, Ewa’s act of forgiveness cannot help but strike us as being untimely and naïve, with little
meaningful to say to us at this difficult moment. One thing is clear: Forgiving
the heinous actions in our midst will not ‘empower’ us right now. Only fighting
them has the possibility of doing that …
Howard Shore’s powerful and moving score for The Yards is an interesting hybrid. It was adapted from Gustav
Holst’s ‘The Planets’, a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English-born
composer, completed by him in 1916. Each movement is named for a different
planet, and Gray had been especially obsessed at the time with the Saturn movement
(‘The Bringer of Old Age’); Shore took this into account when assembling the
score.
According to the director:
|
Howard adapted and stole some of the motifs and
orchestrations from [‘The Planets’]. When he was done, he played the entire
score for me on piano and harp, and we talked through each piece together. I
would tell him to take a certain melody and expand it, because what I basically
wanted was for two themes to be repeated throughout the film. I did the same
thing for We Own the Night. (22)
|
22. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 96.
|
Family and the immigrant experience are key themes in Gray’s
cinema partly because he appears intimately connected with his own forebears
and knowledge of their experience:
|
I know that my grandparents came over from Russia in 1923 – this was just before the quotas – and that they came through Ellis Island, where their name was changed from Greizerstein to Gray. The common belief is that this was done by the customs people in Ellis Island, but apparently this wasn’t always the case. It could have been done by the person filling out the ship’s ledger, for instance … When they arrived, they settled in Brooklyn on Willoughby Avenue, in what’s now called East New York or Brownsville. My grandfather had a plumbing shop there during the Depression years. He spoke almost no English at all, even until his death. (23) |
23. Ibid., p. 22.
|
He also drew directly from his grandparents’ experience for his
work:
|
The stories about Ewa [in The Immigrant] not knowing how to eat a banana or looking at the plate of spaghetti with meatballs and thinking it’s bloody worms come from them. The monologue that Marion [Ewa] has in the church about the ship from Europe all comes from my grandparents telling me about their experience. The attitude of the customs officials at Ellis Island and neighborhood people came from my grandfather. Maybe I got some details wrong because they’re both dead and I couldn’t consult them. They’re actually in the movie. You see a photograph of them. All of that stuff is autobiography. (24) |
24.
Steve Erickson, ‘James
Gray on His Personal Vision for “The Immigrant”’, rogerbert.com, 14 May
2014.
|
Gray cannot be accused of conveying a romantic view of the
immigrant experience. The Immigrant is lovingly shot, and recreates New York’s Lower East Side in 1921 with
impressive and imaginative detail. But his depiction of the harsh conditions of
living and working – and the degradation visited upon Ewa and her fellow burlesque performers – is unremitting and powerful.
Mintzer’s book on Gray, published by Paris-based Synecdoche, is the first on this filmmaker in any
language. It collects a number of leisurely interviews with the filmmaker and
his collaborators, and is arranged chronologically, covering the films from Little Odessa to Two Lovers. It is also a beautifully designed object, bilingual (in
French and English), and reproduces an array of materials such as water-colour
storyboards, production stills, script pages and images from the films.
|
Mintzer is a critic for Hollywood
Reporter who, a few years ago, penned ‘The Smuggler’, a valuable
introductory overview of the work of French critic Serge Daney, that is well worth
reading. (25)
Gray on his inspiration for Two
Lovers:
|
25. Jordan Mintzer, ‘The Smuggler’, Moving Image Source, 17 July 2012.
|
It was hard to find a movie about desire told in the
certain key that I was after, which would be a love story almost directed by
the thriller-side of Roman Polanski. There is one Israeli film called Late Marriage (2001), a director named
Dover Koshashvili, which I think is beautiful and I
stole a lot from. I even cast Moni Moshonov, who’s in that film. (26)
|
26. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 173.
|
Gray wanted Two Lovers to be set in outer-borough New York, and also proximate to the beach (a couple of crucial scenes take place there). This gave him just a few options: Rockaway, Brighton Beach and Coney Island. He also needed an apartment building – where much of the action takes place – and where you could look across the courtyard. Since Rockaway mostly had houses, he decided (as with Little Odessa) that the film would be set in Brighton Beach. The apartment building, and the general tone and feel of the film, were explicitly intended as an homage to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog: Six (1990). (27)
L for Laundry Lines
|
27. Ibid., p. 173.
|
To me, white sheets have always been powerfully cinematic. In
fact, for millions of Indians over the years, they served as screens on which
movies were projected in traveling ‘tent cinemas’ that roamed the country. In
the childhood years of my movie love, the sight of a hanging white sheet – not
just in a cinema but anywhere – caused a tingle of excitement, sparked a flight
of fancy.
White sheets make at least two types of appearances in the
universe of cinema. The first is indoors, in the bedroom – thus charging this plain
and ordinary item with eroticism. The second is outdoors, most frequently
hanging on clothes lines, as they do in the heart-breaking climax of Little Odessa, where they result in an
accidental killing. In this scene, obscured vision leads to death.
This reminds me of other, kindred moments in cinema, of white
sheets on laundry lines momentarily blocking and unblocking vision. For
instance: the eerie, fleeting image of serial killer Michael Myers glimpsed
between clothes lines in the backyard in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978); or the lovers’ crisis in Liberté, la nuit (Philippe Garrel,
1983), an event we view intermittently through hanging laundry – Garrel then cutting indoors to a bed with crumpled white
sheets (is there a director who films beds and the humble act of sleeping better
than Garrel?); or, most iconically,
the finale of Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958), in which Zbigniew Cybluski (‘the Polish
James Dean’), playing a WWII Polish resistance assassin, is shot by soldiers,
his body disappearing into a sea of hanging white clothes, slowly reappearing
as an expanding blood stain on a sheet …
A final thought: Because we often tend to view Gray as a
‘classical’ director, there is perhaps less attention paid to inter-textuality in his work. Gray himself has openly identified
borrowings from scenes in older cinema that he loves. But there are at least
two details from his films that I’ve read nothing about, and that have made me
wonder: Is Ewa Cybulska’s last name in The Immigrant a veiled allusion
to Zbigniew Cybulski in Ashes and Diamonds?; and are the first
words of Leonard’s mother Ruth (Isabella Rossellini) to Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) in Two
Lovers – ‘Hello, neighbour!’ – a sly reference to
Dennis Hopper’s greeting of Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan),
the lover of Dorothy (Rossellini again), in Blue
Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)?
M for Mood
Gray often speaks of creating and sustaining a particular mood and
ambience for each one of his films. For Little
Odessa, he says:
|
I was not interested in using specific sound effects as stings, but in building a whole world. I played a lot of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) for the sound designer, because Polanski was very good at creating an aural landscape, with ticking clocks, foghorns in the distance … (28) |
28. Ibid., p. 58.
|
In the scene in which Tim Roth and his gang kidnap the Arab jeweller,
there’s no music, only certain sounds:
|
I was also obsessed with capturing the kind of sound effects that seemed to haunt my childhood. I grew up not too far from the Long Island Expressway, and when you’d get close to it on a particularly quiet evening, you would hear this [imitates a high-pitched humming]. It’s a sound effect called ‘Singing Semis’, which was created by Walter Murch for Coppola’s The Rain People (1969). I used it in that scene, and I’ve put it in every movie I’ve done. (29) |
29. Ibid., p. 59.
|
The endings of Gray’s movies – and here I don’t mean the narrative endings but the literal ones, the final couple of minutes of projected images and sounds – are designed to hold on to the mood they have been striving to create and maintain. When Adam Cook remarks in his interview, ‘At the end of the credits [of The Immigrant], there’s a lingering ambiance that must carry on for thirty seconds after the credits have rolled’, Gray replies: |
I’ve done that on every film. In We Own the Night it goes on for two minutes. I like to make sure the audience is left, ultimately, with the sound that first made me feel the mood of the piece. In this case, I remember going to Ellis Island in 1976 and hearing those seagulls and the surf. The Yards ends with the sound of the subway, Two Lovers ends with the surf of Brighton Beach, We Own the Night is the prison. It’s my own personal way of signing off with this stage of my life. This is where I was at this part of my life and this was the mood I was trying to impart to you … (30) |
|
N for New York
Being Gray’s hometown, a city he seems to passionately know and
love, references to it are sprinkled throughout this lexicon. So let me zero in
here on a specific aspect of the New York of his films. Gray depicts the city
in a way that emphasizes its working-class neighbourhoods in various parts of
Brooklyn and Queens. For the characters, Manhattan is glamorous, rich, far
away. Think of Bobby, pitching to his Russian gangster boss the exciting idea
of expanding their nightclub operation from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or Leonard’s
night-time car ride to the Metropolitan Opera, set to a swoony, Henry
Mancini-style accompaniment on the soundtrack.
But it is outer-borough New York that Gray wants to show in his
movies. The imposing and breath-taking Manhattan skyline that we have seen a
thousand times on film is not for him:
|
It’s like Woody Allen’s Manhattan done incompetently, because in Manhattan he has an awareness that the vision is romanticized and bogus. And
in a way the whole movie is about people’s neuroses, and how the beauty of
Manhattan is only a sad and ridiculous surface. (31)
|
31. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 88.
|
Because Manhattan has some of the world’s priciest real estate,
films set there necessarily focus on the rich. Which is why
one of Gray’s favourite New York movies remains The French Connection, because ‘it depicted New York as a giant garbage
can. It had never been shown that way in a movie before. Before then,
most movies about New York had been focused on the glamour’. (32)
O for Opera
|
32. Ibid., p. 89.
|
|
Gray is famously an opera aficionado who,
David Ng informs us, ‘can discuss the virtues of certain Puccini recordings
over others’ and ‘keeps his some of his favourite operatic selections on his
smartphone, ready for instant playback’. (33) When he sent the great
cinematographer Harris Savides (1957-2012) his script
for The Yards in the mid-1990s, he
made a cassette tape with opera on it, and gave Savides specific instructions on how to read the script and listen to the operatic
accompaniment simultaneously. Savides remembers:
|
33. David Ng, '"The Immigrant”: James Gray on Puccini and Other Opera
Influences’, Los Angeles Times, 12 May 2014.
|
So I got the package, and sat outside reading the screenplay
with the music playing, facing this beautiful, dramatic sky where it looked
like a storm was brewing on the horizon. When I got to the last two pages of
the script, this Maria Callas piece came on, and the whole thing made for an
extremely powerful experience. (34)
|
34. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 115.
|
The germ of the idea for The
Immigrant came to Gray five years before he made the movie, when he went to
see a production, in Los Angeles, of Il Trittico, a set of three short operas by Giacomo Puccini. Ng reports that he was struck particularly
by the second, ‘Suor Angelica’, directed by William Friedkin. Ng writes: ‘In both stories, a saintly heroine is
cruelly deceived by those whom she trusts. But rather than take revenge, she
learns the value of forgiveness, and in so doing attains a level of spiritual
grace’. (35)
Gray’s attraction to opera is rooted deeply in his valuing of
‘emotion’:
|
35. “The Immigrant”: James Gray on Puccini and Other Opera Influences’. |
The word ‘operatic’ is often misused to mean over the top, where someone is over-emoting. And that does a terrible disservice because ‘operatic’ to me means a commitment and a belief to the emotion of the moment that is sincere … It’s the last island of sincere emotion that exists in our culture. (36) |
|
The character of Enrico Caruso even makes an appearance in The Immigrant, and delivers a
performance that Gray based on a real-life event.
Gray started out making elaborate and beautiful watercolour storyboards
for his films, but abandoned the practice later in order to be more open to the
new and unexpected possibilities presented by shooting locations. But his love
of painting – and its deep influence on his cinema – has endured.
|
James and I discussed the fact that we had never seen a night scene in a movie where the light was warm. The night light in movies was always blue, but when you actually take a picture at night in New York City, it comes out yellow or orange. So we decided to light our nights with sodium vapor instead of mercury vapor, and the result is that Little Odessa is one of the only films of the time where night light is warm rather than cold. (39) |
39. Ibid., p. 79.
|
On the budget constraints posed by Little Odessa, Gray recalls:
|
I remember thinking to myself that if there’s a trade I have to make between beautiful lighting and the number of shots, I will always opt for the lighting. So what I tried to do was design elaborate masters that would cover the scene in a way that would provide very little coverage for the editor, which is why the movie was cut together in only six weeks on actual film. (40) |
40. Ibid., p. 55. |
Q for Queens
In one of the first interviews he ever gave, Gray said: ‘I’m a
schmuck from Queens and I don’t know anybody. I’ve been so lucky, it’s almost
nauseating. I mean, I was directing Vanessa Redgrave at 24’. (41)
On the back cover of one of the most renowned of graphic novels,
Art Spiegelman’s Maus (serialized from 1980-1991),
there is a street map of Rego Park in Queens; this is
very same neighbourhood Gray’s parents lived in, met and got married. But by
the time James was born, they had moved to a different Queens neighbourhood, Flushing. The constantly shifting demographic identity of New
York neighbourhoods – dramatized, for example, so memorably in the credit
sequence of Abel Ferrara’s China Girl (1988) – was also at play in Flushing in the years Gray was raised there:
|
41. Paula S.
Bernstein, ’Brighton Beach Memoirs’, Filmmaker Magazine, Winter
1995.
|
[Despite the fact that my family was Russian-Jewish, the
neighbourhood] was very German WASP. There were some Jews, though by the time I
had left many more had moved in. The character of my neighbourhood changed very
significantly from the early 1970s through the late 1980s. It went from being
very Archie Bunker-ish – the whole Elks Lodge thing –
to being very Jewish, and now very Asian. The result is that the food in Queens
is significantly better than when I was a kid […]
I think [the city of New York] is mostly better [now] and it’s a mistake to romanticize what was an extremely dark period in New York history. The city was very close to bankruptcy around 1975-1976, and I don’t remember it being a very happy time to be there. (42) |
42. Conversations
with James Gray, pp. 26-27.
|
Gray also recounts a funny anecdote about Martin Scorsese, who was
born in Flushing and lived there until the age of ten, when his family moved to
Little Italy:
|
I once asked him how growing up in Flushing was, and he said [imitating Scorsese]: ‘It was fantastic, it was like Paradise!’ I said, ‘Flushing was Paradise?’ ‘Yeah’, he said, ‘I’d ride my bike around and stuff …’ Flushing for me was not a paradise. (43) | 43. Ibid., p. 89. |
Gray’s ethnicity is only one of his many connections to Russia.
Many of his films prominently feature Russian characters and communities, like
the family and setting at the heart of Little
Odessa; and several gangster characters, including the nightclub owner (played
with quiet menace by Moni Moshonov),
in We Own the Night.
But in a less visible way, Russia finds its way into Gray’s work through
literature. He has likened The Yards to a sprawling Russian novel, which takes its time to introduce its characters
and establish all the connections between them. And he joined his illustrious predecessors Luchino Visconti and Robert Bresson in adapting Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 short story ‘White Nights’ (as Two Lovers).
|
Gray has said that he is not interested in directing from scripts
written by others; he sees screenwriting as integral to the making of his
films. Gray writes screenplays quickly, but this is preceded by a long period
of time spent structuring and outlining. Once he has assembled all his ideas
for individual scenes, he puts together a step outline, which is a numbered
list of all scenes, accompanied by notes for each. This outline grows larger
and more detailed, until it is time to sit down and write the screenplay, which
takes little time, and primarily involves creation of the dialogue. So, for example,
in the case of Little Odessa, the
story planning took 4 months, following which the script was written in 3
weeks. (44)
After Gray made Little
Odessa, someone gave him a copy of Coppola’s step outline for The Godfather, and reading it cemented
his way of working the way he does.
|
44. Ibid., p. 49.
|
I initially storyboarded my films very elaborately, but don’t do that anymore. Now I only do shot lists, because on Little Odessa I realized very quickly that you have to throw all that stuff away. For the shootout scene, I got to set and the whole location was different than the one I had in my head. So it’s a waste of time to do all that work before shooting. Hitchcock did it, but he was working in much more controlled environments. And after a while it stopped working even for him, because the style of movies had changed. (45) |
45. Ibid., p. 56-57.
|
T for Tragedy
|
Harvey Weinstein of Miramax loved the screenplay for The Yards, specifically the New York social
world depicted in it. He also developed a great liking for Gray personally, and
took a special interest in the project. The film scored a competition slot at
Cannes, where the French press acclaimed it, but the American press was more
lukewarm. Producer Nick Weschler recalls: ‘After
that, Harvey and Bob Weinstein lost their steam, because they weren’t sure
whether it would work. I remember Bob saying to Harvey: “This isn’t a drama,
this is a tragedy. People don’t want to go see tragedies”’. (46) Thus their
decision to invest only minimally in advertising and promoting it.
Gray loves Shakespeare. In his early twenties, he happened to see
a Central Park performance of Measure for
Measure, then devoured most of the plays, becoming
obsessed with them. He was particularly struck by Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (technically considered part of
Shakespeare’s histories, not tragedies), and went on to model We Own the Night upon them. (47)
Mintzer points out: ‘The idea that Joaquin Phoenix’s character
gives up his way of life to save his brother is very Shakespearean’ – to which
Gray replies:
|
46. Ibid., pp. 159-160.
47. Ibid., p. 129.
|
It is, and there’s also the great way that Shakespeare was
able to delineate both external and internal conflict in a character. He was
the master of the dilemma, and dilemmas are everything in narrative fiction.
Once you know that about We Own the Night,
it’s kind of obvious: Robert Duvall is a Bolingbroke-type figure, a sort of
mediocre king. There’s prince Hal in Joaquin [Phoenix], with his buddy Falseti (Danny Hoch), who’s a Falstaffian figure. And the brother (Mark Wahlberg) is a kind of Hotspur – a mediocre great
warrior … I only wanted the film to be about cops on the very surface. (48)
|
48. Ibid., pp. 129-130.
|
Gray’s filmmaking ambitions were visible early. In high school, he
applied to several film schools, was accepted everywhere, and chose to come to
USC (the University of Southern California) because, even in his teens, he
wanted to be physically close to the industry. The vigorous competition between
the two coastal schools, USC and NYU (New York University), meant that USC awarded
generous scholarship money, and also funded the senior thesis film (something
NYU didn’t do), thus sealing the deal for him.
|
But once he got there, Gray was disappointed. USC heavily
emphasized the technical elements of filmmaking (skills he acquired quickly) at
the expense of narrative storytelling, which was his true interest: ‘I have no
interest in the other [i.e., non-narrative] kind of filmmaking. I feel like
telling stories is the way people communicate ideas to each other, and have
done so since the beginning of time’. (49)
For his thesis, in 1991, he made a short film called Cowboys and Angels, that he didn’t write, ‘about a
private investigator who has to take a runaway back to her father’. One reason
it distinguished itself from the rest of the student work was its music score
with songs by Bo Diddley, Dave Brubeck and Billie
Holiday – while the other students were self-composing their own scores on
synthesizer. It captured the attention of a producer, Paul Webster, who then
offered his services to Gray to produce his first feature, Little Odessa. (50)
USC was also significant because he met his friend and
collaborator Matt Reeves there. Reeves, who went on to direct films such as Cloverfield (2008), wrote and produced The Yards with Gray. They were drawn to each other as
eighteen-year-olds at USC because they loved both American cinema and European
art films. Reeves remembers:
|
49. Ibid., p. 43.
50. Ibid., pp. 42-44.
|
NYU and UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles]
were much more auteur-driven programs, while because of George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis, USC was considered a very
studio-blockbuster kind of school … USC was set up to run like a studio, and
you had to pitch your project and then they would only finance five thesis
films a year. They also didn’t want the writer and director to be the same
person, which is the opposite of teaching someone how to express themselves. In many ways, it was antithetical to the movies
that James and I were excited about. (51)
|
51. Ibid., pp. 108-109. |
V for Verismo
By his frequent admission, Gray has long been obsessed with verismo, a tradition in Italian opera that dates back to
the 19th century, and is associated with Puccini and Pietro Mascagni; Puccini’s La Bohème (1895) is probably the signal
work of this tradition. Gray explicitly intended The Yards to evoke this movement, and also set The Immigrant in the early 1920s partly to gesture towards verismo’s influence on the performance style of silent
melodrama.
|
A hallmark of verismo, and something
that holds particular attraction for Gray, is its turning away from the
traditional subjects of opera, like kings and queens and gods, in favour of the
romantic and working lives of ordinary people. In addition to characters, the
movement is also important to him stylistically, because of its affinities with
the literary tradition of naturalism, and figures such as Emile Zola (‘verismo’ means ‘realism’ in Italian). Gray contrasts the
sincerity and honesty of verismo with much
contemporary work: ‘We live in a cruel and snarky period with a lot of ironic
art [that] is dishonest – it puts the cinema audience above the characters and
the story’. (52)
When The Yards was
finally released on region-1 blu-ray in 2011, it was egregiously
cropped from the original aspect ratio of 2.30:1 down to 1.79:1. This was
particularly appalling because Gray’s use of widescreen is not a fringe
benefit, a decorative choice, but an integral part of his artistic vision: He
uses the format to insistently situate his characters within a world, a
society, a culture that is larger than they are.
The Yards has a remarkable
street-fight scene between Leo (Mark Wahlberg) and Willie (Joaquin Phoenix)
that was directly inspired by Rocco and
his Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960), but Gray shoots
it very differently from Visconti. The camera remains unusually distant from
the characters, and proceeds to retreat even further as the scene unfolds, the
widescreen compositions accentuating both the distance between the characters,
and their surroundings (buildings, fences, trees, the street). Gray explains:
|
52. Tim Appelo, ‘James Gray on “The Immigrant”’s
Opera Score’ Hollywood
Reporter, 9 May 2014.
|
The whole idea of it was that they were really powerless
to act, that they were beating each other up but that their environment had as
much to say about their lives as they did. Their ability to choose is dictated
by the culture and society at large. The point of the sequence is not the
punching, but to present two guys who were warring against each other, and
doing so because of forces out of their control. (53)
|
53. Conversations with James Gray, p. 94. |
The widescreen compositions also posted some interesting technical
challenges during the shoot because the film was shot on old Anamorphic and
Panavision C-Series lenses:
|
They were very slow and the depth of field was awful. For
instance, in the opening party scene we shot with real candlelight, and when
Ellen Burstyn moved her head only slightly she’d be out of focus, so we would
have to do another take. Overall, it took a long time to shoot because the
lighting in the entire film is ridiculously precise. It’s like Gordon Willis on
steroids! (54)
|
54. Ibid., p. 93.
|
X for x-factor
For several centuries now, ‘x’ has stood for the unknown. Terry
Moore has speculated that the practice owes its origins to Spanish scholars
being unable to translate certain Arabic sounds, such as the ‘sh’ in ‘al-shalan’ (the word
means ‘unknown thing’ in Arabic). Instead, they misrendered the sound as ‘ck’, which is written in classical Greek as X, the symbol for
‘chi’. (55)
As I write this, the most tantalizing James Gray x-factor has to
be his science-fiction project Ad Astra (‘to the stars’ in Latin), which is set to start production in a few weeks. The
project is currently shrouded in secrecy; however, going back a few years, we
can consult an interview Gray gave to IndieWire, in
which he spoke at some length about it. Admittedly, at that time, Gray had 400
pages of notes, an outline and structure, but had not yet written the script,
so it is unclear how much resemblance the final film will bear to his initial description:
|
55. Terry Moore, ‘Why is “x” the Unknown?’, ted.com, February 2012. |
You read about the astronauts who went to the moon –
the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited – all suffered serious
mental trauma of one kind or another. It was almost unbearable to see the earth
as small … looking like a marble. Edgar Mitchell started to talk about aliens
and Area 51; Neil Armstrong basically went to his farm in Lebanon, Ohio, and never left it again; Buzz Aldrin has been open about his alcoholism and depression. So part of the story is that
the infinite is unbearable, the idea of deep space is unbearable, and we need terra firma.
2001,
which is my favorite film in the genre and one of my favorite films ever, is
about man’s confrontation with the idea of the infinite and then evolving into
a new species when in contact with an alien force … The problem is that most
science fiction films – certainly the Kubrick film does not do this,
but it comes close, I would argue, to making this mistake, which is to awe us
with some kind of visual spectacle and size. But you can’t really do that, it
has to be conceptual, the awe has to come from a conceptual place … What is
awesome now in the Kubrick film when you see it, is not the stargate – which I think ages somewhat poorly – what ages brilliantly is HAL’s takeover
of the spacecraft and seeing the starchild in that white
room, because that is a conceptual brilliance. He’s not trying to awe us with a
‘Look at the size of the ship!’ thing – that doesn’t ever work. So it’s
incumbent on me to come up with something that is conceptually awe-inspiring. (56)
|
56. Jessica Kiang, ‘James Gray Reveals Details About his Developing Sci-Fi Thriller and the “Conceptual Brilliance” of “2001”’, IndieWire, 28 May 2013. |
Y for The Yards
My favourite James Gray movie. So much of what I
love about his work – the intelligent and expressive mise en scène, the detailed performances, the building up of a socio-economic context
around the characters, and the critical depiction of Family – comes together in
this movie in a way that is deeply satisfying and moving. Gray said of his
aims:
|
I was trying to tackle a couple of different things, one of which was how corruption and violence are the central organizing principles of society. I was also anxious to show a kind of ersatz family – one that had tried to reconstruct itself and was held together partly by class envy, and then is ultimately destroyed by corruption … in some ways, The Yards is the favourite of my movies, even though it’s my least successful movie on almost every level: worst reviewed, worst box office, and the most difficult to cut together. (57) |
57. Conversations
with James Gray, p. 85.
|
The look and production design of The Yards owe something to Robert Moses, a city planner known as
the ‘master builder’ of New York City and its environs, and who transformed the
city in the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Moses’ legacy has been much
criticized: he often displaced poor people from their neighbourhoods in order
to build highways, bridges and tunnels, de-emphasized mass transit, and
launched a great wave of suburbanization in the region.
Initially, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax championed the film when he
was producing it, especially taken by the densely detailed rendering of its
world of subway contractors, their business operations – including the bidding processes
for contracts at Borough Hall – and the internecine warfare between the firms.
But Weinstein came to believe that the original ending was too dark. So he
forced Gray and Reeves to write a new ending, in which Leo denounces government
and business corruption in court. Gray recalls: ‘I had wanted reshoots for
other stuff that I had run out of time to do, but which I thought would make
the film work better. To hold me ransom, he said, “Alright, but you give me
that ending!” So I did it, and I will never do that again’. (58)
Let me end on a note of suspension, of cinephilic anticipation: Gray’s new movie, The Lost
City of Z (2016), closed the New York Film Festival a couple of months ago,
and will be released in spring 2017. Its subject is British explorer Percy
Fawcett, and his several attempts to discover a lost Amazonian city – a quest
that ended with his disappearance in 1925. The movie was shot in the Colombian
jungle and in Northern Ireland. Only a handful of reviews have appeared so far;
I have not read them. I patiently await the surprise of my first encounter with
it …
|
58. Ibid., p. 98.
|
© Girish Shambu 2016. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |