Tributes

 

A drawing of a couple kissing is the image created by director James Gray to serve as poster artwork for this year’s 50th Mostra. This image can be read as a metaphor for the idea of cinema the New York-born filmmaker has been building for over three decades. This kind of closeness, common in kissing scenes, permeates his filmography, in which we are so glued to the actors’ faces that we can feel what the lovers themselves are feeling. 

Long before deciding to study film and direct his first university shorts, Gray fell in love with painting. Just as this art form is able to dive deep without letting the eye escape the surface of the canvas, its shapes and colours, his films stay in close proximity to spaces and their inhabitants to better investigate their mysteries and disorders. 

In his films, his hometown of New York is not the vertical metropolis of skyscrapers and criminal underworlds, but rather the horizontal city of outer-borough neighborhoods, low-rise buildings and characters who fall before they rise again. In his narratives, the weight of family is overwhelming, immigrant identity is complex, and ordinary lives are marked by tragedy. 

This combination of elements has its origin in Gray’s own biography. He was born in 1969, in Queens, into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. His childhood years and youth took place in a social context of a declining middle class and a deteriorating cityscape. In the early 1980s, when he first watched films such as “The French Connection” (1971) and “Taxi Driver” (1976), he found the same world he came from represented onscreen, in faded and melancholic colours. 

Gray could very well have been a part of the group of filmmakers that brought realism, disillusionment and antiheroism to American cinema in the 1970s. He belonged to the generation that came after the renowned directors of the New Hollywood movement. However, as a compulsive spectator of films by the likes of Friedkin, Coppola and Scorsese, James Gray discovered that cinema could be artistically ambitious. 

Following in the footsteps of these auteurs in American film, Gray furthered his education as a cinephile by turning to the masters of modern cinema. Visconti, Bertolucci, Kubrick, Kurosawa and Fellini became key stylistic references before he even set foot in film school. 

This aesthetic framework, combined with an acute sensitivity towards emotions and the inevitability of misunderstanding in parent-child  relationships, has been nourishing his oeuvre since “Little Odessa” (1994), his debut feature, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival when he was 25. 

Shadows loom in the opening images of the film, where a shot is dominated by darkness until Tim Roth’s eyes partially emerge into the light. He plays a contract killer, a son banished from the family nest, whose return offers no peace. If family order was unstable before, his comeback leads to destruction, as with characters in Greek tragedies. From “The Yards” (2000) to “Paper Tiger” (2026), Gray’s films consistently explore brotherhood, love, hate, and the push and pull in sibling relationships. 

Another side of Gray’s cinema takes us to the past, to a cosmic dimension, to the unknown. In “The Immigrant” (2013), a social and historical perspective comes to the foreground. The sumptuous period detail and the exposure of the corrupted foundation of the American dream further elevate Gray’s work. Like Coppola, Leone and Cimino before him, Gray reclaims a fascination with the aesthetics and narrative of historical epics, combining visual beauty with existential tragedy.

This cinema in a major key continues in “The Lost City of Z” (2016) and “Ad Astra” (2019). Although settings such as the jungle and outer space  may seem new when compared with the director’s previous New York- set fictions, his focus remains on familial disorder and its dramatic  and narrative possibilities. 

“Paper Tiger”, his most recent release, maintains a mixture of family drama and historical context. While “Armageddon Time” (2022) heralded the Reagan era, his newest effort follows the disintegration of the American dream amidst the shock waves of the 1980s. It is the portrait of a country in transformation, where the shredding of the social fabric is as relevant as the film’s formal construct. 

The 50th Mostra pays homage to filmmaker James Gray by awarding him the Leon Cakoff Prize, recognizing an artist of genuine cinematic vision and an auteur who fuses classical themes and forms with the transformations of the contemporary world. A body of work that, ultimately, helps us see through the darkness.