“Someone once asked Duke Ellington what kind of music he listened to. ‘What kind? There’s the good kind, and then there is the other kind.’”
James Gray, asked about his choice of the outdated “convention” embodied by genre cinema.
James Gray is an American filmmaker of Russian origin, born in 1969 in New York.
His cinematographic work is composed of four films; one can see it as the declension of a single prototypical narrative, that of an individual at grips with a crushing milieu. After a long absence, a son returns to his family, which is itself attached to a vaster clan, the mafia (Little Odessa, 1994), the business world (The Yards, 2000), and the police (La Nuit nous appartient [We Own the Night], 2007). This confrontation forces the hero to make a choice between criminality and justice, a dilemma whose outcome will determine his relation to the clan. The family territory, posited as the scene of the conflict, is always, explicitly or implicitly, the Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach, located in Brooklyn. Little Odessa, Gray’s first film, is the topographical exploration of this perfectly closed territory; We Own the Night gravitates around the “ghetto”; Two Lovers closes the body of work with a new claustration in Brighton Beach. Only The Yards is not explicitly set there; but the film unfolds in the railroad world and explores the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
The elsewhere, the other clan that awakens in the hero the desire to extract himself from his milieu, is American society. In The Yards, Leo Handler aspires to a social and professional reintegration after his release from prison. In We Own the Night, Bobby Green has refused his family’s police legacy in order to work in a nightclub, and aspires to conquer the world of the night by establishing himself in Manhattan. James Gray claims kinship for his films with “the leftist social drama, in the lineage of certain films of the fifties.”1 He declares, about The Yards: “My intention, very political, was to show a very complicated universe where the great families collide with the political world and that of business.”2 The outcome of this conflict is always fatal: Gray shows by this his “ambition to make a film where economic circumstances and cultural forces end up controlling people’s lives.”3 The filmmaker evokes the influence of Althusser in his representation of the Russian community: “There are dominant ideologies of which we are the hostages, and our free will is restricted by the boxes in which we are confined. Ethnicity remains important, for the culture is not the same in France, in Italy or in the United States…”4
Now, this thematic conflict is found again on the cinematographic plane. James Gray is a solitary filmmaker, who stages films of which he alone writes the screenplay, shot solely in the environment in which he has lived. Little Odessa is a first film hailed by the critics and awarded a prize at Venice. One would have to wait until 2000 for him to shoot The Yards, after four years spent fighting to retain his hold over the original screenplay, the choice of staging and the casting. The film is a total failure, commercial and critical; the studios turn their backs on James Gray. We Own the Night exists only thanks to his two favorite actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, who came forward as producers. But the support of two Hollywood stars was not able to overcome all the difficulties: the making of the film was made possible only seven years after The Yards.
James Gray is a cinephile filmmaker, who claims the heritage of a tradition. He declares himself to be part of a double filiation, that of Hollywood and European classicisms, that of the modernism of the New Hollywood. He wishes to set himself apart from contemporary American cinema (1980–2010), whether mass culture or the post-modern aesthetic of Tarantino and the Coen brothers. This heritage can be read on screen through the choice of the actors who embody the hero’s parents: in The Yards and We Own the Night, Faye Dunaway, James Caan and Robert Duvall emblematize the New Hollywood, whereas the European actors of Little Odessa may constitute a reference to classicism.
The conflict between auteur cinema and mass cinema explodes in a journalistic polemic at the release of The Yards. It seems to us that this reception crystallizes a tension that agitates the work of James Gray, at its center and at its periphery: the filmmaker ties a conflict between the norm and the margin, on the triple formal, thematic and contextual planes. The individual identity (the hero, the filmmaker-auteur) enters into confrontation with two groups: a great emancipatory space, synonymous with respectability and integration, which refuses itself to him (American society, the circle of “good,” recognized filmmakers), and a small space, the famous “box” in which he is enclosed, which limits his expression and partitions his identity (the family, the social class, the immigrant community, genre cinema). Thus the question of identity works through Gray’s body of work: the filmmaker interrogates cinematographic identity on the formal plane, and personal identity on the thematic plane. In parallel, the critics ceaselessly interrogate the generic identity of his films.
This problematic seems rooted in Hollywood history itself, which shows a relation between generic identity and cultural identity. The founders of Hollywood, Jews who emigrated from Europe (the Warner brothers, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer); the champions of Hollywood classicism (Lubitsch, Mankiewicz); the proponents of the New Hollywood (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma): Hollywood history is inextricably linked to that of immigrant creators or creators issued from immigration. The newly invested space of America and the abandoned space of Europe; the American cinema to be forged in the face of European influence; the masses to be conquered by the “dream factory” and the individuality to be expressed through the artistic medium. One sees clearly that Hollywood cinema is worked through by a double tension, where America and the European origins question each other on the one hand, and auteur cinema and mass cinema interrogate each other on the other.
A contemporary filmmaker proclaims that he takes up the torch of the classical Hollywood tradition; the critics lapidarily classify him in “genre cinema” or “auteur cinema,” continuing a debate of which Hollywood cinema has always been the object. He is reproached notably for making a cinema that “never seeks to reinvent, to transcend; where the notion of ‘déjà vu’ is a fully assumed given”5; by this very fact one reproduces identically a critical discourse sixty years old. What sense to give to these repetitions, which concern at once cinema, reception, and History? Rather than dissociating them, one must analyze them together. We will therefore examine the relation between identity and (cinematographic) genre, starting from Gray’s body of work.
We will first interrogate the relations between form and genre. The critics have condemned the formal repetitiveness of James Gray’s films. This repetitiveness is threefold: it concerns the cinematographic genre, which would copy its models too closely, the plot, which would use myths and stereotypes, and the similarity of Gray’s films among themselves.
On the generic plane, Gray’s cinema has been likened to the “tragedy of the Shakespearean mafia-family.”6 Gray would thus revisit a “genre forever marked by Coppola’s The Godfather.”7 It is fitting to recall, following Jean-Loup Bourget, that tragedy is a theatrical and not a cinematographic genre: one therefore speaks of melodrama. Moreover, Bourget recalls that the classic crime film regroups two distinct sub-genres, the gangster film and film noir. In the era of the New Hollywood, Coppola renewed these classic forms by practicing a mixing of genres: the “small form” of the gangster film, centered on a solitary figure, undergoes in The Godfather an “epic expansion”8; it is hybridized with the family saga, the melodrama, the socio-historical inquiry.9
The heritage of Coppola is seen here in the resumption of the hybridization between the crime film and the melodrama. Melodrama is defined notably by the alternation of scenes of collective jubilation and distress, which punctuate the films and constitute their awaited moments. The Yards, We Own the Night and Two Lovers each contain a nightclub scene, to which respond scenes of weeping and family heartbreak in the face of mourning. In the first case, the space is open; the bodies come loose from one another. The flickering of the lights makes the image appear and disappear and creates a visual discontinuity, which the staging does not attempt to remedy but amplifies. To this aesthetic responds, in the second case, the representation of a closed space, in which the bodies press in against one another. The tracking shots give way to a fixed shot, traversed by the slow movements of characters who have become statuesque. One thinks here of the final burial in The Yards; or of the scene of imaginary reunion that closes Little Odessa. The cinema of James Gray thus indeed takes up the polarity of melodrama, except that the films are imbued from the beginning with a muffled melancholy. The celebration that inaugurates The Yards lets an anxious joy seep through, which threatens to turn into panic. Melodrama is present above all through the “tragic” plot of all of James Gray’s films. The filmmaker declares that he draws inspiration from the mythic and tragic structures of ancient Greece: the prodigal son returns home to protect a weakened and delicate mother, to counter a tyrannical (or involuntarily destructive) father, to find again his double incarnated by the fraternal figure.
Thus, on contact with the work, one is first struck by the primacy accorded to the art of narrative. Gray sticks literally to the story; like his hero, his camera returns to the family matrix never to leave it again; it comes as close as possible to the faces when the tragic knot arises, it tightens the field at the turns of the plot. The staging, the actors, the effects of the films serve a single objective here: the narrative, the great star of Gray’s films. The extreme stylization, the formal perfection of the work pass through pictorial influence (each shot offers an isolable image whose light, framing, geometry are perfectly cared for) and the art of detail. These effects serve to underscore the story, hence the reproach of symbolism that has been leveled at Gray. Clélia Cohen thus denounces the “impossibility for the characters to escape their destiny, ceaselessly hemmed in at the joints by a carceral staging, always delimited by door frames, stairwells.”10 The recurrent image of white sheets hung out can play such a role. Placed in the hero’s trajectory, they momentarily obscure the scene and announce the traumatic vision of wounded, dead, or dehumanized bodies. They thus act as a signal during the final execution of Little Odessa, in the hospital scene of The Yards, or upon the discovery of the laboratory in We Own the Night.
Now, the aesthetic of Gray’s work is so sophisticated that it annuls not only all realism, but soon also all symbolism. By dint of underscoring the thread of the plot, of emphasizing the decisive moments, the plastic work ends up deforming the story, leaving its imprint on the narrative unfolding. It is, moreover, the visual conception that precedes the screenplay in the elaboration of the films. The filmmaker initially prepares a series of watercolors that do not retrace the plot chronologically, but constitute its emotionally strong sequences. He then entrusts them to his cinematographer. Thus the genesis of The Yards rests above all on a work of chiaroscuro, inspired by Caravaggio and La Tour. “I begin by trying to create an atmosphere, an emotional climate,”11 explains Gray. After the image, music constitutes the second preparatory element of the film. Gray declares that he does not understand the importance of dialogue, which pertains to the “domain of the stage”: “To my mind, what is proper to cinema is emotion, the close-up, the detail, and one of the avenues of access is music.”12 In The Yards, Leo finds his cousin Erica again at the homecoming party that opens the film. At the moment when emotion is at its height, the light goes out and the scene is plunged into darkness. The power outage forces them to light themselves by candle, and the flickering flame colors the faces with a golden chiaroscuro, which underscores their “uncanny strangeness.” The Freudian term is particularly suited to this familiar environment, which has become strange after the long absence. An anguish surfaces on the affectionate but now strange faces, an unease shows through behind the loving gestures, the celebration resembles a death vigil. But during the final confrontation of Willie and Erica, when the declarations of love punctuate the physical violence, the light becomes intermittent without the film justifying it by a narrative pretext. Like the gestures of panic that burst out, the light is erratic.
The plot, whose treatment the critics judge naive, of the first degree, is therefore secondary. It is in the first place the idea of an emotion to be represented that arises, and it is translated by an image or a music. The filmmaker then incorporates this affective climate into a narrative fabric, elaborated later. The image as something that surfaces, that takes form belatedly, is also the fictional conception that Stevenson elaborated. One may find it incongruous to bring Gray together with an author of nineteenth-century English literature. Yet their reputation as makers of plots, as fabricators of entertainment, brings them together. Michel Le Bris, a specialist in the writer, thus justifies the generic choice of the adventure narrative: “adventure is the very form of fiction — and in this it escapes the totalitarianism of contents, proper to naturalism: it is the manifestation of the plastic power of the imaginary.”13
The “plastic power of the imaginary” manifests itself perhaps in James Gray through the use of the “noir” genre and of the imagery linked to it: it is the pearly smoke that envelops the bodies that fall, the body of the policeman beaten in The Yards, the body of the dying father in We Own the Night. It is the sexual energy of the lateral tracking shot, the shimmering of the nightclub colors, the caressing undulation of the camera over the bodies, in the opening of We Own the Night. One sees there the languorous deployment of the fiction, which surely developed in Gray from this original image and this original ambiance. Set in motion by an erotic scene, the fiction springs forth like a vital flux before drying up as the image moves away. The exterior music is progressively replaced by an original music, according to Gray’s wish that “the film become more and more operatic and stylized.”14 The colors become colder, the narrative slows, the image is sometimes abstract and graphic, the framing slips during the car chase.
According to Gray, “the surface must be in the service of the emotion.”15 It is true that the form undulates, permeable, around the actors. For if the narrative is only an envelope that links key sequences, sites of the surging of the original image, then it is the characters who must conduct it, in their bodies. James Gray creates a physical cinema, riveted to the character, glued to his point of view. He films faces and bodies as blocks of “innervated and explosive energy.”16 Impossible not to be seized by the plastic work of the representation of bodies. The camera stops, and seems to fill with the mineral face of Burt Grusinsky in the ambulance; it furtively catches the moving body of Amada in a corridor; it freezes on the stooped back of Bobby or cuts out the ebony, slicked-back hair of the same actor in The Yards. In Little Odessa, it lets one glimpse, through the crack of a door, the painful choreography of the suffering body of Irina Shapira. The point of view so espouses the perception of the characters that it deforms the film, notably in the action scenes. The stupor of Joseph during the sumptuous nocturnal ambush of We Own the Night abruptly shifts the scene into slow motion. When the action presents itself, it is often in unexpected fashion. The surprise and the fear of the hero slow and mute the scene, which finds itself suspended in a humming silence, as in the sublime nocturnal attack of The Yards. These two films contain an infiltration scene, when Bobby infiltrates the heroin laboratory for the police, and when Leo slips into the hospital to assassinate the policeman. The body penetrates a foreign space that aspirates and threatens it at one and the same time: the silhouette of Bobby melts into the door filled with darkness, that of Leo cuts itself out in black against the white sheet. The panic makes the skin quiver, the body threatens to collapse, and on contact with radical alterity (the macabre images of a suffering body or of the manufacture of heroin) it is, inversely, the filmed body that penetrates the skin of the film. The breathing and the cardiac pounding of the hero fill the soundtrack, until they make it implode when the bullets suddenly fly in the laboratory.
The knots of the plot arise during the scenes of contemplation of a wounded body. Leo and Bobby instinctively choose the path of justice when they are confronted, in the hospital, with the unconscious body of a man wounded through their fault. Their choice pertains less to an examination of conscience than to a skin-deep reaction; Gray proposes less a cinema of morality than a cinema of apparition. The plot is the surging of bodies into the light, which ties a tension; the deployment of the action is the necessity of breathing life into these images. One understands the use of Caravaggio in the genesis of the films of a filmmaker who is “more drawn toward movement, theater, ballet.”17: to set into plot is to set the bodies (back) into movement.
In Gray, the plot takes on a libidinal, drive-based function, for it always comes down to a race (already lost) after life. Much has been argued about Bobby’s final choice in We Own the Night, interpreted as a redemption and an apologia for the police. But what decides the hero to help the police is the prospect of his father’s death. When this occurs, the narrative slips, first formally during the car-chase scene. The rain forms a torrent that opacifies the image, makes the cars skid, prevents advance; it slows the action and precipitates death. As in Little Odessa, death arises in the luminous flash of a gunshot, which electrifies the image and short-circuits the story. For what follows is only an incoherent narrative dénouement. Bobby dons the police uniform to lead a vengeful manhunt. He transforms into an expiatory victim, into an absolute monster, into the great culprit of the police story, the one whom the film had never presented otherwise than as a vulgar little thug. We Own the Night closes on the ceremony of entry into the police; The Yards ends on Leo’s denunciation during a press conference18: these final scenes have nothing glorious or redemptive about them. One must look at the bodies of the characters, contemplate their empty and extinguished eyes, which no longer look at anything. In Gray, when death comes, the plot disintegrates. Little Odessa and The Yards end respectively on a cremation and a fall; with the bodies, it is the story that tumbles down or is consumed. If the narrative continues beyond death as in We Own the Night, then it no longer means anything. The narrative process seems inextricably linked to the vital process; witness the scenes evoked above, where the life of the heroes is put at stake, where the heart nearly bursts. These missed heartbeats, these breaths that race, are moments of stupefaction, of narrative suspension; they pierce the film and tear it like a wound.
Gray’s characters are enclosed in the fatality of death, which is triply conditioned by the mythic material of the plot, by the tragic outcome of the crime film, by the conception of a destructive social milieu. This fatalism of the plot enters into contradiction with the vitality of the fiction. If Gray does not believe in a possible salvation for his characters, he believes lovingly in fiction, which blossoms in a jubilant and exultant form. His films inherit from film noir their tight weave and their asphyxiating climate. But these small claustrophobic structures begin to swell, through a visual and emotional expansion. The ardent desire to feel the melodramatic pathos and to palpate the tension of the plot pushes one to sublimate the image, to aestheticize the bodies, to exacerbate the emotional effects.
Gray then seems to create a new form of circulation of meaning: the narrative organizes itself around significant foci, the scenes of apparition of the desired image. The films will spend their time trying to recreate these dreamed sequences. The narrative deploys the expectation of this emotional peak, of this visual splendor; when it arises, it comes to shatter against it, before falling back through a melancholy dénouement. The fiction, despite this dreary falling-back, ceaselessly relaunches itself. “One must let the films be what they are: living things, that breathe…,”19 says James Gray. This organic conception of the fictional material is also that of television series, which are currently experiencing an apogee. In his reflection on the classic detection narrative, Uri Eisenzweig had already explained the serial structure of detective novels by invoking a formal necessity: the pleasure of reading the detective plot is equaled only by the disappointment provoked by its dénouement. This disappointment entails the necessity of beginning the reading again. Eisenzweig thus observes in detective reading “the structural incompleteness of the experience and the subsequent requirement of repetition.”20 Let us say it more crudely: fiction begins again infinitely in order to prevent a withdrawal crisis. This desire for fiction is palpable in Gray, who restores a great power to the narrative: the story bubbles and with it, it is the whole surface of the film that palpitates.
Now that the relations between cinematographic genre and form have been evoked, it is fitting to examine the relations between genre cinema and identity.
The Cahiers du cinéma recently put out an issue on television series, of which our era marks the golden age; they analyze a range of the best works. The great victor is Mad Men, a series devoted to the leaders of an advertising agency in the America of the 1960s. Jean-Sébastien Chauvin declares: “Everything in this magnificent series seems caught in the nets of plastic perfection and absolute control. In this sense, Mad Men lives itself as a true auteur series, worked through by a cinephile unconscious […].”21 The critic analyzes an “iconic, glacial, almost phantasmal dimension,” which transforms the characters into a “plastic ideal, as immortal as an image.”22 This structure is obviously a “decoy,” for the characters “try to keep standing a world that ceaselessly risks vanishing, riddled with moments of strangeness in which madness and depression would come to nest.”23 The critic then concludes: “In this sense, this cinephile series has integrated the codes of modern cinema and its accesses of opacity, its aesthetic inherited from Hollywood classicism.”24 It is striking here to see that all the characteristics noted, from the “vintage” material to the visual aesthetic, by way of the narrative treatment, the cinephile influence, the classical homage and the supremacy of the “auteur,” could be attributed to James Gray. The Cahiers du cinéma love Mad Men for the same reasons that they detest Gray. What is it, then, that bothers them in the filmmaker?
In the historical work An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler explains the immigrants’ choice to found a cinema industry. The Hollywood founders were first rejected to the margins of American society on account of their Jewishness: they were accused of conspiring against the traditional values of America, and of threatening the structures of power. “[T]o understand what was, perhaps, in the eyes of the Jews, the principal attraction of cinema, one must also understand their thirst for assimilation and the unique manner in which the movies were capable of slaking that thirst. If the Jews were forbidden access to the closed circles of distinction and prestige, the movies offered them, in return, an ingenious alternative. Within the framework of the studios and on the screen, the Jews simply had the possibility of creating a new country — an empire in its own right, their empire, so to speak — where not only would they be admitted, but which they would govern. They would fashion this empire in the image of the prosperous American. They would create its values and its myths, its traditions and its archetypes.”25
This correspondence between two spaces to be conquered, the geographical territory and the cinematographic territory, is found regularly in Hollywood history. One can cite Kazan for the classical era; one will evoke particularly Scorsese for the era of the New Hollywood, for the filmmaker presents similarities with Gray. At his beginnings, Scorsese is animated by a desire for an auteur cinema with an identity of its own, escaping the hegemony of the studios; this is why he takes part in the movement of the New Hollywood. His first films pertain to the “small form” of the gangster film, they are centered on the Italian community. These components will always remain present in his work, but his parallel desire to inscribe himself in the great Hollywood tradition has pushed him for some years toward films of a “noble” genre (the historical film, the biopic), of “grand form,” interrogating American identity. In the eyes of all, Scorsese today emblematizes the gangster film; yet his works illustrate this tension of identity. The gangster film reveals a contradiction, which Scorsese has striven to dig into. The filmmaker reveals the subversive power of the mafia, posited as a counter-power to the State associated with marginality, through its relation to the forbidden and to illegality. But, marginal though they be, the gangsters aspire to enter into the norm of the American dream. They are imbued with a desire for success within capitalist society, and tend to leave their community of origin. The liberal ideology of the gangsters, the functioning of their economic, social and political structures, seem dictated by the american way of life itself. According to Yannick Mouten, in Scorsese this micro-society is less “the reaction of a marginalized social group than an attempt at social adaptation by the members of a group of an ethnic minority.”26 Ideological criticism has thus seen alternately an apologia for or a denunciation of capitalism in the gangster film. The final death of the crook, which is a characteristic of the genre, would be significant of an ideology: a social ascent too high in the hierarchy of social classes always has a mortal consequence, says the gangster film, which would thus justify or denounce the class system.
One understands better why the theme of identity laceration, of social conflict, expresses itself in genre cinema. For Gray, whose dream would be to “make films that one can see, understand and feel in fifty years,”27 the genre film, because it issues from mass cinema, allows access to myth. Indeed, a certain opinion sees in genre cinema the expression of a collective imaginary; its formal structure of repetition and permanence would bring it close to the mythic narrative. The genre film thus allows participation in the perpetuation of American values and myths. But at the same time, N. Gabler specifies, the hierarchically “low” Hollywood genres (to which the crime film attaches itself) have often “espous[ed] the cause of the losers and the loners, the boxers, the slaughterhouse employees, the truck drivers, the miners, the professional cheats, the private detectives, the racketeers, the swindlers and everything that could pass beneath the dregs of the Great Depression.”28 The “low” genre film thus allows one to inscribe minorities, the weak and the marginal into Grand History, to place behaviors judged “antisocial”29 at the heart of the medium that produces the social norm. Access to genre cinema thus constitutes at one and the same time a submission to and a domination of the norm; it is double.
In other words, mass cinema is too enslaved to the norm for whoever wishes to renew genre cinema; but it represents a margin for whoever wishes to renew the tradition of auteur cinema.
One must keep this duality, this tension, in order to analyze the work of James Gray: he is the creator of a genre cinema and an auteur cinema, he is at once American and Jewish. His cinema has often been reproached for being nostalgic; one has been irritated by the omnipresence of the paternal figure, set into narrative by the mythic material and embodied by actors of the New Hollywood. To my mind, the figure of paternity translates less a taste for the past than a problematization of heritage. Let us recall that myths, Greek and biblical, are qualified as foundational because their original function was to explain the creation of a civilization or a community. In James Gray, the aging fathers are the holders of an old world, which is in the process of collapsing. They were the representatives of a double world: the fathers, in the films, are immigrants, placed at the crossroads of two lands. The fathers of the films are the creators of the New Hollywood, who had hybridized the Hollywood mass cinema with the European auteur film of the 1950s-60s. The contemporary cinema of Gray thus poses the question of the heritage of this fundamentally double cultural and cinematographic identity. The recourse to myth may be perceived as boring formally; but it proves necessary for whoever interrogates the notions of identity transmission and community foundation. Let us recall that the myth of Oedipus, before being the narrative of a parricide, is that of the foundation of a kingdom by a man in exile, without land. First cast out of the parental kingdom to prevent all transmission, he is finally brought back to it by exilic wandering, where he accepts despite himself the terrible paternal heritage.
It is the fatally funereal outcome of this circular journey that interests us, notably because it particularly irritates the critics. Gray’s cinema is voluntarily “elegiac.”30 This corresponds to a particular cinematographic conception: “To my mind, forget the rest, every work of art has death for its subject: the human species trying to come to terms with its own mortality. This consciousness differentiates us from the other living creatures. One does not think of it every day, one is even very good at forgetting it; but for me art is a form of religion: it is a way of assuming the fact of being mortal.”31 We Own the Night — the darkness is ours: the influence of Caravaggio is felt in this approach of domesticating obscurity. It is true that Gray contemplates characters who die slowly, progressively over the course of the tragic plot; they themselves are hailed by the hypnotic power of the agonizing bodies. Let us cite notably the tracking shot that embraces in slow motion the throat-cutting scene that Bobby witnesses, in We Own the Night. Let us think also of the scenes of Little Odessa and of The Yards where the heroes go to their mother’s bedside: the vigil of the sick woman already resembles a death vigil. Little Odessa is, moreover, only a film about the waiting for death. When Joshua contemplates the unconscious face of his mother, he does nothing other than watch death come. Inversely, when he aims a weapon at his father’s head and holds him long in his sights, he tries to precipitate a long-desired death, but fails to finish off the one he hates.
This funereal dimension is inscribed in the tragic material of the works that inspire the films. With one difference: in the myths and in Shakespeare, the mortal conflict lacerates a royal clan. The family crisis corresponds to a shaking of the governing power. In the crime film, it is an immigrant, proletarian, or outlaw family that kills one another. In Little Odessa, the clan is completely marginal: Brighton Beach is a hermetic enclave, as if outside America; the Jewish ghetto resembles an immense European ruin, plunged outside time. The Russian community evolves in an economic system that is outside legality: it lives only off serfdom to the local mafia.
Now, in reality, the population that this cinema represents has seized upon the crime film to make of it its emblem. I designate notably the phenomenon of the gangs, and more broadly the marginal groups that “hang out” [zoner] in urban space. The term is here employed in its primary sense of “non-place.” In other words, when current language speaks of zonards [hangers-out, wasters], it designates the landless. The cult of the clan, even of the gang, implies the necessity of exhibiting one’s belonging. Often, the signs of belonging are all the more corporeal as the economic means are weak: for lack of material possessions, it is the body itself that is engaged in the process of representation. One tattoos one’s skin, one marks it, one adorns oneself with certain colors to signify one’s allegiance. One holds the walls, one imposes one’s physical presence by a certain posture, at a certain place. The culture of rap and hip-hop launched the concept of “representing”: the slang means by this that one stands in for a group. Now, what does one give to be seen of oneself when the crime film “represents” us? An ambiguous image that depicts a conquest of society, where the criteria of adherence to the norm are at once subverted and perfectly imitated. But one also gives a macabre image of oneself.
In the “tragedy of the Shakespearean mafia-family,” one struggles in blood for the survival of the clan. Form and content espouse each other perfectly in the serial-feuilleton device of the saga (The Godfather) or the series (Sons of Anarchy, The Sopranos) cherished by the genre, where the fictional flux, called to regenerate itself indefinitely, partakes of the vital process. One calls for the saving of the offspring so as to be able to continue producing narrative. But in James Gray there is no call for help; it is an inverse movement where the narrow community folds in on itself, on its own collapse. “I never needed everyone else anyway” Leo answers his mother, who apologizes that there was never “anyone else” but the two of them in the world, no one to protect them and no one to protect. No prolongation of the struggle here. Inside oneself it twitches and palpitates still, but one is almost already dead. This is precisely what is decried in James Gray.32
I now justify my reference to the reception of Mad Men. One likes to witness the waverings and the inner conflicts of the powerful of society, of the advertising men posited as the fabricators of the dream that feeds the idyllic America of the 1960s. But one detests witnessing the physical conflict of the oppressed classes, of the community of pariahs precisely molded by the values and the myths created by the powerful. One detests seeing the mortal conflict that precisely results from an assumed submission to the norm, from an attempt to enter into the dream. Beneath the veneer of appearance, one discovers an inner rot, Mad Men tells us, which, in filming the distress of an iconic blonde of the american way of life or the psychic torments of a golden boy, only takes up the myth of modern America that Marilyn Monroe emblematized. But to this mythic schema of binary opposition, Gray responds with a radical monolithism, which frankly displeases. If the characters are tormented by double and contradictory desires, some will nonetheless remain univocal: in Little Odessa they are twisted, hateful, impotent, poor, condemned. No system of opposition here. Little Odessa is a film of petty scum, where Gray saves no one: the father mistreats his children, gives his son to the mafia, deceives his agonizing wife; the son abandons a sick mother, strikes his father, provokes the death of his brother.
This type of crime film magnifies its heroes, but it is not through the unleashing of a vengeful and subversive violence. The action scenes are never spectacular, but always litotic, filmed without music; the violence is never inflicted, it is always suffered. If the heroes are sublimated, it is through a work of fixation in the image of collapse, which bathes the work in the proliferation of scenes of falling and kneeling. The characters are iconized, as the model of religious art, chosen to elaborate the cinematographic aesthetic, reveals.
This aesthetic is, moreover, borrowed from the gangster films of the New Hollywood, more particularly from Scorsese and Ferrara. One may judge this representation complacent; but one must follow the analysis to its conclusion and interrogate its implications.
To categorize these disparate films under a single appellation, as the critics do, contributes to inserting them into social practices.33 Now the recuperation of this cinema by the communities of the margin, which thus aim to emblematize themselves, confers a special status on the fiction. In a context of social isolation and economic dispossession, the group is invisible geographically and unidentifiable by material signs. I have suggested that it was the body that then had to engage its presence, be marked and staged in public space. One shows that one exists in a fiction traversed by the question of survival; in a fiction that aestheticizes the community to the highest degree, in a fiction that aspires, in Gray, to provoke a pure plastic enjoyment of the images, a pure delectation of emotion. The objectives of this representation do not obey the consensual criteria of the work of art; they have to do with questions of life and death, troubled and ambiguous. For in Gray’s films, which can also be representative of a certain community, the body that one exhibits to display one’s identity is a dead body.
This datum, which one contents oneself here with pointing out, would merit a deep analysis. It is the heart of Gray’s cinema, and more generally of a certain cinema in which he wishes to inscribe himself, in which the critics finish by categorizing him. Now this datum is rich in implications, aesthetic and political.
Gray films a spectacle only once. In Two Lovers, the hero hopes to seduce the woman he loves during a nocturnal outing. In the car, he has already given himself over to an improvisation of rap to entertain the group of young women. Arrived at the nightclub, he observes the hip-hop demonstration of a dancer placed in the middle of the floor. He throws himself into the middle of the arena to imitate him. There, beneath the gaze of the crowd and of the desired woman, he engages his body in a spectacle of which he knows nothing but which he improvises. Never mind that the movements are clumsy in the face of the dozens of gazes: one plays for all or nothing here, and once the body has chosen to engage itself, once it is launched into the scene, one abandons oneself, one immerses oneself totally in the dance.
The journalistic critic would like to tear the work from its cinematographic space, to find for it an external anchorage. His failure leads him to deduce a dubious politicization of the work: the recourse to myth would translate a nostalgia, even a “climate of the restoration of the traditional values of America.”34 But Gray is literally glued to his story, impossible to uproot him from the narrative. The critic does not see that the political and aesthetic stakes are situated precisely in the adherence to the fiction.
Now, to refuse to see the implications of the immersion of the filmmaker in the gesture of representation (genre cinema), and of the immersion of the character in the represented gesture (the dance, the struggle), is not only a weakness of aesthetic analysis. It is also a political act. For the choice of sadness and of submersion in misfortune is not neutral, neither politically nor aesthetically. Especially when the film is confined to the pure codified category of “genre cinema.” This act of denomination, R. Moine recalls, makes of it “a tool of communication, a cultural, ideological and social mediation.”35
“I feel light as a feather, because of the drug” Bobby pretexts to the dealer, in order to pronounce the code name that will alert the police. But the coded words also make sense: at that moment, the hero is truly like a feather, tossed about and precipitated into the course of events, and above all submerged by fear.
Notes
Ciment Michel and Tobin Yann, Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 477, November 2000, p. 16↩︎
Ibid., p. 16↩︎
Ibid., p. 16↩︎
Ciment Michel and Tobin Yann, Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 562, December 2007, p. 27.↩︎
Cohen Clélia, “The Yards,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 551, November 2000, p. 99.↩︎
Cohen Clélia, “Du bon usage du film de genre,” Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 547, June 2000, p. 38.↩︎
Neyrat Cyril, “Abus d’images,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 629, December 2007, p. 20.↩︎
Bourget Jean-Loup, Hollywood, la norme et la marge, Paris, Armand Colin, 2005, p. 79.↩︎
Ibid., p. 79.↩︎
“The Yards,” op. cit., p. 99.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 477, op. cit., p. 20.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 477, op. cit., p. 18.↩︎
Le Bris Michel, “La Morale de l’histoire,” in Stevenson R.L., Intégrale des nouvelles, vol. II, Paris, Editions Phébus, 2001, p. 13.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 562, op. cit., p. 28.↩︎
Burdeau Emmanuel, Interview with James Gray, Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 639, November 2008, p. 94.↩︎
Ferrari Jean-Christophe, “La tristesse nous appartient,” Positif, no. 562, December 2007, p. 24.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 477, op. cit., p. 20.↩︎
It is advisable to watch the “director’s cut” version, which does not contain this scene, imposed by the Miramax studios.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 639, op. cit., 90.↩︎
Eisenzweig Uri, Le Récit impossible, Paris, Christian Bourgois éd., 1986, p. 85.↩︎
Chauvin Jean-Sébastien, “Il faut sauver le soldat Draper,” Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 658, July - August 2010, p. 8.↩︎
Ibid., p. 8.↩︎
Ibid., p. 9.↩︎
Ibid., p. 8.↩︎
Gabler Neal, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood [French ed. Le Royaume de leurs rêves – La saga des Juifs qui ont fondé Hollywood], Paris, Hachette Littérature, 2005, p. 16.↩︎
Mouten Yannick, “La Trilogie des gangsters,” in Estève Michel (ed.), Martin Scorsese, Paris, Lettres modernes Minard, collection “Etudes cinématographiques,” volume 68, 2003, p. 87.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 639, op. cit., p. 91.↩︎
Le Royaume de leurs rêves, op. cit., p. 235↩︎
Ibid., p. 235.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 477, op. cit., p. 16.↩︎
Interview with James Gray, Positif, no. 562, op. cit., p. 27.↩︎
“Du bon usage du film de genre,” op. cit., p. 38.↩︎
See Moine Raphaëlle, Les Genres du cinéma, Paris, Nathan, 2002, p. 5.↩︎
“Abus d’images,” op. cit., p. 24.↩︎
Les Genres du cinéma, op. cit., p. 5.↩︎