James Gray, a filmmaker who has eight films to his credit, seemingly has a romanticized view of cinema, or movies, to be precise.
While attending the Locarno Film Festival, where he is tipped for an honorary award, the director, whose latest movie Paper Tiger is also set to premiere, said movies have a striking similarity with dreaming.
“To me, movies are the most beautiful art form because they’re the closest thing we have to a dream… Your REM sleep is one and a half to two hours per night, if you’re lucky,” he said.
Gray also compared cinema with other forms of art – fine art and music, for example – and concluded the silver screen evolved stunningly quickly.
“The first full-length sound film is, I think, 1928. Between 1920 and 1933, you have in the first five years of the art form as we know it now, you have an ocean of masterpieces,” he noted.
For example, Gray shared that Fritz Lang’s Berlin-set mystery thriller, “M”, is what? a year and a half after the first full-length sound film.”
Further, the director shared that the astonishing speed of change in cinema is no accident.
“What does that tell you? What’s the gap between the cave paintings of Lascaux and perspective in 1482 or whatever it is?”
He continued, “In music, it takes a thousand years for the scale to develop the way it does. Why cinema so quickly?
Gray also shared that artists from other disciplines had long been striving to push their fields to the level of sophistication of cinema.
“Because when you look at Bosch’s cryptics or when you hear Des Nibelungen by Wagner, you see artists trying to get past that art form. They’re trying to get to cinema.”
“So what does that mean? It’s like a dream,” he noted.
By focusing on dreams, Gray shared the belief that shaped his view toward his films, in particular, and the cinema, in general.
“My view of cinema is I understand that there is a commercial context in which we all have to work.”
“I understand that it is for, I like to say, an audience, not the audience, but for me, what makes it beautiful is that it is the clearest window into somebody else’s consciousness, somebody else’s dream,” he said.
Meanwhile, Paper Tiger, Gray’s film, which will premiere at Locarno, starred Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson.
