Tonight Arte broadcasts “The Immigrant”, the tune of James Gray with Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix. An opportunity to immerse yourself in four films and a series in a genre that spans New York City from 1900 to 1920. A setting where hope triumphs…or misery.
A black from 2013 The immigrant, searing and intimate social melodrama, closer to Hector Malot than to Shakespeare, in which James Gray does not want to give a picturesque character to the New York background, despite a patina of authenticity. Its brief vision of a street on the Lower East Side is adorned in a sepia brown magnified by cinematographer Darius Khondji, which confines itself to claustrophobic, sometimes underground settings. New York in the 1920s is never a space of freedom or emancipation except, doubtfully, at the end. What about the fictions that preceded Gray’s film?
“Rag Time” (1981)
Elizabeth McGovern and Mandy Patinkin in “Ragtime” by Milos Forman.
Dino De Laurentiis Company/Sunley Productions Ltd.
Milos Forman recovers a project entrusted to Robert Altman and draws an admirable fresco from the novel by EL Doctorow. With extreme meticulousness in his reconstruction of New York in the 1900s, the Czech filmmaker never falls into the trap of academicism, skilfully interweaving several narrative threads, infusing a dose of humor into the most dramatic situations, rejecting any Manichaeism. The tragic revolt of an African American victim of racism and the emancipation of a woman from a predestined destiny form the beating heart of this underrated work, which sees the last appearance on the screen by James Cagney.
“Once Upon a Time in America” (1984)
Manhattan Bridge in Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in America’.
Warner Bros
Unlike The Forman, Sergio Leone’s testamentary and Proustian masterpiece has never known purgatory – at least among European audiences, the film, released in a looted version, was a flop in the United States. As wistful as Gray, but in an entirely different way, Leone uses 1920s New York, sumptuously recreated on location, as a character in its own right. Theater of friendships exalted then betrayed by Noodles/Robert De Niro, the Lower East Side, revealed by an unforgettable tracking shot, evolves according to the times; teeming with life in the interwar period, resembling the emotional wasteland of its hero thirty years later.
“Ellis Island, the gates of hope” (1984)
Richard Burton and Faye Dunaway in “Ellis Island, Doors to Hope”, by Jerry London.
CBS/Telepictures Productions
The starting point – geographical and temporal – of this popular 80s miniseries by Jerry London (Shogun), it’s the same as in Gray’s film. Consider New York’s Ellis Island, through which millions of immigrants passed when they arrived in the United States. Here, two Irish sisters, a handsome Italian boy and a Russian Jewish musician unite their contrasted destinies in 1910s and 1920s Manhattan. TV drama obliges, hope triumphs over adversity. In a believably recreated New York in Shepperton’s London studios, Faye Dunaway stands next to Richard Burton, who was to disappear shortly after filming wrapped.
“King Kong” (2005)
“King Kong”, by Peter Jackson (2005).
Universal images
This is 1930s New York; that of the Great Depression, which frames the long introduction and epilogue of this blockbuster remake of an adventure and horror masterpiece. Again, the chrome version of New York is not filmed in New York…but on sprawling movie sets located in Wellington Bay, New Zealand. With the care we know him, Peter Jackson, nourished by countless archival documents, has created a Manhattan overlooking Broadway that is more real than real. However, only the close-ups of the buildings that appear on screen were built for the occasion, the rest of the buildings were subjected to special effects.
“The Great Gatsby” (2013)
The New York of the 30s, in “The Great Gatsby”, by Baz Luhrmann.
Warner Bros./Bazmark Films/Red Wagon Productions
Far from the almost stripped down lavish decor and very Kennedy Long Island vibe shot in the Gatsby Directed in 1974 by Jack Clayton, with Robert Redford in the title role, Baz Luhrmann created a Roaring Twenties Manhattan that is flashy, whimsical and clippesque. The metropolis of immigrants and the poor, but also that of artists, disappears in this visual fantasy on which the eye struggles to rest. And, as if the Big Apple no longer inspired the creators, the Australian director takes Leonardo DiCaprio and his partners to the Fox studios in Sydney, where New York and its surroundings are rebuilt.
I have
St the immigrant, by James Gray, Sunday on Arte at 8:55pm
