Short of the Week: a student film by James Gray
American filmmaker James Gray has always been able to do interesting things with genre frameworks from the very beginning of his directorial career. His debut feature, a crime drama called Little Odessa, not only won the Silver Lion at Venice but was also lauded by none other than the notable French New Wave auteur Claude Chabrol. Since then, Gray has made numerous impressive additions to his filmography that have earned widespread acclaim.
After generating a lot of conversation about his 2019 sci-fi project Ad Astra, Gray returned last year with a coming-of-age film. Titled Armageddon Time, it draws upon the director’s experiences of growing up in New York City during the 1980s. Although Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans was the 2022 coming-of-age work that received the majority of the critical attention, Gray’s movie is arguably more interesting because it deviates from formulaic nostalgia and paints a more complex portrait of contemporary sociocultural conflicts.
For this edition of Short of the Week, we have decided to highlight the film that set the ball rolling for Gray as he embarked on his journey as a filmmaker. Made during his time at the University of Southern California’s film school, Cowboys and Angels is a surprisingly powerful work that feels more mature than a student project. Interestingly, the future director ended up at USC by mistake while trying to follow in the footsteps of Francis Ford Coppola.
In an interview with Film Comment, Gray revealed: “You know what happened, I got a scholarship for USC, but I didn’t want to go. I made a huge mistake—the result of being a moron. I thought that Francis Ford Coppola, who was my hero, had gone to USC when he actually went to UCLA. But I wanted to be like ‘that kind of guy’ and USC gave me the money, so I went there and set up shop. But I always wanted to move back. But New York has changed, it’s just going to be a place for zillionaires. They pushed me out, I don’t live here anymore.”
Film school proved to be a vital experience for Gray, who managed to land an agent because of the strength of Cowboys and Angels. Heavily influenced by the aesthetic elements of the New Hollywood movement, the film revolves around a private investigator who is tasked with finding a runaway 16-year-old girl working at a strip club. Despite his formal training at USC, Gray was always cautious about the impact of film theory on his creativity.
The director explained: “I found film theory both liberating and terrifying. It’s incredible if you’re writing about cinema. It’s horrible if you have to create it because it says you’re meaningless in the process as a creative person… You have to learn from it and then forget it. But as a tool for writing about movies, it’s incredible. And actually, as a tool for seeing the world, it’s incredible. One of the true breakthroughs in thinking—it’s been a long time, but I remember they made us read something in school by Louis Althusser. One of the weirdest guys of all time, literally a murderer!”
Although it’s obviously not as polished as some of his later efforts, Cowboys and Angels demonstrates that Gray always had a strong command over the visual language. Thematically indebted to Arthur Penn’s pulpy 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, Gray’s early work rises above the usual limitations of student films to create a stylised cinematic atmosphere as well as dramatic conflict.
Watch the film below.
