As our portrait film makes clear, James Gray has an abiding passion for, and a broad knowledge of, the fine arts. In 2022, he worked this into an autobiographical narrative, following in the tradition of the bildungsroman novel epitomized by James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
     The subject comes up three times in the film. In the first scene below, the protagonist takes a trip to the Guggenheim Museum of Art and has delusions of grandeur about both his insights and his abilities. He also raises the topic after going with his family to watch a movie, and the idea is resisted by his parents in one of Gray's many nighttime car scenes. 
     In the third extract below, the protagonist' budding interest in art history is connected, more intriguingly, to a family history that echoes Gray's own. Gray's grandparents were Jewish denizens of a Russian-speaking area in what is now Ukraine. In our portrait film, he described internalizing Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels almost from birth. The father in Little Odessa (1994) similarly claims to have read Crime and Punishment (1866) to his 2-year-old-son.
     Gray's films powerfully develop this double consciousness. It is particularly important, if slightly displaced, in The Immigrant (2013), where Ewa Cybulska has memories as traumatic as those recounted in Armageddon Time. It is clear from context that they were Polish partisans killed by German authorities during the Upper Silesian Uprisings of 1921. Whether the Russian Jewish Grusinskys of We Own the Night (2007) were also refugees is left unclear, but we do learn that the protagonist played by Joaquin Phoenix goes by the assimilated name Bobbi Green.
     These themes are also present in the opening scene of Gray's first film Little Odessa (1994, second from bottom). Joshua emerges from the darkness listening to Russian music, while his brother Reuben sits alone watching a deteriorating print of the American Western Vengeance Valley (Richard Thorpe, 1951).
     Armageddon Time ends with the question of a different kind of cultural assimilation and Gray signals what is to come by including echoes of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin (1850), a predecessor and counterpart to the Grail quest narrative of Parsifal (1882), on the soundtrack.