So Crumb stands apart from his other work, and from most other documentaries about artists as well. And since Crumb, he’s made only fiction films, working with comic-book writer Daniel Clowes on Ghost World (2001) and Art School Confidential (2006) and directing Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa (2003). Prior to Crumb, he made documentaries on musical subjects - blues artist Howard Armstrong in Louie Bluie (1985) and a history of Hawaiian music in A Family Named Moe (a film so obscure that I haven’t even been able to find a date for it). Zwigoff was a member of Crumb’s short-lived blues band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and a fellow collector of rare twenties and thirties blues and jazz records. The creation of such a complex weave, while proceeding so logically and fluidly, without any sense of shifting gears, is one of its outstanding achievements. It’s a truthful film and a troubling one, and the highly skillful way in which it’s structured and focused - oscillating between different periods in Crumb’s life, from East Coast to West Coast, from biography to commentary, among family, colleagues, and critics - which Zwigoff says producer Lynn O’Donnell helped him to achieve, has a great deal to do with its success. It’s worth adding that he was in therapy for part of that time, which surely had an impact on the film’s searching thoughtfulness and on Zwigoff’s own investment in the material. An old friend of Robert Crumb’s, Terry Zwigoff shot the movie over six years and edited it over three, and the multifaceted density and sometimes disturbing nature of what he has to show and say over two hours seems partly a function of the amount of time he had to mull it over. In fact, Crumb is all these things, with a generous amount of thoughtful art criticism thrown in as well. But what kind? A documentary portrait of a comic-book artist, musician, and nerdy outsider? A personal film essay? A cultural study? An account of family dysfunction and sexual obsession? Or maybe just a meditation on what it means to be an American male artist - specifically, one so traumatized by his adolescence that he has never found a way of fully growing past it. Now that Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb is about fifteen years old, it seems pretty safe to say that it has evolved from being a potential classic to actually becoming one. This is the second of my essays about Terry Zwigoff’s documentary for the first one, written 15 years earlier, go here. Written in 2010 for Criterion’s DVD and Blu-Ray.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |