The anthology’s centerpiece (Best Commissioned Film) comes from PBS and is a set of vignettes about loneliness. In their own words, five people tell of how, exactly, they feel lonely, and we see interpretations of their stories. The people are chosen from a variety of ethnic backgrounds—God bless PBS!—and their voices are candid and unassuming. The first is an Hispanic man from New York who made and lost a fortune, and learned to find peace by rejecting much of the material world. Next is an easily-distracted white carpenter who simply likes being alone, to think, to solve his problems, to fix things. The Asian computer worker goes to work, comes home, then goes to work again, and when the dread of being home alone becomes too much, she takes up graffiti. The black woman from Harlem talks about feeling lonely in crowded houses and crowded places. Growing up in an enormous family without enough room and in an environment that had no patience for fear or weakness, nothing made her feel more alien to herself than the presence of others. (I recall an exchange from “The Thin Red Line:” “Do you ever get lonely, Sarge?” “Only around people.”)
The artist himself tells of how he grew up and spent most of his adult life travelling from country to country. The final vignette is no less than Milos Forman, director of “Amadeus” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” telling of his relationship with a dog, writer’s block, and a big old house. The pictures look drawn by hand but are animated by computer. The piece includes how exactly this is accomplished, showing us a pair of animators doodling everything by hand on electronic tablets and watching their handiwork appearing on screen. The result is the best kind of computer-aided drawing: very evocative and human. The artist’s connective narration may be a bit wordy and “duh!” unnecessary, but he has a warmth to him that is pleasant, calling to mind a grandfather in a big comfy chair.
I’m pretty sure that JibJab’s Bush and Kerry puppets were intended, by whoever assembled this particular anthology, to wrap things up. A perfect ending. Every piece has a title card: what prize it won, its country of origin, and who made it. But at my screening, after JibJab, there was a brief digital blur, no title card, and then began the devastatingly brilliant “Son of Satan,” based on the story by Charles Bukowski, winner of the Best First/Student Film. Did the folks at the museum tack it on for fun? I’m not sure.
In it, we follow the grotesquely-pimpled boy narrator and his two equally disgusting cohorts as they beat a neighborhood boy within an inch of his life. Why do they do this? To fight boredom. What does the narrator get for his troubles? He suffers retribution from his towering ogre of a father. My wife hated it, but as it reached its whirlwind climax, set to the Adagio from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique (you know, the one from “The Man Who Wasn’t There”), I was carried away. There’s something so universal and inescapable about the barbarity of these characters. It’s the same sort of beauty-at-the-way-things-are feeling you get from watching a good, unsentimental documentary about animals in the wild. Voiced with gallows humor, the whole mess looks like it was drawn by teenage boys on brown paper bags when they should have been taking notes during geography class.
Finished Tuesday, September 6th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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