![]() The exploration of his friend’s vices served as a vessel of reflection for the director and helped quell his own personal struggles with mental health. Zwigoff was lucky to know Crumb so closely. Some people shudder at the thought of revealing intimate details of their lives to familiar faces, let alone a stranger with a camera. Stories like these are difficult to capture. The film also touches on the neurotic, unhinged presence of his mother and her debilitating addiction to amphetamines. There are many allusions to his dysfunctional upbringing, captained by a merciless tyrant of a father known to beat his children and belittle them whenever the opportunity arose. Crumb, 1969Ĭrumb is an unforgettable documentary and one of the strangest, most haunting films ever made. ![]() He slowly dissects the lives of his unusual subjects with patient, sincere empathy. It unravels logically with a malleable, subjective mode of storytelling that jukes and jumps without ever derailing the endearing narrative. Zwigoff’s terrifically complicated film careens between different periods of Crumb’s life, from the West coast to the East, from biography to analysis, from art to humanity. Photographs of their past are masked by a seemingly normal façade that works hard to conceal the family’s grim secrets. Art was undoubtedly a form of therapy that rescued Crumb from a miserable fate.ĭirected by the artist’s longtime friend Terry Zwigoff, the story mainly observes his familial relationships, primarily concerning his brothers Max and Charles, along with glimpses of their dangerously aloof parents. He also constantly battled to retain his sanity, damaged by a slew of horrific childhood traumas. ![]() Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Keep on Truckin‘, and even designed the cover art for Janis Joplin’s “Cheap Thrills” album. He created an underground series called Zap Comix, produced acclaimed cartoon strips like Mr. Consider the life of artist Robert Crumb, known for his sexually provocative, darkly comedic panels of the 1960’s counterculture depicting popular Americana with unforgiving, acid-bent satire. The results can make them seem valiantly heroic or dreadfully insane. These broken souls adapt to survive in spectacular ways, finding new means to channel their pain and suffering. It’s a tragic truth that troubled minds often yield the most incredible wonders. But sometimes when I’m drawing I feel suicidal too.” ![]() I start feeling really depressed, suicidal. Several of the night shots (including the humorous midnight walk at the end) show artifacting, and HVE has attempted to smoothen these defects without lessening the documentary texture of the visuals.“If I don’t draw for a while I get really crazy. The nature of that format often means there's visible grain, weak colour densities, and average mono sound. Some liner notes regarding the film's history would have been helpful, and the sparse technical info leads us to assume the print source is a generic 16mm print. The brief introspections include his early years as an illustrator, the success of Fritz the Cat (with film clips), and his female relationships, with wife Aline being his most idealized, and successful. "Confessions" is a bare-bones disc, with no special features other than an effectively animated main menu, with multiple characters from Crumb's dossier spewing from his exploding head, and Perry Como singing "Magic Moments." That tone is pretty consistent throughout the doc, with Crumb and his wife essentially inviting us into their home (after a short musical performance from their doorstep). Though Terry Zwigoff''s outstanding 1996 documentary "Crumb" pretty much delved into every facet of the artist's life, this briskly-paced BBC doc, written by Crumb eleven years earlier, is more lighthearted and acts as an intro chapter to the feature-length doc. Languages: English (Mono) / English SubtitlesĤ page colour booklet, folding out to large cover poster
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