He would often be spotted in “jam sessions” among other notable artists such as S. Robert Crumb is an American cartoonist who became a bit of a counterculture hero after his line of “Zap Comix” propelled his name and notoriety throughout the hippie, commune movement’s origins in the late 1960’s.
John Anderson is a critic for Variety and Newsday and a frequent contributor to The New York Times.Confessions: unknown director, written by Robert CrumbĬrumb: directed by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, Art School Confidential, Bad Santa) Most importantly, Crumb leaves us convinced that there's nothing accidental or offhanded about great art, and that R. Zwigoff, too, maintains a hands-off policy his voice can be heard a few times, pursuing a question, but there are virtually no intertitles, and no narration, save for that provided by Crumb himself.Ĭrumb is a purist's movie, a successfully formalist exercise, as much a defense of "values" (artistic, not "family") as it is a tribute to the Daumier of hippiedom. No herky-jerky (and by definition hammy) handheld camera techniques for her, but rather a clean, declarative perspective that reveals all and never distracts. The impact of Maryse Alberti's cinematography cannot be overstated either.
Snoid or Angelfood McSpade with lofty regard to think of the film as a singular achievement-is its take on art. But what makes it an "important" film-and you don't have to consider Crumb's Mr. As a psychological study, Crumb is a smorgasbord of tics, twists and spasms. Yes, the film is insightful about family life in 1950s America: how post-war reality flattened the distorted/distorting dreams of financial and moral prosperity, and deflated Big America idealism in light of the tacky facts of middle-class life (despite the Leave It to Beaver image promoted by television). To try and locate gravitas in Crumb by avoiding the fact that it is a film about creativity is to miss the point entirely. Crumb's case-and his case only-the result was not just a dysfunctional human, but a functioning artist. All the Crumbs were formed in the same domestic crucible (kept roiling by the late and apparently tyrannical Charles Crumb Sr.) but in R. They illustrate, with a certain amount of ancillary dread, how Robert Crumb's genius is something like a cosmic/comic/psychic mutation. The brothers, and their mother too, are all morbidly fascinating people, but they are not included by Zwigoff in the film for their freak-show qualities. Narratively, Crumb is less a story than it is an olde curiosity shoppe of neuroses and creative impulses-or rather, impulses that lead to creativity-and features a roster of characters too odd for fiction: the touchingly damaged Charles Crumb, for instance, whose own comic-book genius is such a revelation or Maxon Crumb, the less endearing but no less demented brother, whose practices of self-mortification suggest a deeply troubled soul. But Crumb, throughout, maintains an acknowledgement of-and indifference to-his own peculiarities, and for that becomes an object of our affections.
The women who know Crumb best cheerily dub him a sexual deviant. It was a sensation when first released, partly because of its audacious regard of so-called pop art as something for the ages: Critic Robert Hughes, famously, compares Robert Crumb to Bruegel. Alternately intimate and objective, it portrays a man who whines, giggles and kvetches his way through two hours of the most revealing nonfiction cinema ever produced. Crumb-as open wound and downbeat prankster, Crumb has to be considered now the Birth of a Nation of nerd chic. One of the more astute films in any genre to deal with the creative process, Crumb is probably also the first film to posit a counter-cultural icon as the product of post-traumatic stress disorder.Ī portrait of the artist-underground comix star R.
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Proof that cranky, banjo-playing misanthropes can be movie heroes, Crumb (1994) is a perfect synthesis of character, access and director Terry Zwigoff's eloquent invisibility.
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