On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the book Rats (1986), Art Spiegelman’s wife Françoise Mouly told him, “Next Ratsyour greatest achievement may not be making it into a movie. “
Today, more than a decade after those words, we have a movie. Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Doering, Art Spiegelman: Disaster is my muse (2024) is a biodoc rather than a strict adaptation RatsSpiegelman’s memoir, created a comic based on his father’s experiences at Auschwitz. Not that there’s that big of a difference.
“I felt like there was a 5,000-pound rat breathing down my neck,” Spiegelman said in the film, which premiered at New York’s DOC Film Festival last month. “If I have descendants, it is through this work that I am now proud of what I have done, but when I made it I had no expectation that it would be discovered while I was alive.”
The film is set to be released early next year and will air later on PBS, a dutiful piece of public television. Yet Spiegelman’s biography and his imagination are extraordinary.
A cartoon depicts Jews as mice and Germans as cats, which may explain why Rats Every publisher Spiegelman approached rejected the book, even Pantheon, which finally agreed to publish it after he tried again.
when Rats On the bestseller list, new york times The categorization of this memoir as a novel may be due to the term “graphic novel,” which indiscriminately refers to book-length comics. Spiegelman said in a letter to the publication that if he had known the book was fiction, he would not have spent so many years researching it.
Molly Bernstein and Philip Dollin’s documentary is only 98 minutes long and should have been longer. For example, we never learn that Spiegelman is the creator of the cheeky Garbage Pail Kids, cards that are intended to be offensive in the spirit of mad magazine In sweet commercial cabbage childhood.
As with most art films, the images are shot too briefly.
However, the documentary will introduce viewers to Spiegelman’s early work, situating his stories and images within the history of comics. Film critic J. Hoberman, who knew Spiegelman from his days smoking pot at what is now the State University of New York at Binghamton, commented in the film on the artist’s “Godardian” A portfolio of iconic stories and reviews.
“He was very good at comics of sequential images, but he was also very good at single images—like poetry,” says Joe Sacco. His comics in Bosnia, Palestine, and Gaza blend journalism with the stark visual detail of monochrome One body. Documentary. “A single image can be used to trigger an emotion or thought, or it can be used to really upset people, and sometimes it’s the same thing.”
Many of these images ended up on the cover of the magazine new yorkerhis wife Mouly has been arts editor since 1993. One of the photos depicts a concentration camp prisoner in a striped suit lying on the ground holding an Oscar statuette (after the sentimental 1997 film life is beautiful Won the Authentic in 1999), with a guard tower in the background. Another is a post-9/11 scene, with the Twin Towers rising like tall, dark tombstones against a dark sky. It was a succinct response to the adage that “art is impossible” in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Spiegelman’s short-lived comic series published in German newspapers Die Zeit and the London Review of Books, in the shadow of no towerproving that humor is possible.
other new yorker A 1993 Valentine’s Day cover referenced race riots between black Americans and Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. “I was just doodling and I was drawing this guy with a monocle, Eustace Tilley, and I said ‘I wonder what he would look like if he were Jewish.'” I just gave He put on a Hasidic hat and a beard,” Spiegelman recalled in the film, “and before I knew it, he was kissing this West Indian African-American woman, and that was my Valentine [Day] cover. Why didn’t they just kiss and make up? Man, does this upset people. “
Spiegelman wrote at the time that the comic was “intentionally naive.” “But maybe once a year, even for just a moment, close your eyes, transcend the tragic complexities of modern life, and imagine that ‘all you need is love’ might actually be true.”
Even more infamous is the cover Spiegelman drew in 1999, when Bronx Street Crimes Unit police officers shot Amadou Diallo, an African vendor trying to enter his home. Diallo reached into his pocket and was shot 41 times. Spiegelman painted a stocky military officer, smiling and poised, in black silhouette on an amusement park bleacher. Then-NYPD Commissioner Howard Safire condemned Spiegelman’s illustration as “irresponsible.”
Irresponsible. Satirists look forward to these stings. “I swore I would never be Eli Wiesel in a comic book,” Spiegelman said in a 2011 interview. He also told me, “New York is my Israel.”
In a phone call after the documentary premiered at New York City Hall, Spiegelman explained Wiesel’s comments that might make him more of an enemy than a person. new yorker cover.
Wiesel “was responsible for a lot of things, including finally popularizing the word ‘Holocaust.’ There’s a very practical word called genocide that was invented by a Jew during World War II,” he told me.
“It’s part of putting religious baggage on top of more pressing human baggage,” he continued.
“That’s it, and also the go-to person for anything to do with the Holocaust. I don’t want to be that person.”
His next subject suggests he won’t. After the documentary premiered, Spiegelman told the sold-out audience during a Q&A that his next comic would be about Gaza with Joe Sacco. He was cautious about providing any details about a project that he believed would be difficult to find a publisher in the United States.
“Either I finish this thing or I die. I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match go through my head,” he said. “My superego says, ‘If you want to live with yourself, you have to do this,’ and my id says, ‘Who wants to be sad? [of] Canceled by everyone on earth? “”
Somehow no one confuses him with Elie Wiesel.
