April 2 movie: Monster Road. What a great movie! And I'm not just saying that because producer Jim Haverkamp is a former WXDU DJ and also used to live in the apartment above Georg's.
A bunch of us went to see Monster Road, a documentary about animator Bruce Bickford, at the Full Frame (formerly Doubletake) Documentary Film Festival. It had already won a couple of awards, including Best Documentary at Slamdance. Go Jim! It's well-deserved, and I hope they win something at Full Frame too.
The movie spends a lot of time on the relationship between Bickford and his father George Bickford, a retired space engineer who suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer's and is at least as interesting as his son. It has a great level of energy and really keeps the momentum going, with help from a score by local band Shark Quest (which, I read, will be released by Merge sometime this year). Unfortunately, the screening began at 11 pm. Which is about my bedtime, even on a weekend. I made a valiant attempt to stay with it, but still dozed off and missed about the last 20 minutes. At least I didn't drool on the people sitting next to me.
I hope they release it on video someday so I can see the end. I missed the part where Bickford discussed his childhood fantasy of drowning the Speedy Alka-Seltzer Man in a well. (Or maybe Georg was having me on about that bit.)
Over the weekend I had interesting conversations with both Lisa and Georg about the fantastical, compelling, and somehow immature nature of Bickford's work. Georg pointed out that this is a characteristic of a lot of "outsider" art. Because a lot of outsider artists are like Bickford: a solitary guy, driven to create, with no training, no compensation, no feedback, no audience. Without outside input the work is totally internal, totally personal, and largely unchanging. The work doesn't grow or evolve; it simply expresses (and feeds) the artist's obsessions.
I think this is why a lot of artists don't like the term "outsider art." Because it conjures up that image of a crazy man in a basement airing his personal demons by taking pictures of clay, or building whirly-gigs, or painting icons, or whatever. Some people in the art car community use the term, and we're certainly well outside the bounds of mainstream art. There are a few art car drivers who have that air of mania about them. But most art car people I've met are just, I don't know, people with decorated cars. Seems like a big difference to me.
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charo was telling me that a friend of hers who also saw the screening of 'monster road' afterwards complained that bruce was "too depressed" for her to really enjoy the movie.
charo and i were aghast. no way was bruce depressed! he seemed full of life, full of energy, full of ideas, and full of compassion for his father.
i think she got the idea that he was depressed because, in her words, the art was "weird" and the art was disturbing.
oh man, i was dying to see that! a couple ngihts ago i caught that show on the chapel hill channel that talks about movies and they were interviewing jim and showed the first few minutes of monster road--it looked really neat. they also showed the hot dog man, and i was kicking myself for not getting to the vcr in time to tape it.
Yeah, he was way too manic to be depressed. Though he did come off as extremely dark and embittered. Maybe that's what Charlotte's friend couldn't handle.
Why would anyone who would write Bruce Bickford's animation off as too weird even go to the movie in the first place?
i thought the soundtrack was one of the major highlights of the film. i haven't been following shark quest recently, and i need to be-- it was some of the best, most sophisticated indy film soundtrack music i've ever heard.