EJE PRIMARIO EXTERIOR (HUECO)

The thought of Don Hertzfeldt not being able to make fi lms scares me. Hertzfeldt’s characters (those in Genre and Ah, L’Amour) are anguished souls simply longing to be accepted, to be loved, to be. Th e fi erce frankness of these violent emotions is legitimate.

Hertzfeldt’s work shares a strange sort of kinship with the writing of Hubert Selby Jr. (Th e Room and Requiem for a Dream) in its unearthing of the rage of existence and madness that creeps and crawls within us. Th ere are times when it howls to be unleashed upon the world, and times when it spurts out in a small shout, a dirty look or a middle fi nger. Some do it in a bar; some do it on a hockey rink; Don Hertzfeldt does it on a piece of paper.

Hertzfeldt has been drawing since he smashed Lacan’s mirror and fi rst took up image- making when he was 15. “I got a VHS camera that could shoot a hackneyed version of single frames, so I was able to teach myself some basics through high school.”

After high school, Hertzfeldt went to the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I wanted to be Stanley Kubrick like everyone else, but live action was very expensive to tackle, this was back when it was all 16 mm. but I realized I had unlimited, unsupervised access to their animation camera.”

For the next four years at university, Hertzfeldt made four ani-mation fi lms. “I carried on there with animating all my student

fi lms because you didn’t need to buy as much fi lm; and it was possible to make a movie that way with a really minimal crew.”

Oddly enough, Hertzfeldt went to fi lm school but ended up teaching himself animation; still, he maintains that school was very important to his development. “I’m not sure if my mov-ies would have been very good if I hadn’t gone to fi lm school.

Studying the guts and language of movies, the history and theory, focuses your fl ailing about into clearer ideas on the screen. You can’t make a movie if you only understand how to draw.”

Ah L’Amour (1995) was Hertzfeldt’s debut as an animator.

Hertzfeldt’s primitive and minimal black- and- white style is already recognizable in this short gag fi lm about a guy whose attempts to pick up a girl are met with continual violence. It’s not until the guy says that he has money that the girl fi nally accepts him.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the fi lm’s misogynistic leanings, Ah L’Amour was an instant cult hit. Th e fi lm was scooped up by the Spike and Mike’s traveling festival and screened across the US where it found sympathetic fans in horny young American men who knew all too well the bitter taste of rejection.

Th e success of Ah L’Amour started a trend that Hertzfeldt has maintained throughout his career: each successive short fi lm is funded from money made from the previous fi lm. “I’ve never lost money on a fi lm and have never had to have a traditional job, never had to do commercial work out of necessity.”

A major infl uence on Hertzfeldt’s approach to animation was Bill Plympton, arguably the most successful and famous inde-pendent animator in the world. “I saw Bill’s fi rst few shorts when I was 12 or 13 and yeah, it was invaluable to realize there was

somebody out there who’s regularly able to do this for a living, and do it on his own terms (and who doesn’t draw backgrounds either!). For a long time I think he’s been a guy that a lot of people have pointed to and said, ‘well if he’s fi gured out a way to do this, maybe I can too.’”

L’Amour funded Genre (1996), Hertzfeldt’s weakest fi lm, which follows a long tired line of self- refl exive fi lms (e.g. Duck Amuck, Koko the Clown) that depict a battle between the animator and his character. Th is time the character (a rabbit) is tossed into various genre fi lms. Although there are a few funny gags (for example, when the rabbit fi nds himself in a porn fi lm with his buddy), the fi lm quickly runs out of steam. “I was 19 when we made it, my second year in school, and was still following this kind of setup- gag- punchline formula. But, it was fun to make and at the time I was just excited to learn how to pull something off as long as 5 minutes.”

Lily and Jim (1997), a he- said/she- said story about a man and woman out on a blind date, represents another step forward in Hertzfeldt’s career. Th e minimal drawing style remains, but the drawings and storyline are more structured and fl eshed out, and Hertzfeldt’s fi lm school infl uence is also apparent. With echoes of Annie Hall, Lily and Jim is divided into two segments: in the black- and- white segment, each character talks about the date to an off - camera interviewer (or maybe it’s “us” the audience), while the actual date segment is shot with color.

Th e bulk of the fi lm is slow and awkward — some of this could be pinned on a young, inexperienced artist, but it also cleverly captures the often painful and tedious experience of dat-ing. Th roughout the date, the couple struggle to come up with

something to talk about. At one point, à la Annie Hall, thought bubbles reveal what they’re really thinking during their conversa-tion. In the end, despite having a relatively lame date (aside from Jim having to be taken to the hospital after he suff ers an allergic reaction to coff ee), Lily and Jim tell the audience/interviewer that they want to see each other again; however, their insecurities and false bravado ensure that it never happens. Th ey remain alone.

Lily and Jim revealed to audiences that there was more to Hertzfeldt than just infantile gag fi lms, and Hertzfeldt remains happy with the fi lm. “Th is was a real lucky match of casting and on- the- fl y writing. I had the actors improvise a lot and they performed some miracles that we cleverly blended into my script.

Once that was all locked in and the dialogue was handed off to me in giant stacks of exposure sheets, it was one of the more boring projects to sit down with and draw every night.” In the end, Hertzfeldt fi gures he drew over ten thousand drawings for the fi lms! “I still have no idea how I was able to fully animate a 12- minute movie while going to school full time.”

Billy’s Balloon marked a return to Hertzfeldt’s earlier gag fi lms, but this time with a surrealist twist guaranteed to make every precious parent cringe: a young boy sits happily with a toy and red balloon, when suddenly the balloon comes alive and starts beating the shit out of the boy. Th is continues for the entire fi lm until we see other kids being tortured by their balloons.

Billy’s Balloon shouldn’t work, but it does because, like an Ol’

Dirty Bastard song, the violence is so utterly absurd that you can’t help but laugh.

After the long process of making Lily and Jim, Hertzfeldt was happy to produce a relatively fast and light fi lm. “I remember it

partially coming out of a dream about a boy in a fi eld who begins to fl y. I think I produced it relatively fast, maybe in nine months.

I originally had a dumb sort of punchline gag for the ending and quickly decided against it. Otherwise I think it was pretty straightforward and didn’t change drastically from start to fi nish.

With a dash of Monty Python and a whole lot of Hertzfeldt weirdness, the Oscar- nominated Rejected is a series of fake and very absurd rejected IDs and commercials. While the grue-some gags echo Billy’s Balloon and Ah L’amour, the freewheeling, experimental structure ultimately points towards some of the structures and themes of Hertzfeldt’s later fi lms. Rejected is less a series of ultra- violent gags then it is about a creator suff ering a mental meltdown (at one point the title card reads: “Don’s clear and steady downhill state continued. Soon he was completing commercial segments entirely with his left hand”). As the fi lm progresses, the structure and logic become increasingly frag-mented; humor and absurdity give way to fear as the characters flee their creator. The film ends with the artist’s papers and characters being destroyed.

Not surprisingly, the creative approach to Rejected was almost entirely experimental. “Maybe this was my Sgt. Pepper phase.

Chunks were swapped around, reanimated, dialogue scenes were animated without the dialogue having been written yet . . . it was also my fi rst time screwing around with in- camera eff ects. Th e sound work played the biggest role, with last- minute improvisa-tions, seemingly every other line being played backwards, more rewrites. I think almost every scene was thrown up against the wall, re- recorded and torn back down again a number of diff erent ways. It was a very strange but exciting way to work.”

With Th e Meaning of Life (2005), Hertzfeldt’s fi lms entered ambitious new territory. Th e fi lms became more epic in scope and experimental in tone and the violence and humor of the earlier fi lms are secondary outcomes for characters struggling with existence, identity and madness.

Th e Meaning of Life is unlike anything Hertzfeldt has made before: a personal, playful and poignant take on life. Starting with the evolution of man, Hertzfeldt takes us through a world of babbling humans, aliens and, fi nally, an alien father and son.

Th e creatures and their worlds come and go, but the thing that remains constant is the beauty and mystery of the stars and suns of the universe. Th e ultimate irony is that the eternal human question, “what is the meaning of life” cannot be answered in words.

Th e Meaning of Life took Hertzfeldt almost four years to make.

“I didn’t write the ending until I was two years into animating it, but other than that I think there was relatively little that changed from the fi rst ideas to the fi nished product. I was happy with the fi nished movie but not having a pliable structure that I could play around with and rewrite and shape as I went made it frustrating and very diffi cult to work on. Life’s too short to lock yourself up for that long working on something called Th e Meaning of Life.”

Everything Will Be Ok (2006) and I Am So Proud of You (2008) are two chapters from the same story (a third chapter is forthcom-ing). Both fi lms star Bill, a man with some serious personality disorder issues. Bill sees the world through small moving holes, and his many, fragmented social encounters reveal a man who is paranoid, obsessed, anxious and generally unable to connect with the world around him (even if he does occasionally see the beauty

of it). He becomes increasingly fragmented and disorientated

— death and nightmares haunt him. Finally, Bill goes to see a doctor, but medication only makes Bill’s perspective increasingly disorientated, nightmarish and illogical. Reality and fantasy blur to the point where Bill collapses into a nervous breakdown. On the brink of death, Bill eventually recovers. Eventually he returns to his normal life. Th rough all his pain, Bill never complains. He just goes on.

Everything Will Be Ok is a stunning piece of work that man-ages to off er an insightful, funny and painful perspective of a fucked- up human being, no longer able to make sense of or engage with the world around him. Hertzfeldt’s ingenious use of moving holes, reminiscent of silent fi lms, puts the viewer right behind the eyes of poor troubled Bill.

Hertzfeldt says that the roots of the trilogy start with a WWII story he once read about Nazis invading a town. “Th e protagonist is in a large group of people who are being marched through the city and across a bridge where they’re going to be shot. Th is man has lived in this town his entire life, but as he’s being marched off to die he notices details in the cobblestone streets he’s never seen before. He sees new things in the faces of the people around him, people he’s known for years. Th e air smells diff erent. Th e currents in the river look strange and new. Suddenly he’s seeing the world around him for the fi rst time through these new lenses and it’s disorienting and beautiful. It takes a horrible event sometimes to grab you by the shoulders and shake you, to wake you up.”

When I Am So Proud of You traveled North America in 2008, the following blurb served as promotion fodder:

“. . . a fucking masterpiece. I can’t even begin to articulate my thoughts about the fi lm but it just gave me shivers and I wasn’t able to attend the party after the screening. Just had to be alone. It had this eff ect on a number of other people here too . . . stunning, beautiful, tragic, absurd work.”

I wrote those words to Hertzfeldt in an e- mail a few hours after watching I Am So Proud of You. No animation fi lm has had such a potent and confl icting impact on me; the experience reminded me of reading the fi rst chapter of William Faulkner’s classic novel, Th e Sound and the Fury. I found the chapter infuriating, funny, confusing and exhausting, and it was only near the end of the chapter that I realized the story was being told by a character with some serious mental defects. Th e experience of watching I Am So Proud is similar. It’s a work that takes us out of our experience;

we walk in the shoes of a confl icted and sick man as he drifts through the fragments of his past and present.

“Bill’s been slapped in the face with something horrible and the world is looking very diff erent to him, sad and beautiful. It’s somebody facing death who hasn’t really lived yet. Th e routine things he’s used to doing are suddenly completely redundant.

You begin to see how death enriches life and gives everything its meaning. It’s the people who drift around wasting their time, weirdly assuming they’re going to live forever that are the depress-ing ones, to me at least.”

As diff erent as Hertzfeldt’s fi lms are, the underlying themes of madness, depression and fractured identity run through his entire body of work. “It’s something I’ve always been interested in. I love comedy of course; some of these fi lms exist for no other reason

than to make you laugh. On other projects it’s used more like the sugar you give to make the medicine go down easier. A friend once pointed out that the chain between all the fi lms, beneath the comedy, is ‘quiet dread’ . . . I’ve been called an existentialist more than once, in which case madness is probably just a character’s symptom.”

While Hertzfeldt is more interested in storytelling than in

“dumping emotional baggage” on viewers, he admits that process of animating the fi lms can be therapeutic. “You sit all alone for months and patiently build something bigger out of thousands of almost invisible movements (doesn’t that sound kind of tai chi or something?) and it’s very good to be forced to be alone with your thoughts, which animation requires in spades. Too few people are truly alone with their thoughts anymore.”

Hertzfeldt’s fi lms are also remarkable because of the way they’re made: aside from editing and sound mixing his fi lms digitally, Hertzfeldt uses no computers. With technology having advanced so far that animators can make quality work much quicker than at any other time in animation history, Hertzfeldt is content to take his time. In fact he contends that the “old” way is not necessarily diffi cult.

“Many people like to assume that because I shoot on fi lm and animate on paper I must be doing things ‘the hard way’, when really my last four movies would’ve been visually impossible to produce digitally, if not extremely diffi cult and much more expensive. Th ere are some things traditional cameras do much better than computers, and vice versa.”

Given the increased length of his fi lms it’s surprising to hear that Hertzfeldt isn’t that interested in making a feature fi lm. “No,