Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse’ Review: ‘Maus’ Cartoonist Grapples with the Weight of His Most Seminal Work
From his father, a Holocaust survivor, cartoonist Art Spiegelman learned how to best utilize the limited space in a suitcase, knowledge that he then applied to his hand-drawn panels, where information has to be conveyed in a concise manner. An eminence in the realm of comics, Spiegelman is best known for “Maus,” the two-volume graphic novel about the Shoah — where the Nazis are depicted as cats and the Jews mice — based mostly on his dad’s firsthand recollections and Spiegelman’s need to grapple with the trauma he inherited from both of his parents. The subsequent, almost inescapable acclaim for “Maus” would in turn become another source of anguish for Spiegelman.
From co-directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” is a linear account of how his career in comics evolved from underground publications to mainstream recognition. Constructed from talking-head conversations with Spiegelman and his friends and family, the standard biographical piece doubles as a history of how the medium transitioned from being perceived largely as a vehicle for humor into one suitable for stories of all tones and magnitudes — a shift in which “Maus” played an important role.
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A charismatic speaker who intersperses dry and often self-deprecating humor as he shares details of the events and people that shaped him, Spiegelman oscillates between delight and tragedy. He just as vividly remembers the specific issue of Mad Magazine, one parodying Life Magazine, that ignited his fascination for drawn storytelling, as the atmosphere and emotions that plagued him on the day his mother committed suicide (an event that also inspired another deeply personal comic, “The Prisoner on the Hell Planet.”) Similarly, the vexing relationship with his father, Vladek Spiegelman, constituted the foundation for his desire to understand the suffering he underwent in the concentration camp. Perhaps sharing the burden of the unthinkable hardships could bring them closer.
What his extensive on-camera chats with Bernstein and Dolin reveal is the inextricable bond between his innermost pain and frustrations and what he crafts on the page, the latter birthed as a manifestation of the former. In varying degrees of personal proximity, Spiegelman’s body of work seems comprised mostly of autobiographical explorations. As he narrates each cumulative step that led him to a successful professional life, pivotal players are brought into the fold, including underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and Spiegelman’s talented wife Françoise Mouly, an editor at the New Yorker.
Those who know him and his process intimately confirm the functional neuroticism that drives Spiegelman, which has always yielded deliberately piercing commentary on the world as it exists, in all its glory and turmoil (more of the latter in his comics). Tacitly, the filmmakers allow Spiegelman to pay homage to his heroes and contemporaries by contextualizing his own output as part of a community or a “tribe” with similar views on what comics could be, rather than portraying him as an isolated genius.
Among the interviewees, film critic J. Hoberman, who met Spiegelman when they were both young, likens his approach to comics to the way Jean-Luc Godard thought of cinema: as an artform he’d studied so granularly that he intended to deconstruct and examine it to its most abstract essence. The recounting of Spiegelman’s life and career makes clear that cinema always occupied a prime place in the periphery of his practice, particularly through his friendship with New York experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, the father of Azazel Jacobs (“His Three Daughters”) — both of whom appear briefly.
Considering how groundbreaking Spiegelman was in his field, as well as the interdisciplinary connections present in his path, one might hope that a tribute to his transgressive oeuvre would take more formal risks. Alas, while the comics themselves have prominence on-screen in their static form, the doc remains a proficient, engaging portrait, but an unadventurous one. Of the many thorny subjects at hand, Spiegelman’s conflicted sentiment about attaining fame via a story that looks into the darkest human abyss feel profoundly honest. Unfortunately, “Maus” has never lost relevance, and that means it continues to loom over Spiegelman as an unsurmountable, career-defining masterpiece.
Late in the doc, the artist embraces how timely that work remains as an anti-fascist monument to historical memory in the face of the book-banning Trump administration, whose policies — including the mass deportation of those deemed undesirable — chillingly mimic those in Nazi Germany during World War II. Furthermore, as a Jewish man with a direct connection to the horrors that the Nazi regime inflicted on millions of people, Spiegelman recently collaborated with author Joe Sacco on a three-page comic about the alarming situation in Gaza. Through it all, Spiegelman remains motivated by the realization that there’s no end in sight for the kind of personal and collective trauma that has fueled his work thus far.
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