(Jett is a Juror at this year’s Nashville Film Festival, (April 16th-23rd); he’ll be updating ‘The Film Talk’ throughout the Fest with thoughts on films seen both in and out of competition – as always Spoilers Ahoy)

- – -

I Am So Proud of You / By Don Hertzfeldt

Normally.

Normally.

Normally I wait a couple of days after seeing a film before commenting on it – letting it digest, you know.  But I find myself with fierce urgency typing this – so compelled am I to tell you what I’ve just seen.  You don’t see two good films in a day, man.  I don’t see one good film in a month it seems – and I see everything.

So today – to see two extraordinary – remarkable – films requires an exclamation point at the end of this sentence, !

First – ‘I Am So Proud of You’:  It’s everything Benjamin Button wanted to be – an extraordinary meditation on life, childhood, aging, futility and the search for meaning.  Fusing the work of artists like Guy Maddin, David Lynch and Crispin Glover, animator Don Hertzfeldt has created a masterwork.

Watching this twenty-two minute life story of stick-figure, ‘Bill’, is to see someone in complete control of their medium.  It’s hysterically funny, whimsical, macabre, horrifying, sentimental, mawkish, chilling, insightful and sublime – all at the same moment.

Make the time to see this picture – if you can’t see it at the Fest then put it on your queue, your download in-box, your phone insta-list – whatever, whatever you use to view films – make a note and see it.

- – -

‘I Am so Proud of You’ screens as part of the ‘Cartoons for Grownups’ program: Saturday, April 18th at 9:30pm and Tuesday, April 21st at 9:30pm.

Slaves / Directed by David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn

While ‘I Am So Proud of You’ uses a vast array of cinematic tricks and grammar to produce intense emotional effects in the viewer, ‘Slaves’ uses one very simple technique at the start and end to completely enwrap you in a story.

I say story – but that’s not right – let’s call it for what it is – the human condition.  This condition being the tendency we have to treat others in ways different than we would like to be treated – in short it’s 2009 and we allow slavery.

There are slaves here – just a plane ride away.

Does that bother you? Yes?  Well what are you going to do about it?  Anything?

In ‘Slaves’ we hear an audio recording of two escaped slaves giving a history – this audio interview has been animated – a method of film making very similar to what we see in ‘Waltz with Bashir’ – but with an important difference.

The audio in this film isn’t polished as in ‘Bashir’; we hear the interviewers having problems with recording equipment, futzing around with levels, bumping the mic, etc.  By letting us hear these technical problems at the start as well as at the end of the film, and by including other bits of business commercial cinema normally cut out such as sneezes and coughs our ‘cinematic minds’ are conditioned to believe everything we hear – in short – we accept we are witness to a truth.

This is motion-picture manipulation at its most elegant, most powerful and most justified – the same exhortation I used above for for ‘I Am So Proud of You’ applies to ‘Slaves’ -  I can’t think of two more important and urgent pictures to watch right now.

‘Slaves’ screens as part of the ‘Animating History / Animating Reality’ program: Saturday, April 18th at 07:00 PM and Monday, April 20th at 03:15 PM.

- – -

An additional note: watching these films am struck again by the absurdity of categories for films – ‘animated movies’ – why?  ‘Documentaries’ – why? In an age in which in the Western world everyone has a video camera in their pocket, the need for ‘silos’ for different kinds of pictures becomes not just otiose but unhelpful – we’re at the beginning of an explosion of new types of moving pictures – why compartmentalise this new work?; (additional and perhaps contradictory thoughts on the subject can be found in this post).