1994 Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This movie chronicles the life and times of R. Crumb. Robert Crumb is the cartoonist/artist who drew Keep On Truckin', Fritz the Cat, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comix. Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife, and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind.
クラム, 克鲁伯, 크럼
Canada
USA
Romania
USAR
Canada
Romania
USA
Gotta say, one of the most fascinating films I've ever seen. After spending 2 intimate hours in the mind of Robert Crumb I still feel like there's so much more to know about him. Not to say I wasn't satisfied by the end, I definitely feel "full". This film starts off odd and just gets more twisted the more you learn about him, his family, and his perception of the world around him. But with that you grow a sense of understanding towards why he is the way he is, leaving you finding a weird sense of relatability. Much more to say, this is my new favorite documentary.
There comes a point in every man’s life where he has to decide which Crumb brother he is.
....damn.
Describing a Crumb comic about an incestuous family, one of his detractors says, "You sense that Crumb is getting off on it ... I think it has gone over the line from satire of a 1950s hygienic family in denial into something which is just Crumb producing pornography.” I completely agree, but where this person and I part company is in the implication that there is a dichotomy between satire (good) and pornography (bad), and that there is a line between the two that shouldn't be crossed.
"have you gotten criticism about the way you sometimes draw black people?"
"oh yeah, oh yeah... but it all came from white liberals."
"i have this... this hostility towards women, i admit it, it's out in the open, i have to put it out there."
"some people wonder if he doesn't exaggerate the size of his penis, which always appears awfully big in the comics. robert does not exaggerate anything. he is endowed with one of the biggest penises in the world."
the structure of this film is the key to it. it opens up with crumb speaking at an art school. here we are being shown crumb as an influential, important artistic voice. after about 20 minutes, the controversial…
Six years in the making, Crumb is one of the most honest portrayals of an artist that I've seen in a documentary — largely due to the personality of Robert Crumb himself. He discusses his desires and motivations without shame or censorship, even when it comes to some of his more controversial content and his feelings towards women (which I suppose could be called a love/hate relationship), and the same matter-of-fact delivery extends to the members of his immediate family too. Within society Crumb seems like an outcast or deviant, but against the backdrop of his family he appears to be the most normal one in the room, with some of the saddest moments in the film relating to his…
Me: h-
Robert Crumb: In case you haven’t noticed, I’m weird. I’m a weirdo. I don’t “fit in” and I don’t WANT to fit in. Have you ever seen me without this cartoon animal pornography? That’s weird.
We’re usually led to believe that dysfunction is conducive to artistry; the revelation here is that for every fucked up person who managed to channel their negative experiences into Creation there are 1000 more who could never come close to doing that. Luckily for R. Crumb, as mentioned by a woman in this film, he has the biggest penis in the world. Wow
If the psycho family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were geniuses and somehow resisted their impulses to rape, murder and abuse each other, this is pretty much the bunch you’d end up with, the most disturbing difference being that all of this is real. Jordan Peterson once said that this was the only film he’d ever seen to truly capture Freudian pathology, and as Oedipal and twisted as Crumb may be from the jump, I wasn’t quite sure what he meant at first, but then it dawned on me. The admissions of guilt here range from Robert Crumb confessing that he frequently masturbated to the image of Bugs Bunny throughout his adolescence, to his brother Maxon elaborating on his own…
I understand why this is celebrated as a good documentary. The talking points are interesting and the direction/treatment/coverage is cool.
But I don't understand how it is impossible to engage with this film without feeling visceral rage.
Watching Robert Crumb laugh while his brother talks about molesting women, him showing no remorse when his ex-girlfriend tried to hold him accountable for his actions, posing with women in a blatantly sexist photoshoot? No thank you!
Ya sure, I understand that this all fits within their family's context and their era more broadly.
But I don't understand why this movie doesn't go further in critiquing the harmful elements of his 'artwork / sexist behaviours & attitudes. The film seems very flippant and somewhat…
Terry Zwigoff's eye-opening account of the Crumb clan is one of the bravest nonfiction portraits ever committed to celluloid. Like "The Thin Blue Line," "Hoop Dreams" and "Gates of Heaven" it is a documentary that becomes ever more absorbing on repeated viewings as the hazy backdrop sharpens into focus. In Morris's pictures, once the question of how Dallas County could frame an innocent man becomes known, we look at why they would enact such corruption and the ethics of this practice when guiltless Randall Adams is knowingly placed on Death Row. Or when the curiosity of a cemetery for dead pets becomes a familiarity, we think back to the poetic cadence of the lady in the doorway, the heartache felt…
