Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse — Claims Conference Film Grants

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Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! explores the life and career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the creation and ground-breaking impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, the story of his parents’ survival of the Holocaust and his own struggle to come to terms with this legacy.

Synopsis

While best-known for the two volumes of Maus (voted by the New York Public Library as one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years), Art Spiegelman’s deeply personal body of work also includes In the Shadow of No Towers, Breakdowns, and The Wild Party and he is known for his many provocative covers for The New Yorker magazine where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. With his wife, Françoise Mouly, Spiegelman published and edited the acclaimed and influential comics magazine RAW from 1980-1991, where Maus was first serialized.

When Maus was banned by a Tennessee school board in 2022, Art, a self-avowed “first amendment fundamentalist,” stepped back into the spotlight as an ardent defender of free speech and against book-banning in both national media appearances and community engagements all over the country. As one of our country’s leading public intellectuals he has used his platform well and continues to do so.

Disaster is My Muse! is a portrait of an artist fully engaged with his past and his present who, with his chosen medium of comics, helps us to understand our turbulent world, and is testimony to the power of art to make sense of our personal and collective histories.

About the Directors

MOLLY BERNSTEIN is the director, producer and editor of Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, a documentary that premiered at the New York Film Festival, received a wide theatrical release and was selected by the Dublin and Glasgow International film festivals. Deceptive Practice was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s top 10 films of the year and aired on the PBS series American Masters. Bernstein directed and edited An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell, a New York Times Critic’s Pick that premiered at Film Forum in NYC, played in over 20 theaters nationwide and at: The Folger Shakespeare Library; MASS Moca; Museum of Art in Portland, Maine; The Center for Contemporary Arts in Sante Fe; and at The Natural History Museum of Denmark. Bernstein produced, directed and edited The Show’s The Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock, a feature documentary selected by festivals including DOC NYC, the Boulder, Cleveland and Doclands International Film Festivals, Doc’n Roll Film Festival in London and Asbury Park Music & Film Festival. The Show’s The Thing aired on Sky Arts in the UK. Bernstein has had an extensive career as an editor with credits including Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (Sony Pictures Classics), and the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About (American Masters). She has produced and directed many short films with Particle Productions on various subjects such as contemporary international artists and art collectors, and environmental issues and climate activists. She is on the film faculty of University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

PHILIP DOLIN, PRODUCER/DIRECTOR has produced and directed over 100 films about art, architecture, dance, the environment and many other subjects. His clients have included universities, non-profit organizations, art galleries, museums and a variety of businesses. He started out producing hip-hop videos in the early ‘90s for rap artists Salt-N Pepa, MC Lyte, Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor and many others. He was recently the executive producer and cinematographer of An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell. He was also a producer of Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, which was named one of the top ten films of 2013 by Entertainment Weekly. He recently directed and produced the feature documentary The Show’s The Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock, which The Hollywood Reporter called “essential viewing for anyone interested in music industry history.”

Artistic Statement

The more we learned about Art Spiegelman during the making of this film, the more complex our story became. We begin the film with Art reading PACKING, a strip about his father teaching him to pack a suitcase efficiently because “many times I had to run with only what I could carry.” Already set in his ambition to be a cartoonist, the young Art listened reluctantly, but then acknowledged that his father’s instruction “to pack inside everything what you can” was the best advice he ever got as a cartoonist. Art approaches his work like Vladek approached packing. The suitcase becomes the comic frame and Art packs it as tightly as he can with story, meaning, subtext and references to his beloved canon of comics. Anyone who hears Art talk realizes that he speaks the language of comics. Comics were his introduction to the world, his escape from his traumatized household and eventually they became his own creative vocabulary.

As we started this project, we realized we had to “major” in three distinct subjects: the complete history of comics; the history of the Holocaust and the issues around the representation of the subject in film and literature; and the full story of Art’s life and the lives of his parents. We fully embraced this complex challenge and spent many years studying comics and graphic novels, films about the Holocaust and Art’s work and public record in books, interviews and lectures. We began to collect the original comics and ephemera that were so key to Arts life; Mad Magazine, Topps baseball cards, the seminal underground comics and Art’s early work in Funny Aminals (1972), Short Order (1973-74) and RAW Magazine (1980-91).

As we got deeper into our work, a structural paradigm materialized to help us organize Art’s story: the model of the hourglass. At the top is Art’s early life, his influences and mentors and his adventures in underground comics with a cohort of artists who pushed each other to break boundaries and create a new adult art form. At the center of the hourglass is the creation of MAUS, the amalgamation of Art’s life, work and his quest to understand what his parents went through before and during World War II in Europe. The bottom of the glass is everything that came after: The tremendous impact of MAUS and its effect on Art as he struggled to find new stories and themes; and the impact that MAUS had on the world of graphic novels and on the generations of cartoonists that followed. Key to this story is Art’s relationship with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and her major contribution to their creative journey together.

During production, we witnessed the story develop and change. Initially, Art was reluctant to speak about MAUS. His attitude changed after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville in 2017 and the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018. When MAUS was banned by a Tennessee school board in 2022, Art was thrust into the national spotlight and forced to “speak about MAUS in a way I had never had to before.” At this point we began to see Art’s life as a kind of Frankenstein story: a mad-scientist-artist creates a work so powerful that it comes to life and starts to take over. The artist spends years running from the monster, but eventually they team up to fight the evil threats of the day. As Art said when he received his National Book Award, “I’ve had to try to become a mensch, it’s been a long march.” We were pleased to be able to set the final act of the film squarely in the present-day climate of book bans and other serious threats to democracy in the US and abroad.

The film premiered at DOCNYC in November of 2024. We were honored to be awarded the Grand Jury Prize in our category, and deeply moved by the insights of the Jury Statement:

“Out of this year’s outstanding selection of films in the Metropolis competition, one provoked the most discussion within the jury. Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse is about the essential role of subversive art and storytelling in our culture. The quiet modesty of the filmmaking belies a radical tale of a cartoonist who transformed the way illustrations can be used to process the most horrifying chapters of human history. We hope this deserving award can provide a platform to discuss the countless ways Spiegelman’s beautiful, haunting work continues to resonate today.”

Thank you.

Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin