The illustrator and director I will be comparing are Todd Solondz and Marcel Dzama. Todd Solondz is a controversial director who created films such as welcome to the dollhouse, Happiness and the film I am going to compare, Storytelling. Storytelling is a film based in two unrelated parts “fiction” and “non-fiction”. Fiction is about an encounter between a white student and her black writing teacher when she agrees to go home with him after meeting in a bar. At the next class she retells a “fictional” account of their experience. “Non-fiction” is about an aspiring filmmaker who makes a documentary of contemporary suburban teenage life after the columbine shootings. The story is told through they eyes of Scooby, a wannabe TV star.
Dzama’s illustrations are surreal images of tree-people, fish headed children, war and dismemberment. He has delicate, enticing drawings but the narrative is violent and displays current wars and world issues. I will look at the similarities and differences in storytelling that Solondz has with the illustrator Marcel Dzama.
Dzama and Solondz use influences from their home towns; Winnipeg is constantly showing in Dzama’s work and Solondz sets his films in suburban New Jersey where he was born. This creates a slow and isolated feel too their work, they weren’t brought up in busy cities but small communities.
The main similarity between Dzama and Solondz is that they both tell horrific narratives in a subtle manner. Solondz films are very verbal and slow where as Dzama tells stories over a series of images drawn in subtle inks and watercolours to tell a larger story.
Both director and illustrator have a darkness to their work, they try to make the audience uncomfortable while watching the film or engrossed in the illustrations.
Solondz and Dzama draw interest from the dysfunctional. Solondz uses suburban families in a lot of his films, in the non-fiction section of the film Scooby is apart of a typical white American family with the strict Father, stupid Mother, rebellious child, jock child and genius child. All are typically an average dysfunctional family but Mickey the youngest, brightest child shows odd relationships to the live-in maid and his Father, wanting attention and affection in a sinister and selfish way. Dzama also creates strange and surreal characters; just from one image you can create a narrative about this character.
Dzama’s collection, Even the Ghost of the Past continues to demonstrate the similarities between the innocent and perverse, I feel that Solondz dramatically proves this in the fiction section of the film, when the student goes home with the powerful college teacher, whereas Dzama shows this in his drawings. In an interview he said that his drawings have gotten more violent recently by watching the news and what is going on in the world, Solondz is obviously inspired by these themes and issues too and finds he wants to tell the stories of the modern world, even if it shocks and causes controversy within the audience. Both director and illustrator say that they do not aim their work at anyone in particular.
In both Solondz and Dzama’s work there is no intentional meaning to the narrative, fiction and non-fiction have no connection and Dzama’s characters do not resemble certain types of people or his opinions to the world, just that it’s violent and shocking.
Overall I feel that Dzama is successful in his illustrations. He has started to bring more of a narrative to his work now that he is experimenting with film and collaborating with Spike Jonze in The Lotus Eaters. I like the contrast between the subtle and pretty images that really are about wars and reality.
Solondz, I feel does not show his opinion through his work, it seems he does not communicate it with the audience, just that he’s created a story that will cause a stir but not show any opinion. I felt in the non-fiction sections that my full attention was not engaged as I am with Dzama.
Even though the main similarity I have looked at between Dzama and Solondz is the violence they bring to their work. I feel that Solondz makes you feel disturbed and unpleasant, whereas Dzama even though the subject matter is violence and war you still are enticed and want to see more and not disturbed by the images. You are drawn into the violent but pretty world.
Watch Stroytelling trailer at....
http://www.spike.com/video/storytelling-trailer/2417984
