Crumb (Zwigoff, 1994) is streaming now on DocPlay
Before I was an owner of Wellington’s Paramount, I was a popcorn slave candy bar assistant working at one of the city’s finest arthouse theatres during the a golden age of independent cinema.
The day we found out how long Altman’s Short Cuts was – and that every shift would be an hour longer as a result – was a great day, let me assure you.
In the mid-90s, we didn’t have all the access that we do now. Films would take an eternity to get to Wellington and would arrive in pretty beat up fashion and often all we had to go on was a Film Festival programme note from the previous year.
Documentaries therefore could assume that we weren’t coming in with preconceptions. When Terry Zwigoff’s film about the underground cartoonist R. Crumb arrived, I was only vaguely aware of the subject via his famous work on the Big Brother & the Holding Company album Cheap Thrills, the Keep on Truckin’ cartoon and I was aware of – but had never read – Fritz the Cat.
I thought I was getting a traditional ‘portrait of the artist’. What I was not prepared for was the singular weirdness of the whole Crumb family and the lengths that Zwigoff would have to go to to tell his story.
We are now much more sensitive to mental health issues than we were in 1995 – when this film seemed like a freak show – and I’m looking forward to revisiting it from my (hopefully) more mature perspective.
DocPlay is an essential Australasian streaming service run by Madman Entertainment. Then offer a 14-day free trial.
They are also streaming The Day the Sun Fell, a documentary about Hiroshima which might be of interest considering the other big films out in cinemas at the moment.
