Cineastes and Evolutionaries

Probably the most dazzling film I saw at Sundance this year, experimental animator David Lebrun’s Proteus (which has its L.A. premiere at the American Cinematheque on September 23) begins as a straightforward investigation into Haeckel’s life and work, using period photographs to illustrate the tale. But then the film spirals off into a broader, free-associative consideration of mankind’s epic aspiration to reconcile art and science, terra and technology, evolution and religious dogma. Coleridge’s fictional Ancient Mariner (beautifully voiced by actor Richard Dysart and represented onscreen by Gustave Doré’s famous drawings) puts in an appearance, as does Cyrus Field, struggling to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin and Charles Darwin pop up in cameos, too. And before it’s all over, the radiolaria themselves spring to splendiferous life through Lebrun’s painstakingly precise animations — made by photographing Haeckel’s original drawings, one frame at a time, on an optical printer. With the added assets of Marian Seldes’ elegant narration and Yuval Ron’s period-flavored score, Proteus fully lives up to its billing as “a 19th-century vision,” but it may be even more aptly classified by the description Lebrun himself affords to Coleridge’s poem: “An inward journey through a sea of imagination woven on a loom of actuality.”

Lebrun’s first feature-length work, Proteus is no spontaneous labor of love, but rather the end product of some 23 years of tinkering on weekends, holidays or whenever else Lebrun (who also enjoys a career as a producer and editor of more traditional documentaries) could find the time. Despite the long interval between projects, many of the animation and editorial innovations of Proteus are directly descended from Lebrun’s earlier films — something audiences will have a chance to see for themselves when Filmforum presents its two-night Lebrun retrospective on September 12 and 26. Of particular note is the filmmaker’s debut short, Sanctus (1966), which was made while Lebrun was on sabbatical from his undergraduate studies at Reed College and which finds extraordinary symmetries of motion and meaning in its juxtaposition of three radically different rituals: a Roman Catholic Mass, a Mexican bullfight and the hallucinogenic-mushroom ceremony of the Mazatec Indians. Better known, but no less worthwhile, the scintillating Tanka (1976) takes us on an eye-popping journey through the Tibetan Book of the Dead as represented by a series of 16th- to 19th-century scroll paintings. Then, for a foray into California’s countercultural past, check out The Hog Farm Movie (1970), Lebrun’s documentary record of the famed Tujunga commune he helped found and its (ultimately failed) attempt to transport one of its pigs to the 1968 Democratic National Convention for a proposed presidential bid. Proof that, while the idea of running a lower life form for our country’s top office isn’t necessarily a new one, it at least used to register as satire.

 

Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque screens Thursday, September 16. Proteus screens Thursday, September 23, at the American Cinematheque. Filmforum’s David Lebrun retrospective screens Sunday, September 12, and Sunday, September 26, also at the Egyptian. See Film & Video Events this and subsequent weeks for more information on all three programs.