A Hymn to Dionysus
from Darroch Greer
Two philanthropists walk into a bar. One says to the bartender, ‘We want to make a film about Euripides.‘
Okay - that‘s not exactly how it happened.
“Greg Carr of the Carr Foundation and Noble Smith, these are the two men that approached me about making a film,” Jessica Yu recounts of the genesis of her film Protagonist. “The way they described it to me was that Euripides was seen as the first psychologist. Actually, when you first read the work - and it‘s not really a film about the man, per se. I didn‘t want to put people off and have them think, ‘oh gosh, I should have studied more in school to be able to follow this film.‘”
Jessica Yu is another Sundance alumnus, known for, among other things, winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for her 1997 film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O‘Brien, about the writer who lived for decades on an iron lung after suffering from polio. It premiered at Sundance, as well as her narrative short Better Late that same year. In 1999, her film about an art community in a mental institution, The Living Museum, premiered at Sundance, followed by her partially animated portrait of the hermetic folk artist Henry Darger, In the Realms of the Unreal, in 2004. Her films are distinctive and original. Who else would you turn to to make a film on a Greek playwright from the 5th century BCE?
“I think the film works on a kind of visceral level that people get as a story - a combined story,” Yu says. “What it is, is I‘m interested in what makes a person go down a path for a good reason, and then somehow go off-course where they become the opposite of what they had intended. It‘s kind of like a classic anti-hero story. The film tells the story of four men who have followed this strange path, and I think it‘s a way to sort of look at where they went. Why does somebody - for instance, one man became a terrorist. The film is trying to suggest ways that we see this as more of a human situation that not everyone could fall into, but it‘s a way of seeing this as a more nuanced experience.”
Protagonist tells the story of four individuals who follow personal odysseys to the point of total consumption. One is German man who rebelled against his authoritarian policeman father by joining a leftist movement that evolved into an offshoot of the notorious Bader-Meinhof terrorist group. Another is a ‘black sheep‘ from a religious family in New Jersey who joined the church to escape the ‘hell‘ of his burgeoning homosexuality and wound up spreading the word of Jesus in gay bars. Yet another fights years of parental abuse by robbing banks, and a fourth becomes a fanatical martial artist to make up for his diminutive size. The film contemplates questions such as what is the path to extremism, what is the line between reasonable and unreasonable, and how does one recover from the delusion of certainty? Unlike Euripides‘ characters, these four men experience the power of redemption. Did I say men?
“It was interesting that we didn‘t start out by wanting to make a film about all men, but that‘s indeed what we found for this particular journey,” Yu says. “The interesting thing about researching this - because we looked at probably a couple hundred people and, literally, four or five were women - is that we were being very strict about these people‘s experience fitting in to this very specific arc. The arc was that there has to be a moment where someone has this terrible realization dawn on them that they‘ve been going full speed in the wrong direction. It seemed like men tended to be more susceptible to that. Whereas women - not to say that women are any better or worse - but going down the wrong path there was more of a sense that they knew that this was not working out. Whereas the men have been able to be more blind-sided.”
Yu tells their stories in parallel structure, separated by animated chapter headings. The stories are linked with the help of wooden rod puppets staging excerpts from Euripides‘ plays and scenes from the subjects‘ pasts. There are also voiceovers of Euripides‘ text spoken in ancient Greek.
“In telling the stories of the four men, the connecting elements are the sequences that are acted out by these eerie-looking rod puppets that are modeled after the Greek masks,” Yu explains. “There‘s a look that sort of connects all of those pieces, and they also act out all the quotes from Euripides. Then there‘s this beautiful animation, and we were lucky to have worked with this animator named Robert Conner. Then, in each of the stories, there are certain elements that don‘t completely dominate the stories visually, but in some cases there is stock footage, in other cases we had some green screen elements that would change. In others, we had some other art work that came into play. We tried to give each of those men‘s stories a certain visual flavor without having it distract so much that it didn‘t seem like that story belonged to the central vision of the film.”
Yu chose to shoot in HD on the Varicam, the better to shoot long interviews without burning so much film. Unfortunately, they ran into problems with the green screen elements further down the line. “I think it was actually a work-flow issue with using Final Cut Pro and Varicam,” Yu says. “We were having to discover the answers along the way! It was many, many hours by our post team. We worked with this company called Pair of Hands out in the Valley. Matt Small, who was dealing with a lot of that stuff, I think he ended up putting in close to 300 hours trying to get that stuff cleaned up.”
Of all the different technical elements, it was most fun to work with puppeteer and filmmaker Janie Geiser and her puppets. Yu exclaims: “I hadn‘t worked with puppets before, and it‘s actually very liberating when you compare it to the slowness of animation, where you can talk about a shot or a sequence, you storyboard it and do whatever, but you have to wait a long time to see if it‘s working. With the puppetry it‘s very immediate. At the same time there were technical issues. Unless you‘re sitting there, you haven‘t really thought out, ‘Oh, I‘d love to get this figure to move from here to here.‘ You‘re working on a set. You have to cut a hole, a path through the bottom of the set for the puppet to be able to move from one place to another, making sure that all the puppeteers can see the monitor. We had little rolling carts because they‘re underneath the set. Just physically getting bodies down there - what was great about it was that it is so immediate. You can really get that instant gratification of something working or not. If there‘s some emotional quality you‘re going for, or a certain lighting effect, you can deal with it right at the moment, whereas in animation, even when something is done, ‘OK, let‘s wait 24 hours for the render so that we can see that it‘s really coming together the way that we want.‘ The puppets was the most fun shoot. It was a blast!”
With her third feature doc in competition, as well as a handful of shorts, Jessica Yu is excited to return to Sundance this year. As a veteran, she seems to have her game plan down. “I‘m really looking forward to the festival, and I‘ve heard that the competition is very very strong - every year it is for documentaries. If you actually make a point of going to see other people‘s documentaries besides your own, you‘ll have a much better festival experience. What I‘m looking forward to is that they‘re actually live subjects in my film that will be at the festival. In the past, like with In the Realms of the Unreal, the artist Henry Darger had been dead for 30 years. It‘s a film about a painter, and there were a lot of questions that I didn‘t really feel were necessarily my place to answer in the Q and A. But that‘s what people look forward to at Sundance. They like the intimacy of having not only the filmmaker there, but the subjects of the film. In this case, we have three out of the four.”
If you see three men in platform catherni, with large ghastly masks, chanting stasima and looking very tragic - ask for tickets very politely.
Listen to the full interview between Greer and Yu regarding Protagonist.
