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THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON |
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Written by Filmshi
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Saturday, 15 April 2006 |
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig, is a documentary about the underground cassette tape savant Daniel Johnston. The film begins with footage of Johnston speaking to a video camera in front of a mirror. As artful as it is eerie he says, "This is the ghost of Daniel Johnston." Though this looks like a narrative convention, Johnston does not narrate his own film. In fact, though the film intends to mine the mystery of the artist, the demons that torment him get first billing. We are limited to interfacing with the artist through his songs, sketches, films, and the extensive collection of audio and videocassettes that document his day-to-day life before his commitment and subsequent medication in 1991.
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Largely biographical, this poignant and sometimes breathtaking view of
divine madness, blatantly avoids glamorizing the all too real terrors
of Johnston's mania. Louis Black, Austin Music Critic, touches upon the
astounding lack of poetry in the situation when he stands over a bridge
and retells the horror story of Johnston's first public display of
mental illness. Called from a sick bed on Christmas, Black was asked to
pick Johnston up from a river at the local University. Johnston had
been found baptizing invisible sinners. Fearing for Johnston and the
safety of those around him, Black finally expressed the impenetrability
of the situation when he said; you hope to meet genius "... but when I
did I did the most pedestrian thing, I had him committed."
Though the "narration" gives us a sense of third person distance,
people who loved and cared for Johnston fill in the gaps of a story
that doesn't have to be "in your face" to cut close to the bone.
A potent theme, and an enigmatic (if traditional) metaphor for the
cinematic image, ghosts literally haunt the film in so many forms. The
Devil is seen in Johnston's drawings, oftentimes manipulating Johnston
like a marionette. The unspeakable force of the Devil along with the
uncanny suggestion that Johnston is some sort of automaton translates
the dangers and dramas Johnston causes into something dark and
undeviating, as if he, the ghost, is the only one who will endure,
because, as we learn, ghosts are efficacious and unstoppable. Casper
the Friendly Ghost, Johnston's favorite icon and a recurrent character
in his art, is something of a simulacrum of the "ghost of Daniel
Johnston". Painful and beautiful, the film credits return to this
meditation on Johnston's child idol, as we see a large, middle-aged,
Johnston in a Casper costume dancing indelible forever to one of his
own songs.
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON is as much a primer for the uninitiated,
as it is an insightful exploration of the artist and divine madman.
Unlike other documentaries that seek to expose underrepresented issues,
this film seeks more to introduce a character into "posterity". THE
DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON is seeing to it that Johnston's throngs of
local and international, garage loving fans never lose their grasp on
this already floating, perpetual ghost. |
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