Animation Fetishist:
At that time filmmaker Jim Trainor was living in a dumpy upper Manhattan railroad flat, having long since moved from the east-coast suburbs where he grew up to New York City to attend Columbia University. Later he actually moved to Avenue B, the East Village street where he lives today. He meets every one of Hoberman’s racist, sexist, classist criteria for a filmmaker we don’t need. His films were largely unknown then: he was only a year into the 11 it took to complete his longest film–the 38-minute The Fetishist (1997)–supporting himself mostly with office jobs. By the time he moved to Avenue B, his close friend Lewis Klahr had lived there for years–another straight suburban white boy whose highly original cutout animations have won him considerable renown. Now it’s Trainor’s turn: his first one-person show here, Friday at Chicago Filmmakers, reveals a quirky, original vision of human and animal nature. (Later this summer he’ll leave his job bartending and move here to become a full-time animation professor at the School of the Art Institute.)
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Trainor began making animated films when he was 13, working with a friend whose main role was filming and coloring in Trainor’s drawings. Trainor had a childhood interest in dinosaurs and birds, and today he collects insects, reads a variety of nature books, and has returned to birdwatching. His subjects are usually plants, animals, or the animal nature of humans, and he’s developed a uniquely expressive drawing style, an unquiet blend of disturbing physicality and gentle charm. Of the eight films at Chicago Filmmakers, five are silent. Some, he told me, were made as breaks from the 20,000 drawings he needed for The Fetishist (also on the program); though he originally saw these films as a way of expanding his vocabulary, he now shows them as completed works. A fine entree to his use of line, shape, and rhythm, the silent films allow the viewer to apprehend his style more clearly than the three sound films, which have narratives.
Set 247 million years ago in what is now South Africa, The Moschops (2000) is a faux nature documentary focused on a genus long extinct. Saying that the film is “about the origin of compassion in the animal kingdom,” Trainor writes in a fanciful statement that “scientists believe the Moschops was capable of interior tenderness, which it expressed, ironically, through incessant fighting.” In the narration a female Moschops tells us, “We didn’t love each other exactly, but at night we all slept together in one big stupid pile.” The male protagonist is a bully, beating up on a smaller male as a way of impressing girls. The female narrator says, “When one of us died, we barely noticed it”–a comment followed by a scene of a corpse being consumed by bugs and carnivorous reptiles. Trainor contrasts the fighting among males with the tenderness the narrator feels for others of his sex but can’t express. “Suppose the origins of human love don’t evolve from the need for procreation,” Trainor says, “but out of this bittersweet homosexual attraction.”
While it’s a bit strange to see a serial killer drawn in Trainor’s appealing sketchy style, The Fetishist is in some ways his richest work. For one thing, the changes in Heirens’s expressions, hair, and body convey his instability–in fact he blamed the killings on an alternate personality, “George.” Trainor also makes significant use of cutout photographs or drawings. A room that Heirens burglarizes is depicted in photographic fragments–a sofa, a rug, and so on–emphasizing his isolation from reality. When he defecates and we see a drawing of him openmouthed, with a medical-book drawing of a mouth between his lips, Heirens’s physicality becomes frighteningly vivid. And when Heirens holds a photographed key and uses it in a photographed lock, we’re reminded of the very real consequences of his actions, a point also brought home by the photographs representing the victims.
