Kind of boo-hoo
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11/27/2008 - 11/28/08
Sometimes a person has to suffer for her art. Even when she's a cartoonist.Nina Paley began her cartooning career in 1988, "at the tender age of 20," with Nina's Adventures, her "semi-autobiographical, often experimental, not-quite-underground alternative weekly comic strip" that debuted in Santa Cruz Comic News and later ran in other California newspapers. Fourteen years later, with syndicated comic strips and short animated films to her credit, Paley followed her husband to Trivandrum, India, where he had taken a job. She found him emotionally withdrawn and in the throes of a midlife crisis, and Paley had a lot of time on her hands.
She became familiar with the Ramayana, the ancient Indian epic that recounts the adventures of Prince Rama. After Rama's virtuous wife, Sita, is abducted by the villainous king Ravana, he rejects her because he presumes her virtue has been sullied. "Like many Westerners," Paley admits, "I initially considered the Ramayana little more than misogynist propaganda."
Soon she would have reason to consider it in a more personal light. While Paley was back in New York discussing a new comic strip with her syndicate, her husband broke up with her — by e-mail. "The Ramayana took on new depth and meaning for me," she says on her Web site. "It no longer resembled a sexist parable; rather, it seemed to capture the essence of painful relationships and describe a blueprint of human suffering."
Paley couldn't go back to India, and she couldn't face returning to her home in San Francisco. She stayed in New York and began working on ideas for an animated film that would bring into play the Ramayana, her own unhappy love story, and some recordings she had just discovered by a little-remembered 1920s torch singer named Annette Hanshaw.
"What happened was, I was staying in New York on the sofa of a friend of a friend," Paley recalled in a telephone interview. "And this guy was a record collector. He had an enormous collection of old 78s ... and he just kept pulling down records and playing them, and Annette Hanshaw was in his collection. Totally serendipitous. I basically just kept my eyes and ears and mind open and let the right things fall in."
"When I was in India, I was reading the Ramayana, and I just felt like drawing my own versions of the characters," Paley said. "And then I was in New York ... and I heard the Annette Hanshaw songs for the first time, and I was just really moved by them. And the Ramayana was in my mind, and I was memorizing the Hanshaw songs; they were in my mind, especially 'Mean to Me,' and I was just walking around thinking, I love this song, and I love this story, and they're the same thing. And at some point a couple of days after I heard the song, I got to thinking that I could use this as the soundtrack for my own little Ramayana story."
Paley's "little Ramayana story" has blossomed into an 82-minute animated feature film called Sita Sings the Blues. It has been the toast of the international festival circuit, and it will be shown as part of the Santa Fe Film Festival on Wednesday, Dec. 3, and Sunday, Dec. 7.
Sita Sings the Blues is visually irresistible, drenched in color and full of lively action. The animation is two-dimensional, some of it in a jerky, stop-action mode. Paley uses a variety of styles and techniques to tell her story. A loose, sketchy hand draws the ill-fated modern romance of Nina and David, lifted directly from Paley's own experience. She uses the traditional Indian images of the Ramayana as the basis for the animation of that ancient Indian love story. Then there are passages using shadow puppets set ingeniously to what sounds like a bull session of contemporary Indians hashing out the Ramayana. "That's exactly what it was," Paley said. "It was totally unscripted. I just brought some friends of mine into the recording studio, asked them some questions, and let them talk."
The most delightful sections are the ones set to the bluesy recordings of Hanshaw. When Sita sings the blues, she's drawn in a contemporary vector-graphic cartoon style, and the 1920s jazz songs emphasize the universality and timelessness of heartbreak and love gone bad. "That is why the old music sort of made it," says the filmmaker, "because these elements do come from two completely different eras and traditions and cultures, but they tell the exact same story."
Sita Sings the Blues may have come out of a time of heartbreak for Paley, but in the hands of this gifted cartoonist and storyteller, the movie is anything but melancholy. She began it as a way of exorcising her demons of misery. "In my grief-addled state, her [Hanshaw's] songs, my story, and the Ramayana merged into one," she says on her Web site. She produced a short animated film, Trial by Fire, which eventually (after another failed relationship) grew into the full-length feature that has captured hearts, minds, and awards around the world. Drawing and creativity seem to have lightened her heart and soothed
the pain.
In a movie that grew out of mingled stories of masculine betrayal, was part of the intended message that men are beasts? "Oh, that wasn't the intention," she protested. "That's not what I was trying to say. The whole point is that everybody suffers. Even when the gods are incarnated as humans, they suffer. The very fact of being human means that you're going to suffer, and you might even make other people suffer."
Sita Sings the Blues is human and built on suffering, but like the blues of Hanshaw, it reminds us that sadness is only a building block of beauty in the hands of an artist. Suffering may be universal and timeless, but so are love and laughter.
details
Sita Sings the Blues
Wednesday, Dec. 3, 6:45 p.m.
Sunday, Dec. 7, 8:15 p.m.
The Film Center, 1616 St. Michael's Drive
$10, 989-1495
