Still from Paulina Hollers, 2006 [Enlarge in New Window]

Brent Green: Paulina Hollers

Picture this: a Santa Claus who's a skinny, irritable old cuss who guzzles cough syrup for the buzz and whose workshop is home to scrawny blackbirds and big-eared, dancing mice. And imagine his story told with a tremulous voice muttering snatches of prose over scrawled drawings held together with bits of Scotch tape. That's Hadacol Christmas (2005), Brent Green's adamantly handmade twelve-minute animation, a rough, cobbled together thing that makes your head spin with its barrage of unexpected moments, like a shotgun blast spewing poetry.

"I'm not, so much, into polished stuff," says Green, whose work is all about the improbable splendor of the broken down, the rickety, and the barely-held-together. "I don’t see any beauty in it."

This pursuit of the unexpected is what drew Green to filmmaking in the first place. After writing a short story, Green decided he wanted to bring it to life. So he taught himself how to animate, maniacally drawing thousands of images that second by second became his first film, Susa's Red Ears (2002), a story about a girl who sleeps on top of a bureau. Pleased with the fact that the moving images approximated his vision of the story, he kept going, working next on Francis (2002), based on a soundtrack by the band Califone. Green's three films wiggle and jump with hand-drawn characters. And in each, there’s that voice-over narration, spoken by Green himself with an edgy urgency that drives the films forward like freight trains at night.

Funded by the Creative Capital Foundation, Green's current project is Paulina Hollers, an animated film that draws on his own family history. "My family was originally from West Virginia," he says, "and for this project, I tried to write an Appalachian folk tale where everything gets worse and worse, but there's still this tinge of hope around the edges." According to Green, "the story centers around an asshole kid who dies and goes to Hell. His mother kills herself so he won't be alone. She finds him and they try to escape."

The boy's character was inspired in part by Green's grandfather, a man who was struck by lightning twice, "once when he was standing under a tree, and the other time in his own basement," notes Green, underlining the implausibility of the incidents. Indeed, his grandfather was convinced that God was out to get him, and lived accordingly, raging at the world with a fury and malice that left an indelible impression on his grandson.

For the scenes on Earth, Green is using stop-motion animation; Hell, by contrast, will be hand-drawn. He's currently carving the earthly characters out of wood and plans on using other things—like rabbit bones and birds' wings—to help tell the story. As he uses the bodies of dead animals to conjure a character who’s quite simply hateful, it's clear that Green is venturing into new and challenging territory, grappling with things that are at once awful but wholly human: he and his characters are in Hell meeting evil and grace. You can bet that his new film will carry us, on the wings of dead birds, to places of surprising, terrible beauty.

In addition to completing Paulina Hollers, Green is also preparing for a solo show at Bellwether, the Chelsea gallery that represents his work; the exhibition will open in January of 2007.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Americana | Mid-Atlantic | 2005