Here's something a little different from Lewis Klahr, who is known for making short stop-motion collage movies, generally from old advertising and comic books and objects he's found in thrift stores. Here we're still dealing with stop motion collage, but at feature length. He's departed from his comfort zone in more ways than one. One great strength of the Klahr shorts is that he is a proper music buff and manages to find the perfect songs to accompany his films. What we get here in terms of soundtrack, other than the spoken word, is just some sound Lewis recorded of a thunderstorm. Another difference from his usual Prolix Sartori movies is that it's not a love story. Indeed in terms of effects he's doing something very different, trying to induce a reverie in his words, to which end he's interspersed the footage with a lot of Durassian black screen, which kind of flickers in a lot later on in the movie when the Pettifogger is disintegrating. Much of the footage there is abstract, which will fray the nerves of a typical cinema enthusiast.
The Pettifogger is a small time conman who is shown as very calculating (the mental yes/no decision diagrams he's working from are sometimes shown). Over the year the film spans, he has brief affairs, some of them sort-of-sincere, some of them grifts. This pathetic existential cowardice and greed catches up with him, and his life enters a dark funk that's unresolved by the end. Hearing Lewis talk about his films can be interesting in that he often intends things that aren't that obvious, for example at the talk following the screening after The Pettifogger he mentioned that the central character in my favourite film of his actually dies at the end of the movie; I've seen it three times and wasn't close to thinking that. Here he said that a lot of the inspiration from this film in terms of observation comes from his father who apparently often used to suffer from depression and would segregate himself from the family for long periods during bouts.
The film is meant to be a comment on the current feeling that we Anglo-Saxons particularly have been living in a state of greed, which became a prevalent mood following the financial crisis of '08-'09 caused by Ponzi-style investing in property and lax credit conditions. There are no overt references however, no meaningful political analysis, just an exploration of one man's folly.
It pretty much worked but I would suggest it for avant-gardists only.
