"Drawn by Memory", an hour-long animated feature, is the charming tale of young boy struggling with the experience of becoming a man. While it explores familiar themes of boarding school bullies, an overbearing father and the anguish that comes with never having been allowed to own a family dog, the film also reveals accounts of political intrigue, including a harrowing near-escape from Eastern Europe engineered by the CIA.
Ultimately, this isn't the deceptively simple tale of an ordinary boy growing up-this is the autobiographical account of the extraordinary Paul Fierlinger, who was, in fact, facing the trauma of boyhood adolescence during the post-war era in Communist Czechoslovakia. His familiar boarding school companions were none other than the young Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czechoslovak Republic and notable film director Milos Forman ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The People vs. Larry Flynt"), and his overbearing father was a highly ranked-if not implicitly corrupt-Polish political official.
Wednesday evening, Dartmouth students will be presented with the rare opportunity to meet with the remarkable Czech animator for a screening of the film and a following discussion.
Although Fierlinger was eager to leave Czechoslovakia to pursue an animation career in the United States, where he has since established his own independent animation production company, AR&T, he says that he owes much of his success to his beginnings in Eastern Europe. He attended art school in Czechoslovakia, but was self-taught in animation. His love of drawing comes partly from what he refers to as a "mental neurosis" and partly because he knew it was something his father hated.
Fierlinger recalls the working conditions that plagued his filmmaking colleagues who continued or attempted to continue working in Czechoslovakia. During the new wave of low-budget Polish films, Milos Forman directed his first feature "A Fireman's Ball," which employed non-actors as cast members. Fierlinger says that the production bus and film crew were often welcomed with a hailstorms of stones thrown by the non-professional actors who apparently hated Forman. Incidentally, Forman's voice, as well as Havel's, is recorded on the soundtrack to "Drawn by Memory."
Fierlinger's own filmmaking experience in Czechoslovakia was much propitious. Out of necessity in Eastern Europe, he learned how to create animation with very little means. He was able to work in one room with minimal equipment and rapidly produce his projects within days.
Fierlinger was able to use this talent to his advantage when looking for work in Western Europe the year before he arrived in the United States in 1968. He received jobs in television in Amsterdam and Paris, and signed on as the only animator for a production company in Munich. His jobs in Western Europe were short lived, however. Usually he was only able to hold a job up until his first paycheck, when it would then be discovered that he was an illegal alien.
Fierlinger arrived in the United States from a refugee camp in Germany and within a year he was able to sell himself once again as an animator able to work by himself, rapidly, with very little means at his disposal. For his first job, he was hired as the single animator for "Concept Films," a documentary company. There he animated spots for Hubert Humphrey and other political candidates.
By 1971, he had set up AR&T in Philadelphia and continued to produce TV commercials and animated shorts, most of which he describes as "funny, quirky little things." On a more serious track, however, he has also produced "And Then I'll Stop," in 1989, a film on drug and alcohol abuse, which was followed by "Drawn By Memory" in 1995. Fierlinger, however, claims that the obvious political and social commentary imparted on most of his material is "pure coincidence."
Fierlinger likens the current conditions surrounding the American filmmaking industry to the advances desktop publishing made on the printing industry. The progress of computer animation may have made the independent filmmaking field easier to penetrate, yet it seems to have generated much more "mediocre" work.
Fierlinger admits that he now works exclusively with computer animation. In fact, much of his former animation equipment has been generously donated to Dartmouth's own Film Department.
As far as distribution and exhibition of his work goes, most of Fierlinger's animation is commissioned for television. "Drawn by Memory" was, in fact, produced by Fierlinger for the "American Playhouse" television company. Fierlinger worked on the project for a total of four years. He claims that it would have taken only two years if it hadn't been for the "dreaded middleman" at the "American Playhouse."
According to Fierlinger, the "Playhouse" producers were "fine people to work with," yet they took their time. Appropriately, Fierlinger remarks that "Playhouse" no longer airs original work, but has been reduced to re-run broadcasting.
Very rarely does Fierlinger exhibit his work at college theaters, and he admits that the campus screening scheduled at Dartmouth unfortunately comes at a particularly bad time since he is currently working on an animated film with his wife, Sandra, for the Independent Television Series (ITVS). The film, "Still Life with Animated Dogs," is about his pups, Roosevelt and Ike.
The prospect of screening "Drawn By Memory" for an attending audience has Fierlinger feeling a little queasy. His works always affect him in the most contradictory fashion. He is very attached to the films he works on, yet he dislikes watching his past jobs because he is always made aware of mistakes in every single scene.
Fierlinger doesn't mind producing work for television broadcasts. He says that both "Playhouse" and ITVS have given him "100% creative freedom" in his filmmaking and adequate budgets. The sixty-three year old director claims that he is "still a whore" and is content to produce any film that will be able to pay the bills.
Paul Fierlinger's "Drawn by Memory" plays at the Loew Wednesday at 7 pm.
