Andrew Hyman '94 is something of a perfectionist. He pauses thoughtfully before answering questions about his upcoming Senior Fellowship project, a film tribute to Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, choosing each phrase deliberately and sometimes stopping for long minutes while he searches for the best word to describe his work. Several hours after our interview, he sends a succinct correction: "When talking about 'The Man With the Movie Camera' I said that Pudovkin was the director. That was incorrect. The director was Vertov." But as with his films, the result of his devotion to details is anything but cumbersome. Both his conversation and his movies constantly reveal new textures and meanings, much like an expressionist painting.
Hyman's two major films at Dartmouth - "Still Life," which was shown at the student film festival last spring, and his as yet untitled biography of Munch - are in fact consciously influenced by expressionist art. "Still Life," a five minute black and white picture, recounts the story of a painter's descent into homicidal madness as she "experiences" all of her subjects, starting with a bottle of wine and culminating with a young man whom she seduces, murders and cannibalizes. The film was replete with inside jokes and wry visual gags (in the seduction scene, the camera nonchalantly pans over a book in which a fork is used as a place-marker).
Hyman enjoys peppering his work with such nuances and inside jokes. "It makes it more fun for me," he explains. "And I think that the more subtlety that goes into a film, the better it is for the viewer. The more times you watch it, the more you pick up. I think there has to be more to filmmaking than just plot. The first time you watch a movie is for the story. After that, you can pay more attention to the artistry and to the process itself."
And process is the crux of Hyman's filmmaking. One of the reasons Hyman chose Munch as a subject, in fact, is their shared appreciation for art as process. "Munch said that crystallization is what expressionist art is all about. Crystallization was his word for describing the emotions and feelings and memories that exist within everyone. It expresses what is inside. This film is like crystallization backwards. It's taking the painting and recreating the experiences that inspired it."
So although his upcoming film does deal with biographical material from Edvard Munch's life, Hyman says that "it's a biography only if you know his biography ... There is a narrative, but I've taken several of Munch's paintings and tried to recreate the events that inspired them rather than simply trying to tell the whole story of his life." Those who are familiar with Munch's art will understand, for example, Hyman's use of Vaseline to cover the lens on certain shots in order to blur the images as a mimicking of the artist's expressionist style. The same people may also recognize Hyman's strategic use of red, green and blue lighting in various scenes, which in Munch's paintings symbolize learning, childbirth and death respectively. True aficionados will notice that the narrator speaks in a poetic cadence reminiscent of Munch's own poetry.
Hyman gained some notoriety on campus after last spring's showing of "Still Life," which for all of its texture and subtext is a highly erotic and emotionally charged film. And although like any artist, he was pleased by the film's popularity, he remains cautious about the dangers of popular appeal. Munch, after all, is probably best known for a single painting, "The Scream," which was intended to be a provocative expression of a real-life existential crisis. But in some ways, Hyman senses the painting's notoriety has reduced it to a sort of dorm-room cliche, a poster-flower that has been largely stripped of its power by its very popularity.
"While I was talking about this film the other day, someone said 'Oh yeah, Munch. The screamer guy, right?' It scares me that success like that dampens the effect of the painting. There's really not much he can do about it though. When Munch was young, he wrote this manifesto saying that people should never again paint interiors of men reading and women knitting. Painting should be alive and emotional. He once said that he wanted people to recognize the sanctity of paintings and take off their hats as if in church when they saw a great work of art. He was very spiritual about it, and he'd probably have a heart attack if he were alive to see the commodification of his work."
Is this a problem Hyman forsees in his own future as a filmmaker? "Well, people get known for their best work. And audiences see what they want to see. I mean, "Still Life" could just as easily be remembered as a film about a great blow job as a film about the cannibalistic nature of expressionist art. Of course, I'd rather they remember it as the latter." And although he enjoys seeing movies like "Naked Gun 33 1/3" and "Wayne's World" as much as anyone else, he doesn't see himself making such mass-appeal commercial films as a career. "I want to find a kind of compromise," he explains. "The Munch film is a compromise between theory films and strictly narrative, plot-oriented films. It's 'semi-narrative.' I don't want to make films that only I can understand, but I don't want to be just a story-teller either."
As for the future, Hyman is keeping his options open. After his film is shown at the end of this term, he might attend the prestigious film school at the University of Southern California, or he may work with acclaimed television director Ken Burns. He is not even sure he wants to direct as a career.
