An Interview with James Sumner

An Interview with James Sumner, Creator of the Animated Film “The Getty Address”
By Dakota Kim

James Sumner is a highly intellectual man. He also might not dwell on the same plane as the rest of the world.

The filmmaker speaks rapidly and easily on a wide range of unusual subjects, from Aztec mythology to an almost biblical infestation of seven-year cicadas. There is something equally shocking about Sumner, the rabidly intellectual combined with the intensely visceral, a rapid stream of thoughts accompanied by the urgency of tense hands that carve nearly-visible images into the air. Nowhere is this combination of his intellectual and visceral world more evident than in his opus thus far, The Getty Address. A series of shorter film segments that form an album-length narrative, the film is an animated opera, a feast of sights and sounds as breathtaking, ridiculous and tragedic as any opera.

The film was conceptualized as an accompaniment to an earlier-produced album of the same name by The Dirty Projectors, a mammoth musical conglomeration of separately-recorded vocals and instrumentation that succeeded only with talented maestro Dave Longstreth steering its unwieldy helm. Just as some legends and fables come to life with illustration, the already grand scope of Dave Longstreth’s masterfully-recorded and produced album amplifies itself when accompanied by Sumner’s entrancing, absurdist images. Try these two on for size: prehistoric kangaroos combating giant tarantula monsters, followed by Don Henley and Sacagawea spinning around one another on a grassy plain, caught up in the force of centrifugal love. With the anthropomorphization of animals and natural forces into central characters, The Getty Address is as much a fable of nature’s power and hope for constant renewal as it is the legend of a mythical Don Henley who represents both the force of colonization and the victim of his own power.

The film was produced in the fall and winter months in an unheated warehouse off the Halsey stop, “where I slept in a sleeping bag on my detached van seats,” Sumner said. Matching stories to songs and developing themes as well as some of the animation occurred off the Jefferson stop. “I was basically a teetotaling recluse through this entire period so the respective nightlives of each neighborhood … isn’t too salient. I needed a ridiculous amount of space to shoot full-body green screens and was lucky to find the amount of space I did anywhere.”

Screenings have occurred across the country with the Dirty Projectors national tour and in locations such as Monkey Town, Williamsburg’s multimedia audiovisual space. New chapters of the film were shown for the first time at The Dirty Projectors’ April show at Cake Shop, where audience members sat quietly on a floor used to feeling only beer-soaked sneaker soles, hushing louder audience members. It was a sight to see tipsy, chatty New Yorkers so spellbound and struck silent by the dramatization of the colonized, industrial, breathtaking world in whose nerve center they conduct their daily lives. Sumner has recently completed even more segments that take the epic story deeper into its own world of archetypes and characterization, available on www.vsanna.com and on sale at Other Music.


--
Dakota Kim: What drew you to the project originally, and how did you and Dave put your minds together?

James Sumner: Dave and I met at Yale … I played in some bands around and we had mutual friends. He actually moved into my room. It was all pretty calculated I think. He had seen a couple of shorts with the program I had started using, Mojo. It’s a little bit like Flash but it’s better for characters.

Dave had wanted backdrop for a show and had the album and the storyline so it kind of all snowballed from there. I was just attracted to the scope and ambition of incorporating music into film in a living way. It’s also a chance to have humor and gravity comingle. I appreciate the coexistence, that is not possible in much of the rest of the world, of the ridiculous and the serious, and that’s possible in animation.

How did the film progress over time? I know you’re still adding more.

Yeah, never enough time. A Peter Jackson quote to live by: “You never finish a film.”

Most of the tracks were done by the time we did the South by Southwest show. Some of the remix aspects where different songs are reinterpolated developed in the months afterward. I had a crane flying through a storm in response to one part of The Getty Address, another to the wildnerness theme. Dave responded to that and said, hey let’s do the DVD, and I said yes not having at the time any idea how far it was going to go. It was much more abstract, kinetic and flashy at the time, from a little program. I just figured I would do it a couple months with them.

Little did you know, right? That’s how it starts, with a little yes.

Yeah, and now it’s basically my life to make this a really solid whole – something that can be watched straight through, taken both seriously and on a comedic level.

Do you think your background and environment have had an ongoing affect on your style of creation?

I’m from a Mississippi small town, since I was thirteen. The differences between growing up in the South and somewhere else are definitely eroding. Like a lot of midsized American cities, it’s plagued with a lack of industry, brain drain, mall sprawl, white flight, the usual things… but the ten percent that’s different is definitely interesting and has affected me.

You’re far away from that small town these days, traveling all over the country to present the film. Has the experience of taking it on the road with a band proved difficult or did venues accommodate your needs for showing the film?

I needed to have my own screen so I did a rider saying either white wall or screen. I’m essentially the opening band so I like to be tightly integrated with the band—if possible, immediately before Dave so music sets aren’t split. It’s a creative process of collaboration that’s truly exhausting but I love doing it.

Before you presented your film to a crowd of tipsy, intellectual New Yorkers, you said that it should be easy to understand, but that if anyone needed explanation they should talk to you after the show. I certainly felt like I could use one.

It’s meant to be listened to and watched more than once, and I always have a different perspective every time I watch it. I’ve watched it and listened to the music literally tens of thousands of times by now if you add up all the seconds total and I’m still getting things. I mean, it's about Don Henley, the Aztecs and 9/11, but there's more.

Someone commented to me that your film is like a Japanese video game in its style, and it seems that many animations recently, such as Waking Life or Miyazaki’s work, have entered into the American mainstream. Are we moving toward a much more virtual society where animation rather than traditional film with actors will reign?

Our world’s mostly been like that for a while, so I’m not sure we’re necessarily moving toward a more virtual one. The film is a virtual world in the same way that a 19th century painting was for Londoners, the only way they could see America, which in their own way created these fairly ridiculous scenarios of nature. But it was almost beautiful and admirable. I really enjoy animation because it allows me a lot of control and I can’t afford animatronics or action sequences. It’s coming more to the mainstream as a very intense computer art, but I have also blended conventional actors and animation, as in the Getty Address.

Who do you cull inspiration from, in terms of animation and otherwise?

Most of the animation I like these days doesn’t look anything like what I do. I think inspiration would be sort of misleading but Paperrad has made some of my favorite videos. They have a very lo-fi 8-bit APHID aesthetic using perversions of 80s cartoon characters like Gumby, which makes it have this very insane aesthetic and logic to it. I watch a bit of Lord of the Rings. The way Peter Jackson makes movies is wonderful. I’ve looked at as many painters as anything else. As far as music, The Getty Address has made me very impatient with a lot of music, but I used to listen to a lot of drone and improv music.

Paperrad to Peter Jackson – quite a stretch. Not that your work is visually like either, but your film takes the legend/fable framework similar to adventure/fantasy stories, injects it with some of the absurdity of Paperrad and floods it with a serious environment-in-crisis morality similar to the Lord of the Rings. I was really struck by the scene with Henley overthrowing the semi-trucks, and as a city-dweller, longed for some of the greenness in the film.

One of the biggest thematic inspirations of The Getty Address is the destruction of the American landscape. Not even pure destruction but the genericization suffices. One of the best ideas was that truck scene and the kind of landscape involved. I wanted [Don Henley] essentially coming down the hill to travel on the roads and came to realize what Dave was talking about, that this shouldn’t be a country road, shouldn’t be just a rambling Tolkienesque walking through the roads. The entry to the wilderness itself can be through parking garages, roads, as much as anything else. There are these Greek choruses counseling Henley that there’s a way to see the oceanic expanse of the parking lot as as beautiful as any forest. Even for me it’s hard to say that we should that beauty in our minds because there’s no other recourse. But even in all this madness, there’s a sort of beauty in the craziness. The city’s industrial heat and creativity that you don’t find in other places, for instance.

At one point, you show the image of Fu-Hsi, creator of the I-Ching, in the clouds and dedicate the segment to him. What’s the meaning behind that?

I was thinking less of [Fu-Hsi’s] role as the creator of the I-Ching and more of his role as founder of Chinese civilization. Legend holds that Fu-Hsi taught the people hunting and gathering, and his successor Shennang taught them farming and settling. I was attracted by the accurate mythologization of the prehistory of a people.

Plus, he inexplicably has horns, just like Michelangelo's Moses, another mythical leader/colonizer guiding his flock to a promised or maybe just imagined fertile land.

That’s complicated. I need to think about that! Speaking of understanding method and philosophy, Thirteen does a series where you see the process of the artist at work rather than just looking at a finished product on a museum wall. Do you think it’d give great insight into your film to see your mental process at work, say as a special feature on a DVD?

I’m not sure if everyone would quite get my process, or be interested in all the dull moments, but sometimes it does help to explain where things came from. You’re kind of jumping from the rigors of “Okay, I need to make this finger palm the cicadas” to moments where it’s really exciting. The inspiration might be more exciting than the process in my work – for instance, in “Ponds and Puddles” I was inspired by that incredible seven year brood of cicadas that came to fly around and blindly hump just everything.

Are there any other significant past projects or things you’re working on right now?

This is more or less my corpus right now. There’s a short I did with a friend in Providence, Jeff Mullen. We used his music and I’d like to expand on it later.

Lastly, can I just mention that the scene with the cave paintings and the kangaroos is one of my favorites? It just gets you viscerally.

Thanks. I think it’s actually true they found evidence of body painting that predated cave painting, done in mammoth’s blood.

Only a fact James Sumner would know, and then be able to do something with.