Sedona News – The Sedona International Film Festival is proud to present the Northern Arizona premiere of “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse”, showing March 7-13 at the Alice Gill-Sheldon Theatre.
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel MAUS is a landmark in reckoning with the Holocaust and breakthrough in serious comic art — but his full achievements are more remarkable and eclectic.
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” provides intimate access to the man and mind who revolutionized the art form of comics. Spiegelman proves an eloquent guide through his provocative work, along with contemporaries and younger cartoonists inspired by Spiegelman’s unflinching confrontation of personally traumatic themes.
“Disaster Is My Muse” could not be more timely — MAUS is an important cautionary tale whose power to move people is unrelenting and its lessons are ever more salient in this climate of rising authoritarianism, racism and antisemitism. And in his work since MAUS, including the provocative social commentary of his covers for The New Yorker magazine and his second masterpiece “In The Shadow of No Towers”, Art has firmly established himself as one of our leading public intellectuals. Today, with book bans on the rise (MAUS has been taken off shelves and curricula in Tennessee, Missouri, and Iowa) and freedom of expression threatened around the country, he continues to be a champion of free speech.
“Disaster Is My Muse” is a portrait of an artist fully engaged with his past and his present who, with his chosen medium of comics, helps us to understand our turbulent world, and is testimony to the power of art to make sense of our personal and collective histories.
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” will be shown at the Alice Gill-Sheldon Theatre March 7-13. Showtimes will be Friday and Saturday, March 7 and 8 at 12:30 p.m.; Sunday and Tuesday, March 9 and 11 at 3:30 p.m.; and Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, March 10, 12 and 13 at 6:30 p.m.
Tickets are $12 general admission, or $9 for Film Festival members. For tickets and more information, please call 928-282-1177. Both the theatre and film festival office are located at 2030 W. Hwy. 89A, in West Sedona. For more information, visit: www.SedonaFilmFestival.org.