Crumb (1994)

 Crumb (1994)

Crumb takes a deeply personal look at 60's counterculture artist Robert Crumb. The film focuses upon three decades of Crumb's artwork to reconstruct his unhappy childhood, days with Zap Comix in the late 60's, `dark side' period and recent life. Interviews with him, his wife Aline, family and friends reveal the motives behind his astounding creativity. Crumb is sometimes hilarious, often depressing and always entertaining – a rare combination in a documentary film.

During childhood, Crumb and his brothers Charles and Maxon found solace from their tyrannical father in comic books and drawing cartoons. Crumb escaped the mental illness that ended both his brother's careers as artists (Charles was equally as talented), but otherwise had a perfectly miserable childhood and adolescence. Socially awkward, bullied at school and rejected by women, he decided in 1962 (at age 17) to take revenge upon society `by becoming a famous artist'. (IMDB steven.swenson)

 Robert Crumb: Jesus. Fuckin' raging, epithet music comin' out 

of every car, every store, every person's head. They don't have 

noisy radios on, they got earphones; like, "motherfuckin', 

cocksuckin', son of a bitch. Lot of aggression. Lot of anger, 

lot of rage. Everybody walks around, they're walkin' advertisements. 

They've got advertisements on their clothes, you know? Walking 

around with "Adidas" written across their chests, '49'ers on 

their hats. Jesus. It's pathetic. It's pitiful. The whole cultures' 

one unified field of bought-sold-market researched everything, 

you know. It used to be that people fermented their own culture, 

you know? It took hundreds of years, and it evolved over time. 

And that's gone in America. People now don't even have any concept 

that there ever was a culture outside of this thing that's created 

to make money. Whatever's the biggest, latest thing, they're into 

it. You just get disgusted after a while with humanity for not 

having more, kind of like, intellectual curiosity about what's 

behind all this jive bullshit.