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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Joann Sfar’s Spurious Gainsbourg “Graphic Novel”
Posted: January 14, 2011
Some may call me oversensitive, but my tingling “Snidey sense” rarely fails me when it comes to mentions of comics. I was reading Wally Hammond’s review of Joann Sfar‘s Gainsbourg DVD in Time Out #2107 (page 72, January 6-12, 2011). He writes that Sfar is “adapting his own graphic novel”. There is actually no pre-existing graphic novel of Gainsbourg by Sfar to adapt. What there is, is a huge 450-page book of drawings by Sfar but this was published after the movie and compiles artworks, storyboards, sketches, which he made while preparing and directing the movie, but this is not a graphic novel as source material.
Second, and linked to this, I also take issue with the lazy film-reviewer shortcut of using the ‘C’ word and equating almost anything comics-related (even if in this case the film is not an adaptation and the only connection is that Sfar is a graphic novelist first and foremost) with being self-evidently shallow and slapdash, as in this phrase: “The film maintains a comic-strip insouciance showing neither great depth nor over-fastidiousness with the historical record…”. The prejudice seems obvious to me here - the whole comics medium as valid as film, older than and foundational to film, and today easily the equal of film, is reduced and dismissed. Even the consciously awkward, almost sneery use of the term “comic-strip” underlines this snubbing.
I noticed the same error re the graphic novel source of Gainsbourg in Time Out‘s online review by one “BR” who chimes: “Here, the celebrity biopic is given a wild and wicked makeover with the help of director Joann Sfar’s source graphic novel, blending real life, comic book and musical.”
At least somebody out here is watching…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
