Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

directed by Philip Dolin & Molly Bernstein, 98 minutes

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. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC 2024, 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.