SHORT FEST

Animated Herman Melville short has poignant themes for today

Bruce Fessier
Palm Springs Desert Sun

On first viewing, “Bartleby,” a stop-motion short by two Ivy League art school grads, is a pleasant animation. It has an interesting message about how passive resistance within the workplace can relate to active resistance outside of the workplace.

But, one of the great things about short films, especially when watching them from a website, is you can pause, rewind and observe details you might have initially missed.

On second viewing, “Bartleby,” an adaptation of Herman Melville’s classic short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” looks layered with details that make it seem like an early Oscar contender for the Best Animated Short Film Shortlist.

Laura Naylor and Kristen Kee are the writer-directors who moved into film after graduating from Columbia and Yale, respectively. Naylor's second feature, "The Fix," premiered at AFI Docs and won the jury prize for Best Documentary. Kee, who has a degree in sculpture, adapted Yoko Ono's book, "Grapefruit," into a stop-motion short.

"Bartleby," a 12-minute-Stop motion animation, screens Wednesday as part of the "Outsiders & Underdogs" program at the Camelot Theatres

"Bartleby," which screens at 2 p.m. Wednesday during the "Outsiders & Underdogs" program at the Camelot, is about a Wall Street employee who, after working long hours at a law firm, astonishes his boss by telling him he’d “prefer not to” do his next tasks. Naylor and Kee discussed their 12-minute adaptation via an e-mail conversation.

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THE DESERT SUN: There are so many short films and at least one feature based on Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," I have to ask what was the root source of inspiration for your film – or did it come from reading Melville's short story?

NAYLOR and KEE: Our inspiration comes directly from Melville’s story. We were both been taken by its enigmatic and darkly comic sensibility – after encountering it in high school. our relationship with "Bartleby," and the idea of preferring not to, has only evolved since then. Because we wanted to extend and amplify Melville’s enigmatic story – as opposed to illustrate or reduce it – we purposefully didn't draw inspiration for other cinematic adaptations.

Was there a modern event or character that inspired you to make the film now?

Well, the inspiration was kind of us. We met while working in a tall office tower in Manhattan. We were both art school alums who had no business working in finance, but, like a lot of young artists, we needed day jobs to support our creative work. To cope with the monotony, we filled our days with schemes of making things together – and that's how our plot to adapt "Bartleby" first hatched. "Bartleby" became an avatar who could “prefer not to” while we might still have to. Looking back, in focusing our energies on something we were passionate about, "Bartleby" did eventually help us both prefer our way out of the tall tower. And unlike Melville’s "Bartleby" of 1853, our adaptation is set in the Wall Street of 2011. Re-situated, the story is surprisingly timely.

Melville was a clerk in a customs house and his "Bartleby" seems like a protest against mindless work with the thought that if everyone stopped working because they "preferred not to," they could cripple a capitalist society. Your film takes place in an office where a protest is happening outside. Do you draw a correlation between the contagious nature of Occupy Wall Street and Bartleby's passive resistance?

When we started writing the script we were living a pretty passive, cubicle-based life –where you IM, or now Slack, instead of talk. So that was definitely an intentional move, to thrust Bartleby’s refusals into that context. As we were thinking through the story, too, and contemporizing it, we wanted to do so in a way that was true to the story, but wasn’t ahistorical. So we asked ourselves, “What might "A Story of Wall Street" look like today? What are our Wall Street stories? So we set our "Bartleby" against the backdrop of the Occupy movement. The whole story is backlit, in a way, by active resistance occurring behind Bartleby’s passive refusals. That decision allowed us to start to tease out, hopefully along with our audience, the impact of passive versus active resistance, and to think through the pluses and minuses of all these apes puttering away in cubes. Not saying cubes are bad, or any of it, just asking questions.

"Bartleby" is a stop motion animated adaptation of a Herman Melville short story screening at 2 p.m. Wednesday during ShortFest,

There's such great attention to detail in the film. I love that the wall hangings go from "Life Is A Beach" to really dark themes, including a picture of a pope on a crusade with the words "Prefer not." Is that something you inserted into the story to encourage passive resistance to oppression?

We loved the idea of having the physical world slowly shift in response to Bartleby's escalating refusals – and his boss’s increasingly frazzled mental state. Much of the text (on wall hangings, computers screens, papers) eventually transforms into versions of "I Prefer Not To," a subtle visual nod to the power of passive resistance to effect the people and world around you. We also used camera angles to emphasize the shifting power dynamic between Bartleby and his employer. You'll see that, as the story progresses, we tend to shoot Bartleby from a lower angle, giving him a looming, powerful quality that he doesn't have when he first enters the narrative as a meek and obedient worker bee.

I like the fact that placing the story in modern times with the scriveners becoming word or data processors adds the possibility of a new interpretation: That communicating via computer leads to isolation and "miserable friendlessness." But I'm confused by having the news come from a TV set instead of a computer, as the boss eats a TV dinner. What was the thought behind having him get his news from "Pox" TV in this era when most people get their news from online?

In the film, our characters consume news both online (in the end, the employer learns of Bartleby's fate through an IM with a link to online news) and network TV (in the scene where Bartleby's employer is watching Pox TV and eating a sad TV dinner). Both mediums can be isolating and contribute to the "miserable friendlessness" we see in all the characters in the film. We loved the double meaning embedded in having the employer's thoughts about Bartleby's sad isolation be projected on a screen – hopefully to make it clear that both the boss and Bartleby are rather miserable and friendless. Placing the sad boss alone in a bathrobe, in the dark, passively consuming empty talking heads on TV, seemed the perfect moment to communicate this. And the two media – TV and internet news – aren't necessarily that distinct at this point.

Why did you choose to make this film in stop-motion animation?

We were drawn to the control and the level of creativity stop-motion offers. It requires you to make so many creative choices; none is predetermined or given. It’s a great thought problem, and probably appealed to our inner art student. And, given the amount of visual license we wanted to take with the story, it made a lot of sense to exercise that amount of control. Like, how do you engage viewers in a largely diaristic narrative in which nothing happens? There are a lot of ways you could tackle that one, but we decided to create a world unto itself, a world with its own rules and creatures.

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How long did it take you to make the film and what were the biggest hurdles?

Two years! We finished the script mid 2015 and, after assembling our team, spent the fall fabricating and building all of our puppets, props, and sets. We shot in a warehouse in Brooklyn for the first six months of 2016, and then spent the second half doing post-production Stop motion is risky and challenging, and neither of us had ever attempted it on this scale before. There was a steep learning curve and, even when we were up and running, every 8-second shot (that took an entire day to shoot) was rife with risks. We’d bump the table and have to start the shot all over, for example. Also, stop motion requires a surprising degree of premeditation. Because of the time-intensive nature of the medium, there is no room, or time, to shoot first and decide later. As a director, you need to make all of your decisions before you shoot. That was an incredibly rich challenge, and the opposite of a typical documentary or studio art practice, where you’re constantly gathering as much as you can, experimenting, and sorting through it later. 

Why did you choose to enter the film in the Palm Springs ShortFest and commit to attending the festival?

Palm Springs ShortFest is one of the premiere international festivals for short work and is Academy Qualifying so it was on the top of our submissions list. Because of its proximity to L.A., it's a great industry festival with lots of opportunities to network, learn and meet other makers, which is why we made it a priority to attend. Heat notwithstanding, we couldn't be more excited to be here with "Bartleby."