Nestled way up in the south of Maine, the Camden International Film Festival is galvanized by incredible programming which spotlights offbeat, unusual films. The festival is a celebration of the best and boldest genre-bending experimentation.

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MY AUTONOMOUS NEIGHBOR

A common failing among art documentaries is the tendency to approach one’s subject with a too sterile objectivity. There’s almost a fear that drawing the audience’s attention to the filmmaking itself might dilute their interest or admiration for the art or artist they’re examining. The end results are stylistically dull and intellectually myopic puff pieces that play less like documentaries than Saturday night PBS specials. Michel Negroponte’s My Autonomous Neighbor defiantly rejects these banalities as it seeks not only to explore the mind and work of its subject but to emulate said work through the filmmaking. 

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The film examines outsider artist and philosopher Fred “Tate” Billings, a retired member of the National Guard who’s spending his twilight years assembling bizarre and beautiful collages and automatic drawings. Nestled away in the Catskills, his home is a ramshackle shrine to cultural camp ephemera with his walls, cupboards, and crannies all stuffed with all manner of cheap doodads and knickknacks he’s rescued from gift shops and goodwill stores. While his physical collages sanctify the chintzy detritus of our disposable capitalist society, his automatic drawings attempt to channel what he describes as the unconscious pulsations of the bardo, the liminal state of consciousness between death and rebirth. He travels to an area charged with some kind of energy—a beautiful landscape, a Civil War battlefield, an ancient Manhattan church—and scribbles circles and waves on an easel with pencils in both hands. After he’s covered said easel, he looks for patterns within the lines that form objects and figures which he isolates with an eraser and inks with a pen. The result are collections of psychically generated curios he assembles into scrapbooks like collections of escaped figures from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

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Billings is just as interesting as his work, going on long tangents about his creations and philosophies, especially those concerning the tyranny of linear time and resurrection. (He claims his first words were “Oh no, I’m back again.”) But what makes the film particularly unique is how Negroponte channels Billings’ collage process, creating a loose, non-linear experience stuffed with color-filtered footage from Republic Pictures serials, old postcards, and surrealist green screen segments of Billings dancing or posing for photographs. This is a film so enamored with its subject that it tries to mimic him. And miraculously, it succeeds. That old saying about imitation and flattery has never been more true.