The Crack-Up (2017)
Jonathan Schwartz
The Crack-Up, Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 16mm > digital, 18 min, 2017
The ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
An excursion through fear, near collapse, and transformation that takes its name from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 autobiographical essay. Reflecting on life’s “process of breaking down,” it is both extremely personal and also relevant to the difficult times we live in. With sublime 16mm footage of glaciers, monumental snow-covered landscapes, and an icy, roiling sea, The Crack-Up alternates strident sounds and brash rhythms and gestures of the camera with moments of arresting fragility and grace. Danger, death, the unexpected chaos and destruction of life are all evoked with almost no human presence in the image. The sound of wind, rain, the cracking of frozen earth occasionally gives way to two voices: a female voice reciting from Fitzgerald’s text and a male voice struggling to use language at all.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Canyon Cinema.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy of Canyon Cinema © estate of Jonathan Schwartz.
About the artist
Jonathan Schwartz (USA) was a filmmaker born in New York City in 1973. His films “incorporate handheld gestures, in-camera superimpositions, and an acute attention to the transient qualities of the world. Whether shot near his home in Vermont or during cinematic journeys to India, Turkey, or Iceland, his work embodies a devotion to the ephemerality of external worlds and a responsiveness to profound and shifting internal states” (Irina Leimbacher). He received an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. His films, including For Them Ending (2005), Nothing Is over Nothing (2008), and Animals Moving to the Sound of Drums (2013), have screened at numerous international venues including UnionDocs, Los Angeles Film Forum, San Francisco Cinematheque, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, EXiS, and Ann Arbor Film Festival, with a complete retrospective presented at Punto de Vista Film Festival in 2019. In 2010, he was included in The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Avant-Garde Poll in Film Comment as one of 25 Filmmakers for the 21st century. He was an associate professor in the Film Department at Keene State College from 2008–2018. His film A Leaf Is the Sea Is a Theatre (2017) was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Media City Film Festival in 2018. His untimely passing in 2018 is still mourned by loved ones, colleagues, and the world of artists’ cinema.