Tom Gibbons serves up a Kafkaesque experience in The Hunger Artist. © Tom Gibbons.

The Hunger Artist
Animator Tom Gibbons did the sensible thing when he decided to make a film version of Kafka’s short story; he blacked out the windows of his Oakland warehouse residence, built some sets, and lived in the dark for 18 months. Sacrificing legroom, and keeping a close eye on his cats, he was rewarded with an all-expenses-paid studio space. His dedication paid off; The Hunger Artist is a triumph of grand-scale intimacy, of tiny emotional machinations played out in a seemingly vast and gorgeous space.

The subject of the piece is the cadaverous Artist, who, at the beginning of the film, arrives before a cage built into a downtown street like a storefront. Locked inside and provided with only an alarm clock and a day-by-day calendar with 40 peel-away pages, the Artist must simply survive for the duration, to the morbid delight of passersby. Listlessly pacing the ample length of his cell, his torso inhabiting suspendered pants like the shaft of a half-open umbrella, the Artist awaits his crowds of admirers — who never arrive. As weeks pass, gazing up at the empty windows of the apartments across the street, he’s seized with delirium and imagines himself the star attraction of a stadium-bound carnival, the hands of unseen throngs applauding and showering him with flowers. When his time is finally up, he can’t face the humiliation of his ignored performance, and he surprises his gatekeeper by refusing to leave the cage.

The scope of The Hunger Artist feels enormous, with high-ceilinged sets and elaborately detailed character dressing. The loving grotesquerie of the character designs are obviously reminiscent of Henry Selick and Tim Burton, but here whimsy has been replaced with harder dramatic irony: The Artist is a fully three-dimensional object while the men and women in the crowd have faces cut from cardboard, their smiles frozen in time, forever bemused. The stadium’s master of ceremonies, with his prickly extremities and pre-verbal gutturals, isn’t someone you’re likely soon to forget.

The pacing, lighting, and some impressive effects work all add up to a, well, Kafkaesque experience. The Hunger Artist won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at Slamdance in 2002, and has won awards at six additional festivals. It was produced independently.