By Stephen Silver
Steven Marcus teaches a course at Stockton University called “Art and the Holocaust.” So it was probably apropos, Wednesday night, that Marcus hosted the New Jersey premiere of a documentary about a man named Art, who created one of the most important literary works about the memory of the Holocaust.
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” debuted at film festivals in late 2024. It had a showing in Philadelphia in February, and it’s set for airing on PBS as part of the American Masters series in April. But the only place to see it on a public screen in New Jersey, so far, was a classroom inside Stockton’s Sara & Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center on the evening of March 5.
Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, “Disaster Is My Muse” comes at Spiegelman’s life story from multiple angles, featuring contemporary interviews and lots of archival footage, including numerous appearances at literary festivals.
While we learn about Spiegelman’s time in the world of underground comics, his long marriage to editor Françoise Mouly, and his children, much of the focus of the film is on “Maus,” Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork.
In “Maus,” Spiegelman had the idea to dramatize the Holocaust in graphic novel form, with mice playing the role of Jews. The book was serialized between 1984 and 1991 and published in book form that year.
Maus is equal parts about the Holocaust itself and about the often difficult relationship between Spiegelman — born after the war in 1948 — and his survivor father Vladek, including the stories Vladek told him about surviving Auschwitz. It’s a key text on the subject of the relations between survivors and their children.
“Maus” was a massive literary success, which helped usher in a golden era for graphic novels that inspired the work of many others, like Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and Joe Sacco. But the book’s success also often haunted Spiegelman in the years afterward, something he once drew in the form of a giant mouse chasing him. And more recently, “Maus” has been the subject of book-banning controversies.
Indeed, as evidenced by the “Disaster Is My Muse” subtitle, much of Spiegelman’s work has been inspired by some of the worst things that can happen — the Holocaust, his mother’s death by suicide, and later the 9/11 attacks, which inspired his “In the Shadow of No Towers.”
Steven Marcus is the director of Stockton University’s Holocaust and Genocide Dual-Credit Consortium, which offers college credit from Stockton to high school students who take classes in Holocaust and genocide studies, a couple dozen of whom attended the film screening.
Marcus said that the university heard directly from Cargo Films, the distributor behind “Disaster Is My Muse,” offering to screen it, both because the university has a Holocaust center and because they wanted to have a premiere screening in New Jersey.
Irvin Moreno-Rodriguez, the Holocaust Center’s director, and Marcus insisted on watching the film before committing to an event.
“We came back and all we said to each other was, ‘we’ve gotta screen it,” Moreno-Rodriguez said.
“Because it operates on so many different levels,” Marcus said, pointing to the film’s examination of Spiegelman’s time in the world of underground comics — along with R. Crumb, a longtime favorite of Marcus’ who appears in the documentary.
“The kids that were in there, they don’t know anything about the underground comics, and they don’t know about the ’70s,” Marcus said. “But they know about the art, and they may know about the film.”
Marcus also teaches courses at Stockton on Jews in American Film and America and the Holocaust, in addition to Art of the Holocaust.
“How important, in this day and age, is Holocaust and genocide education?” he asked.
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” will air on PBS’s American Masters series in April, including on the PBS app.
Stephen Silver is a Broomall-based freelance writer.
