AT THE INTERSECTION OF FINE ART AND FILM

The Semi-Fictional Characters of Sarah Jane Lapp

By Tina Borders

Sarah Jane Lapp has been making films since 1994, but has been drawing for the last 25 years. “I think I’m on my 15th short format film. I haven’t counted,” she says. Of those 15 films, about half are animated and the rest are live action.

In November, Artist Trust awarded Lapp a Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, granting her $6,500 to finish her current work in progress, an animated feature called Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist . The first chapter premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2006.

Born in Minneapolis, Lapp attended Brown University where she graduated with honors in Creative Writing. When she entered school she’d planned on becoming a playwright, but she says that changed when one of her professors thought she should be a filmmaker because her style of thinking was very image oriented. Later, after winning a Fullbright Fellowship, she met a key person affiliated with the Film Academy in the Czech Republic and was able to work abroad.

Her first compilation of 16mm and 35mm films explored the religious imagination and comic impulses of displaced persons, primarily denizens of the Czech Republic, among whom she was living and training artistically. Those themes are apparent in her 1999 film Happy Are The Happy (your best joke, please) , which she co-directed with artist and filmmaker Jenny Perlin. The same year, Lapp received her MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the film, Lapp and Perlin interview war survivors of atrocities such as the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But instead of asking the obvious questions, the filmmakers want their subjects’ best jokes, please, and use them to focus on how these survivors relied on humor to cope with their horrific situations.

Lapp arrived in Seattle in 2001. “Currently, I use filmmaking to investigate practices of conceptual love-institutionalized exercises of kindness, sweetness, gift-making,” she says. Celluloid, she adds, allows her to create semi-fictional composites to express her ideas, as in Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist and Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper (2002). The stripper and the eulogist are “conceits through which I may archive and animate people, detritus, and historic moments that seem otherwise ephemeral.”

Eulogist is made in HD, a radical departure for Lapp who is used to working without the aid of computers. While being interviewed for this article, she was riding a city bus and reading her Final Cut Pro manual.

“I produce all my own animation which is hand-drawn on paper with India ink, gouache, and wax-usually referred to as its former industry name, cell animation,” says Lapp. She also shoots the drawings herself, but admits, “I am no genius with camera parts,” and typically relies on an assistant who is familiar with Oxberry camera mechanics.

Since Lapp has the ability to draw, she’s been able to work in other mediums other than film and makes her living off the sale of her drawings and paintings. “Drawing is a way of thinking. There’s a certain amount of drawing that has to come out,” she says. She has served as an op-artist for the Seattle P-I, with illustrations that poke fun at politics, social problems, and at least one questioning the architectural genius of one of Seattle’s Public Libraries. She also made a pair of promotional “bumpers” for the Seattle Channel to advertise its Art Zone show, called The Skeleton and Swarm.

Working in film remains her passion. “Filmmaking is a gathering of resources and effort and will. You have to will films into existence,” she says. “I like making films as gifts. It’s really a way to explain how you feel about things without words. Film is about creating an atmosphere of questions, not answers. I like films that have you enter a state of grace.”