BRENT GREEN.

Byline: CASEY SANCHEZ

Appalachian memento mori

Set halfway between hell and Appalachia, Paulina Hollers is the surreal story of a bad boy named Holler who gets barreled over by a bus and shuttled off to hell. Grief-wracked over his death, Paulina, his religious zealot mother, shoots herself and heads to hell as well -- so she can save him and the pair can escape Satan's clutches. The film is unbelievably raw, set to the punk-folk warblings of the Chicago band Califone. The story is narrated in a mix of fury and optimism set to the fired-up preacher ramblings of Brent Green himself. Earlier this year, The New York Times called his filmed shorts "among the most original animations devised by an artist in years."

Green's work has a mysterious allure, influenced by Bob Dylan's grotesque lyrical renderings of Americana and the macabre and romantic visuals of Tim Burton. He is an auteur in the true sense of that much-abused word -- creating, composing, and filming all of his animations, a process that takes him a month for every minute of video. His animated figures are composed of scrap lumber and metal or drawn on acetate cells, the clear tape used to move the frames still visible in the finished product. He likes leaving the traces of his own handiwork, hoping it inspires

others to create art of their own. In an interview with Pasatiempo, Green said that the traces of human trial and error offer "that connection to these senses of wonder and urgency."

He has had an unbelievable streak of success. In 2005, Creative Capital, an offshoot of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, dropped a sizable grant on this little-known, self-taught artist who lives on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. "I'm really lucky," Green said. "When I finished my first film, I sent it to my five favorite artists and Califone wrote back instantly, and said, 'Do you want to work with us?'" Since then, his work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also tours the country, screening the films and delivering his rollicking monologues over live musical collaborations with figures such as Vic Chesnutt (1964-2009) and Brendan Canty

of the punk band Fugazi.

The heart of Green's films are his monologues, which mix jokes, metaphysics, country lyrics, and snatches of down-home dialogue. For instance, after the death of Holler, Green's voice laments the injustice and inevitably of death: "It's easy for us to do -- die -- because God builds like Frank Lloyd Wright: you can marvel at the mechanics, ingenuity and occasional beauty, but we are by no means sound. We're not even weatherproof."

When mother and son realize that they cannot escape hell, Green describes their plight in the most humane terms, creating a gorgeous list of things we fail to value in life. "We are always forgetting to sing and to move, to look for truth or a giant gospel choir, singing till empty lungs, the threads that hold us here are coming off one by one."

For a young artist, Green has an unusually somber turn of mind. Yet that somberness is balanced by a sprawling reserve of hope. The result is that his animations have the strange quality of being self-help memento moris, surreal and inspiring reminders that we are all going to die -- an event that should be greeted with equal measures of stoic acceptance and ecstatic embrace of life. It's a philosophy, or at least an outlook, that Green says dominates his own personality. In his words: "I am furious and optimistic."

-- Casey Sanchez