Even if you don’t know Pat Oliphant’s name, you probably know his work. Oliphant, who is 90, is one of the most influential — and ferocious — political cartoonists of the 20th century. As one commentator in the new documentary “A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant” (in theaters) puts it, “If Pat Oliphant wasn’t a cartoonist, he’d be an assassin.”
The director Bill Banowsky takes a relatively conventional approach, interviewing family members and friends to tell Oliphant’s life story. Born in Australia, he moved to the United States in 1964 to work at The Denver Post, and within a year The Los Angeles Times Syndicate was distributing his cartoons. In 1967, he won the Pulitzer Prize. But he was displeased with the cartoon for which he’d won — he’d submitted what he considered his weakest one of the year on purpose — so he criticized the board’s choice and refused to be considered for any future Pulitzers.
“A Savage Art” makes the case for Oliphant’s placement atop the pantheon of political cartoonists, both in style and substance. Commentators say he was unusually good at locating the cracks in politicians’ facades and capturing them in his drawings, and the film shows the evolution of his depictions throughout the years. It’s a fascinating look at the development of an artist who often courted controversy while goading his readers into thinking, even when they also were reacting.
All of these biographical details are interesting, especially if you’re familiar with some of the 10,000-plus editorial cartoons that Oliphant has produced. But where “A Savage Art” really shines is when it traces the discipline of political cartooning and the satirical edge it’s brought to journalism and commentary for centuries. The film locates the origins in the Protestant Reformation, when images lampooning authority figures helped chip away at hierarchical structures. Then, the development of the lithograph made it more possible to disseminate those pictures widely.
Showing how the cartoons drawn by Thomas Nast were important in developing iconography we still use today (like the donkeys and elephants that represent political parties) and to create actual change (like taking down the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall politician Boss Tweed), the film makes the case for cartooning as not just funny, but — as Oliphant puts it in one interview — “a serious expression of a political thought.” In fact, the film argues, one might see internet memes, with their ability to quickly express an idea in a single image, as an heir to political cartooning.
It’s a compelling history, one that’s especially vital in a time when irony and satire can be hard to pin down. Oliphant is the vehicle for the story, but there’s a bigger point here: that American politics, in particular, are built on a rich heritage of protest, of challenging authority, and that cartooning has been a part of that from the start. However that evolves, and whatever it becomes, Oliphant’s work has played a crucial part.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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