Oliphant Documentary Gets Love from Print Media
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During the heyday of Pat Oliphant‘s career editorial cartoonists numbered in the hundreds, down from a high count of thousands, today the population of staff editorial cartoonists maybe a couple dozen. Newspapers these days go with the much cheaper syndicated editoons where they do not have to pay salary or benefits or contribute to retirement funds. In Oliphant’s day newspapers ran syndicated cartoons on the one or two days a week their staff cartoonist took the day off – or the inbetween times when one cartoonist left and the paper was looking for a successor.
So it is a bit of a surprise to see the love showered on the Pat Oliphant documentary.
A Savage Art: The life and cartoons of Pat Oliphant. Bill Banowsky (dir.). Magnolia Pictures, 2025. (documentary, not rated, 88 minutes) https://asavageart.com/
No surprise is Peter Kuper’s praise at the International Journal of Comic Art review:
Oliphant was a rare talent who could cut to the core of his subjects. He identified the defining tells — Nixon’s 12 o’clock shadow, Carter’s shrinking size, Reagan’s blank eyes, George Bush Sr.’s leading chin, Bill Clinton’s snake oiliness, giving readers layers of understanding beyond the headlines.
Others including Ann Telnaes, Bill Mauldin and Adam Zyglis cast a light on the visual alchemy of Oliphant’s drawings and his impact on other cartoonists. (I count myself among the legion of imitators, lifting his Reagan caricature whole-cloth in my early attempts at political cartooning.)
Ania Hull at the Santa Fe New Mexican interviews director and co-writer Bill Banowsky about the film and about the participation of Pat Oliphant, now 90 and legally blind, in the making of the documentary.
A critic once said, “If Pat Oliphant couldn’t draw, he’d be an assassin.”
Luckily, Oliphant — a long-time Santa Fe resident and one of the fiercest and most famous political cartoonists of the 20th century — can certainly draw. And he can sculpt. And he can paint, too.
Even luckier, Oliphant spent six decades, one in his native Australia and five in the U.S., channeling his fury at the political establishment with pencil, ink, pen, and paper.
A Savage Art runs 90 minutes and explores different aspects of Oliphant’s life and career: his beginnings as an artist, his Pulitzer Prize, his family life, the 10 presidents he lampooned, the risks he took. Oliphant also gave annual lectures in political cartooning at the Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Charles Eisendracht, the center’s retired director who brought Oliphant to Wallace House, tells Pasatiempo about the time Oliphant drew a satirical cartoon on the walls inside the center as he was giving a lecture. The drawing, which some thought controversial and that is now known as the “Wall of Shame,” allowed Eisendracht to lead a series of fruitful discussions with the Wallace House community about the nature of censorship.
Stephen Saito at The Movable Fest also interview Bill Banowaky:
“A Savage Art: The Life and Cartoons of Pat Oliphant, Bill Banowsky’s vivacious profile of the satirist, now in his nineties, couldn’t come at a better time when the courage to say what others wouldn’t on the platform available to him seems to be in particularly short supply, especially as the profession that he became one of the all-time greats in is shrinking by the day with fewer newspapers in circulation and even less that have political cartoonists on staff. Diminishing eyesight would force Oliphant to retire in 2015, but he remains as feisty as ever and the cartoons live on as a parade of U.S. presidents may have all had their time in the barrel, with Oliphant cleverly finding an attribute unique to them to size up (or down) their job performance, but the sketches continue to reverberate in their sharpness, speaking to issues in world affairs and American society that still are unresolved.
Coleman Spilde reviews A Savage Art for Salon:
For as clichéd a piece of music as it is, Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a perfectly appropriate score for a film about the life and work of political cartoonist Pat Oliphant. Grieg’s famous composition — written for Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play “Peer Gynt,” and popping up in everything from the “Inspector Gadget” theme song to “Real Housewives” season trailers — is instantly recognizable for its swift sprint toward its electrifying, tense climax.
Fitting, then, that “In the Hall of the Mountain King” opens Bill Banowsky’s new documentary, “A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant.” The composition’s frantic strings and minor chords cleverly emphasize the brilliance of Oliphant’s cartoons depicting the circus of the politically obscene. In a career spanning 61 years, over 10,000 cartoons, 24 illustrated collections and one Pulitzer, Oliphant established himself as one of the world’s preeminent political cartoonists. No person, be they an American president or a civilian critic, could make Oliphant put down his pen — though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Death threats and backlash from those in power were regular responses to Oliphant’s work, reactions he welcomed as proof of a job well done.
This is one of the most critical moments in our country’s history for a documentary like “A Savage Art” to be released. Oliphant understood that his job was to make people look at the truth, and he used humor and ingenuity to do it. “What Pat did in terms of challenging the status quo was quintessentially American,” Oliphant’s son, Grant, says in the film.
A Savage Art is in theaters now, if you are fortunate it is in a theater near you.
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