Through the Screen and Into the Psyche

The mind is generally considered the province of literature. “I don’t know what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me,” as novelist David Foster Wallace once put it. “A great book allows me to leap over that wall.”

With words and a handful of punctuation marks (the only tools in the author’s kit), a writer can conjure up a character’s thoughts and emotions quickly and gracefully. Take the first few sentences of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground: “I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” Welcome to the frenzied interior world of the Underground Man.

Can a film—and especially a documentary film—do this? Yes, but it’s complex. When Ania Gruszczyńska and I started working on Sparni, we decided we wanted to give viewers a peek inside Pierce “Sparni” Sparnroft, a jazz vibraphonist living with bipolar disorder. We would have to do with image (and sound) what the best writers can do with language.

In preparation, Ania and I watched documentaries about mental illness—and learned as much about what we didn’t want to do as what we did.

There was one feature film called A Summer in the Cage, about a man in his late 20s who begins to show signs of severe bipolar disorder and whose crises are captured in real time. In one disturbing sequence, he bows before a statue of Theodore Roosevelt, strips down to his shorts, and wades into a lake in Central Park. Back on land, he dredges up the story of his father’s gruesome death while speaking with a group of strangers.

Ania and I respected the film but weren’t eager to emulate it. We were uneasy about barging in with our gear whenever Sparni was most manic, most depressed, most vulnerable; and even if we did, the footage would’ve missed what was going on internally. The camera is not an X-ray machine; it cannot penetrate the skin, much less the psyche.

So we needed another approach if we were going to turn Sparni inside out. One of our professors at Columbia Journalism School had nudged us in the right direction when he screened Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, a short documentary about an artist struggling with anxiety and depression. The film deals with mental health through interviews—the artist describes her symptoms in great detail—and, simultaneously, through audiovisual analogies: quick cutting, distorted images and cacophonous ambient noises accompany a discussion of sensory overload; the claustrophobic panic of shopping at Costco is illustrated by special effects (the aisles close in like the walls of the trash compactor in the original Star Wars movie). This type of filmmaking appealed to me and Ania. We would need to get creative in order to render Sparni’s inner life as tangibly as possible.

My epiphany came one afternoon in mid-June 2023. I was thinking about the advice of that same professor: “We want to see the world through Sparni’s eyes,” he had said—and it occurred to me that since Sparni is a musician, we should want to hear the world through Sparni’s ears, too.

I recalled one line in particular from an interview with Sparni: “It feels like I have an internal monologue and, like, seven other internal monologues going on at the same time,” Sparni had said. Well, what if the documentary started on a black screen, with a metronome ticking away like a grandfather clock on steroids, followed by a crescendo of Sparni’s sound bites: intelligible at first, but increasingly more distorted, more chaotic, overlapping as if competing to be heard, until finally—the roar of a cymbal along with the title of the film? Not only was this a way of listening to what it can sound like in Sparni’s head; it was also akin to greeting viewers with an uppercut to the jaw. The goal of storytelling is to arrest, sustain, and reward the audience’s attention—and a punch in the mouth is arresting alright.

Audio became an essential part of the documentary. Consider the scene in which Sparni tries to practice the vibraphone during a manic episode. “When I’m in a manic state,” Sparni had said, “my headspace feels really loud and disjointed.” Cue the clashing, cluttered sound bites, plus rapid jumping from image to image and melody to melody. Sparni had spoken about sensory overload, too, and how music can sometimes seem like a barrage of sounds. When Sparni makes that point in the film, a hectic drum solo rages in the background.

But what about the video? What would we show, for instance, when Sparni describes having visual hallucinations? That answer came in early July, and this time it was Ania’s eureka moment: One day she told me she’d figured out how to use an iPad to design animations. This opened up a new route into Sparni. Ania is a talented illustrator (she could spend class doodling a portrait of the professor and it would be as intricate and accurate as a police sketch), and her animations—“Aniamations,” as I prefer to call them—made the invisible visible. Her pen gave form and shape to Sparni’s feelings, memories, visions. Now we could, in effect, see the world through Sparni’s eyes.

These techniques have their limits. Deploy them too often and they lose their potency. A film is consumed in one sitting—or at least it should be—so it needs variation: day scenes followed by night scenes, slow scenes by fast scenes, heavier scenes by lighter scenes, no cinematic device overused, the alternating current keeping the audience engaged. There is an element of approximation to this style of filmmaking as well. Making Sparni’s point of view visible and audible required us to introduce our own spin on what Sparni had told us. We couldn’t show (or know) exactly what it’s like inside Sparni, but we could give viewers our impression.

In other words, through documentary filmmaking, we could allow the audience a chance to leap over the wall, to see what it’s like for one person to live with bipolar disorder. There is knowledge in this endeavor, and knowledge is the first step toward understanding. Understanding, in turn, can help defeat stigma. This is the merit of a nuanced portrait in image and sound. There is no stereotype here. There is only Sparni.