“I’m fascinated with giganticness,” Isaiah Zagar says, as his tightly-framed face fills the screen. Appropriately, his life’s career has been spent creating enormous mosaics, vast, colorful and frankly joyous work which encrusts entire buildings, from floor to ceiling, inside and out, alleys and rooftops. His work is a well-known fixture of Philadelphia’s South Street neighborhood.
“I’ve always been an artist,” he says, and it’s true. But there’s something more to Isaiah’s art. For years, he kept journals, many of which are filled with self-portraits that recall various artists – Picasso, Kahlo, Rembrandt. As he sees it, his mosaics are an extension of that work, in which he (somewhat abstractly) chronicles his own life story and family history on a grand scale. In some ways, it echoes a practice (exacerbated in our overshare-prone digital culture) which some have of documenting each small moment of their life, perhaps in order to convince themselves that their existence will not be forgotten. Isaiah just does it out in the open for everyone to see.
Recently, Isaiah and his wife Julia became the focus of In a Dream, a documentary made by their younger son, Jeremiah. The film follows the couple as a harrowing period in their marriage unfolds. It also does a fine job of capturing the life and mind of an artist who repeatedly works into his art the phrase, “Art is the center of the real world.”
And interesting stories come to the surface. For instance, Zagar learns that Isaiah had tried to commit suicide at age 29, and when he came home from the asylum to which he had been committed, he and Julia conceived their older son, Ezekiel. (This is news to Ezekiel.)
It’s also a meditation on the long arm of the effects parents have on their children. The Zagars appear to have been pretty good parents – filmmaker Jeremiah seems to harbor no animosity toward them – but Isaiah’s emotional instability has been passed on to his older son, and his artistic instincts have been planted in Jeremiah. Julia and Isaiah also run a gallery and live in a house in which every inch of the walls and ceilings are covered with mosaics. Not a typical upbringing, and one that appears to have had a profound effect on their children.
In a Dream would make an ideal artist biopic (I nominate a bewhiskered Chris Cooper to play Isaiah). It has all the right elements: romance, passion, love, mental illness, an evolution of artistic style and form, and a vaguely megalomaniac protagonist who, despite his foibles, is nonetheless far more lovable than a lot of artists who appear onscreen. Julia describes him as “crazy and self-absorbed, but amiable.”
And this is where it gets interesting. As I watched In a Dream, I wondered how different the finished product was from Zagar’s initial vision. The first third of the film is a simple exploration of his father’s work and his parent’s history, as they have children, buy derelict buildings in Philadelphia and turn them into mosaic-houses for rent, and generally live a good life. It plays as a better kind of home movie, of the variety in which high school students are instructed to find out about their parents’ roots. Of their days as artists, gallerists, and parents, Julia says, “For years, we were living in a dream.”
But suddenly, a strange thing happens: as Jeremiah is making the film, Isaiah makes a life-altering confession, and the Zagars’ marriage begins to come apart at the seams. Simultaneously, Ezekiel moves home after a failed marriage and checks himself into rehab. Isaiah is still making his work, but Julia is devastated and the family is left reeling. Amazingly, the third act sounds notes of redemption: all is not well, but the Zagars look like they may make it after all.
And this is where I wondered how much effect the presence of Jeremiah and his camera had on the story. It’s bad enough to go through marital troubles in front of your own grown children. But to have a camera trained on you in a moment of extreme vulnerability can only add to the tension. Then again, Julia and Isaiah never seemed to be too worried about being vulnerable on camera (there’s a lot of benign footage of them playfully and nakedly cavorting in their younger days). But it’s impossible to imagine that the camera didn’t exert some force.
In the end, I was left pondering how the film managed to hang together so well, even though it seemed to veer off track mid-way through. And then, I realized what the connection is: mosaics.
Isaiah began making mosaics because he wanted to break things. He takes stone, glass, and ordinary materials, breaks them with a hammer, and then puts them back together, “one piece at a time,” as he says. He makes them colorful and meaningful by the things they depict.
Julia, on the other hand, says of Isaiah’s time recovering from mental illness, “I was his reality base, and he was my bird.” She is the strong one. And as it turns out, Isaiah is her mosaic: he is broken into pieces, and she is putting him back together – not because she has to, but because she is drawn toward the work of creating something beautiful from a broken man.