One of the buzzier cultural events on the cinematic calendar in recent years has been the annual celebration of Bleak Week, a repertory block designed to celebrate the “cinema of despair.” What started as a cheeky attempt to create a Shark Week style marathon for arthouse cinema’s most notoriously dour, punishing missives in the cultural hubs of Los Angeles & New York City has since escalated to a global-scale film festival. In its fifth year, Bleak Week was celebrated by over a hundred theaters in over seventy international cities, each with their own unique lineups of hopeless, despairing classics. It’s proven to be a remarkably popular event, which means that it’s only going to expand even further in the coming years before cinematic masochists everywhere tap out and declare that we’ve already suffered enough. As a result, repertory programmers across the globe are soon going to run out of the more obvious Todd Solondz, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier titles that would conveniently pad out an annual Bleak Week schedule, and they’re going to have to venture further into the cinematic abyss for bleak deep cuts to avoid repeating themselves. To that end, I would humbly recommend that rep programmers consider screening Douglas Buck’s 2003 short film collection Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America in future Bleak Week celebrations. Not only does it match the general Bleak Week vibe in its early-aughts edgelord miserabilism, but its structure as a tryptic of shorts would fit right in with the typical rhythms of a festival program (especially as a reprieve from lengthier Bleak Week regulars like Bela Tarr’s 7-hour stunner Sátántangó).

The subtitle “A Trilogy of America” makes Family Portraits sound like it tackles a much broader topic than what it actually covers. Buck’s trademark short films specifically depict the failures of American fatherhood, not America as a whole. The fathers in all three of its vignettes are dead-eyed, emotionally unavailable brutes guilty of domestic violence and incest. The other descriptor Buck used to describe these shocking portraits of bad dads was “a Suburban Holocaust trilogy,” signaling the shorts’ penchant for inhuman cruelty and their anonymous setting in the suburbs of Everywhere, America. Just as depressing as the passionless acts of familial violence is the pervasive blandness of the mise-en-scène, as these fucked up domestic dramas are staged in loveless, artless homes with cheap appliances and no distinguishing character. In “Cutting Moments”, a lonely housewife mutilates herself in a desperate attempt to distract her abusive husband from a televised baseball game. In “Home”, a lonely housewife struggles to conform to the self-flagellating religious rituals of her Evangelist husband, who’d rather slaughter his family than pursue a healthier relationship with his sexuality. In the longest, concluding segment, “Prologue”, a lonely housewife discovers a cache of her husband’s crude artworks that confess his double life as a small-town serial killer. In all three shorts, the men profiled are serial rapists of children and terminate their loveless marriages in horrifically violent acts. They’re all variations on the same bleak idea: that the American family unit is rotten at its core, that most of the nation’s bleakest horrors play out quietly behind closed suburban doors.

“Cutting Moments” was Douglas Buck’s student film, and you can feel a youthful eagerness to resolve the tension of its suburban despair in the shocking violence of its conclusion (which features gore effects from horror legend Tom Savini). By the time Buck made “Prologue”, he was much more willing to sit in a rotten mood without offering his audience the violent catharsis of genre filmmaking (despite horror mainstay Larry Fessenden’s appearance in a small role). Not only is “Prologue” the longest & quietest segment, but it’s also the only one where all of the sensational violence has already occurred years before the story’s start, and all the audience can do is chill in the aftermath. Its ice-cold sparseness in mood & setting recalls the arthouse abstraction of James Benning’s Landscape Suicide more than any shock-value horror title, whereas “Home” & “Cutting Moments” wouldn’t feel out of place as standalone segments in the Masters of Horror miniseries. In a way, Buck’s Family Portraits are their own mini Bleak Week program, condensed down to 100 convenient, squirmy minutes. The genius of the anthology’s sequencing is in how it gets bleaker as it goes along, despite opening with its most attention-grabbing acts of onscreen brutality. Whether you live in a city that has yet to initiate its own Bleak Week celebrations (such as New Orleans, which has yet to participate in this relatively new tradition) or you already miss that cold, despairing feeling and can’t wait for next year’s program to come around, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America is the perfect Bleak Week microdose to help you get through the sunnier days of summer blockbuster season, as ruled over by the tyranny of joyful entertainment.

-Brandon Ledet