TRT 7:30, 2025.
Nik Nerburn: Fabulist, Genealogist, Storm Chaser
By Christina Schmid
DRAFT
Nik Nerburn is the quintessential storyteller: Television’s episodic sitcom structure meets midwestern gothic in his short films that are at times humorous, dreamlike, and dark. Moody and atmospheric, they draw on an archive of family lore. Like a favorite hand-me-down sweater, these stories fade and sag and somehow take on a life of their own. Nerburn’s films pay tribute to this curious liveliness and spin tales that conjure worlds within worlds and always involve the used, worn, and lived in. No Such Thing As Bad Weather (2025) runs seven and a half minutes and, like most of the artist’s recent work, is shot in a second hand vintage dollhouse sourced online. The hand-made miniature of perfectly aligned proportions comes complete with signs of use. A child’s pencil scratches on floral wallpaper ensure that viewers catch on: This object has had another life before becoming the set for an experimental film. The real-ness matters. More than mere retro vibe, it steeps each scene in memory that is more than personal recollection. It gestures at the life of the object, its scuffs and scars. Nerburn shares this love of the flawed and discarded with puppeteers and animators, most notably the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer.
Unlike puppeteers of old, Nerburn does not pull strings to animate his characters. Instead, sound and lighting, combined with objects and gestures that function as stand-ins for characters, bring his tales to life. A rich sense of deja-vu permeates his films, a familiarity that is both uncanny and inviting. Characters, too, are vaguely familiar, more type than personality – the father, the mother, the milkman – more archetypal caricature than distinct personality. Nerburn shares this approach to character construction with Czech animation.[1] Finally, there is the storyteller himself, always implied as a “you”, never present on screen, but undeniably a keen observer of the wicked and the weird.
Nerburn’s films tell stories in an understated and surreal way. Decor and point of view are considered with uncanny attention to detail. The opening sequence to No Such Thing As Bad Weather is a case in point. From a living room, the camera orients us toward an entryway where a chandelier, floral wallpaper, two wall-hung oval silhouettes, and a staircase with a dark wooden railing locate us in a midwestern home. A carefully composed soundscape along with a flash of lightning seem to contradict the eponymous old adage: bad weather, indeed. But something is amiss. Right in the center of this ordinary-enough tableau there looms an oddity - a tree. Its trunk is whittled to resemble the marks left by beaver teeth and its branches extend like limbs. Curiously figure-like it stands, inexplicably, on the threshold between entryway and living room, out of place – a dreamlike intrusion, a haunting specter that interrupts the modest domestic. Only much later does its presence acquire significance.
As the storm sounds subside, the narrative unfolds in a series of vignettes, accompanied by short captions that take the place of dialogue. Nerburn introduces a set of characters by way of triangulation: a narrator – “I hate this weather,” the initial caption reads – is revealed as the father – “Your mom likes it cold in the house” – talking to a child who listens to the adults talking. And disagreeing. Though the temperature and thermostat settings serve as the acute reasons for marital and parental strife, the way that Nerburn tells the story always hints at something else that hovers unsaid in between image, sound, gesture, and captions – a sense of foreboding perhaps, amplified by the lighting, which is reminiscent of film noir with dramatic contrasts and deep shadows.
But amid the ominous, there is humor. Visual puns abound. The mother appears on screen first as a live cat, then as a puppet paw that shreds the window plastic that went on too soon, and finally as a sinister stuffed cat face whose glassy eyes glow mysteriously in the bedroom’s near dark. Her only captioned utterance contrasts sharply with the father’s amicable voice: “Your father is an asshole.” Her words cut through the façade of happy family life. The film’s final scene shows the mother/cat eating grass. In a twist on an Iowa saying about cats eating grass, the caption reads, “When your mom eats grass like that, it’s usually going to storm.” But the storm has already hit in Bad Weather: Farmer’s almanac aside, the cat’s timing is off. Time is loopy.
Save for one scene, the parents do not share the screen. The captions that give voice to the father only appear when the mother/cat is absent or asleep: “Your mom’s asleep, right?” He checks with the implied, silent child before cutting the grass, which, in another confusion of inside and outside, sprouts jungle-like in one of the rooms. Personified by two live hands that seem about sofa-sized in the dollhouse world, the father uses kitchen scissors for the task. Nerburn borrows such breaks in the logic of scale and proportion from the toolkit of puppetry, where the breakage of the law of illusion adds an edge of anarchic humor and irreverence.
But as funny as they are, the deliberate confusions of scale, of inside and outside, and even of time’s progression serve an ulterior purpose: An illusion comes undone. And as the carefully constructed world of domestic fantasy frays, other potent myths unravel: There is no wholesome family idyll here, no vision of the Midwest as a place of happy lumberjacks and sturdy pioneers who toil in golden fields of wheat. Instead, in a film titled The Milkman, Nerburn takes us to the cold desolation of “Winter Street,” into family tragedies and secrets that knowing characters spill as if to protect others from the lure of a too-perfect illusion. This is where Nerburn, following in the footsteps of Jan Svankmajer and others, delivers stealthy political and social commentary.
While the gesture of dismantling myths and stereotypes is far from uncommon in contemporary art, the sensibility that Nerburn brings to his material as well as the unique archive of stories he draws on make the work fresh. As folksy familial tales give way to something more sinister, the films maintain a lightness and affection for the material that is palpable. The films gently unravel stories that come with the patina of much-told tales. Masculinity in particular, though never questioned explicitly, is explored and subtly complicated in Nerburn’s films narrative. The point is never some grand denouement and correction than an open invitation to question, to look behind the smooth surface of appearances and note the moments and places where details misalign and fissures open. The visual breaks in scale and proportion most prominently embody the cracks and incongruities that hide in the stories themselves.
The way Nerburn handles his material is invariably playful: Stories nestle within stories. In Bad Weather, one such story begins with a question - “Did you know your grandpa could see things before they happened?” A black and white photograph of a man leaning on a sign that promises home cooked meals features an actual ancestor of Nerburn, Charles Crofoot. The gift of sight, though, did not save him one stormy night when a tree, almost chewed through by a beaver, fell and killed him. Visual paradox meets narrative irony in this tragedy. At last, the striking presence of the tree in the film’s opening scene makes sense. On second viewing, the film, along with the story, has changed. Divining the future – whether by cats’ grass eating habits or clairvoyance – is uncertain business.
Rich with innuendo and allusion, Nerburn’s practice steps into a tradition of film-making that has no truck with grand illusions of perfect worlds that hide the messy signs of their own making. Instead, there is a deep affection for the ways stories, like dollhouses, are built from scrap and used as a projection screen for many fantasies. Nerburn re-purposes them, like the dollhouses, with all their scratches and dings to tell yet another story.