Clings and Burns explores the role of Robert Fleming, the artist’s father, in the firebombing by U.S. forces of 68 Japanese cities during World War II, including residential areas. The impetus for the film was the artist’s discovery of a small photograph showing a bomb site over the city of Nagoya with a date stamp of 3:12:45 among his father’s shoe box of photos and mementos from the war. This triggered questions and research as to what that photo represented and how to make sense of it from both a personal and societal perspective.
The film has two channels. It is centered around a fictional legal deposition of Mr. Fleming and archival footage (U.S. and Japanese), as well as family photos and military personnel records. David Mitchell is the film editor and, together with Joe Stocker, also provided sound editing.
Bob Fleming is a visual artist. He works primarily in painting and printmaking, and is a co-founder of Mirabo Press, a printmaking studio in Buffalo, N.Y. Fleming‘s practice, which has tended toward the representational and figurative, is a reaction to living in an era that always seems to deprioritize our shared humanity. While there is no intentionally specific meaning to his work, some of the themes he is currently interested in are the sense that people are off balance (off kilter) in their lives; the difficulty of meaningful and sustained personal interconnections; the human disruptions caused by economic and other crises; and—especially in Clings and Burns—the myth of the “good war.” His work is highlighted currently in the exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center entitled Mirabo Press: Persistence & Practice, on view through May 2023.
