Disappearing Man featuring Robert Janz

Director and Cinematographer: Noah David Smith
Story Editor: Elizabeth L. Smith
Original music "cocoon" by Melanie Hsu, from a prayer for broken glass.

Disappearing Man is an intimate film portrait of TriBeCa artist Robert Janz -  whose ephemeral, streetscape water paintings reflect on the impermanence of the artist’s own life. 

Robert Janz’s unique artistic medium is water on brick, stone or concrete. He paints totemic words on New York City façades and sidewalks. Janz’s self-erasing word paintings challenge the serendipitous viewer to reflect on the contradictory nature of artistic practices that often capture and immortalize both a fleeting moment in time and the mortal artist that captured it. 

In capturing this story of the artist at work, the film evokes Janz’s philosophical musings on practicing an art form that is very much a metaphor for his own mortality. Both the filmmaker and the viewer clearly become not just observers but students of Janz and his art.