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What should I
make up? is the title of this autobiographically -
inspired essay. I've chosen to interview three filmmakers
whose work engages with issues surrounding autobiography
and representation in striking and innovative ways. I
have spoken with Michele Fleming, Sarah Jane Lapp, and
Amie Siegel about their recent films,
Life/Expectancy (Chicago, 1999), Mimo
(Prague, 1995), and The Sleepers (Chicago,
1999). I think it is
only appropriate to introduce myself and outline the
reasons for this exploration. I work with the moving
image. I am a woman who makes films and installations in
a style or genre which has many names: non - fiction,
essay, experimental documentary. The projects grow out of
reading, research, and from my personal life. My choice
of subject matter in each project is intrinsically linked
with autobiography, although it may not manifest itself
directly in the projects. Since 1991, my
projects have taken me to tiny border towns between the
Czech and Slovak Republics; to interview Lisa Fittko, the
German Jewish partisan who accompanied Walter Benjamin on
his flight across the Pyrenees; to the Chicago site of a
Civil War prison; to trash heaps in San Francisco; to the
town where Sigmund Freud was born. In each of these
places, questions arise: what is this thing we call
history? Is it located in this creek which now divides a
village into two countries? Is it under the ground with
the bones of these Confederate soldiers? Is it in the
stories my grandmother tells? Is its dust scattered on
the cobblestones in rural Moravia? Or in the ink of this
text? Or is this thing we call history something we've
invented, and now believe as fact? My pieces are
translations among numerous histories. A personal
history, a history of a particular site and space,
national, cultural histories. These narratives cross,
contradict, and reinforce one another. Each of my
projects investigates these intersections. The impetus
for this article comes from autobiography. I am currently
at work on a new film, entitled Perseverance and How
to Develop It. In the process of making the film, a
piece inspired by the discovery of a self - help book
from 1915, I find myself at a crossroads. How much, if
any, autobiographical information to include directly in
the work? And what form should this information take? As
an artist with no commissions, and no one to answer to,
the choice of subject matter is inherently a personal
one. However, what voice should it take? A first - person
voice - over? The word 'I' or the word 'she' or 'he?' My
voice or someone else's? Or no voice, letting the images
'speak for themselves?' The combinations and inflections
of the personal are potentially infinite. I was stumped,
and turned to investigate some recent films by women I
much admire. Each one of the works sketched below engages
with and against the presence of autobiography in
intriguing and complex ways. I believe these films form a
new trend in the world of experimental film precisely
because of their complex use of the personal. Neither
confessional nor strictly formalist, the films,
Mimo, by Sarah Jane Lapp, The Sleepers, by
Amie Siegel, and Life/Expectancy, by Michele
Fleming all bring cinema into to a new space replete with
complex questions and thoughtful responses. In the spirit
of the personal I will also add that I consider these
women friends; Lapp, Siegel and I did our graduate work
together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Michelle Fleming was and continues to be a much - admired
faculty member at the same institution. I find it
striking that such an interesting generation of
experimental filmmakers has emerged from this school, and
especially in these times of blatant commercialism
rampant in institutional settings. In addition, the
continued commitment to 16mm film is also worth noting.
Why are we still working with film? And how are we
engaging with the personal? Is an
autobiographical impulse inherent in films by women? I
don't believe so. However, I do sense there is a
difference in audience expectation of films by men or by
women. I believe that audiences assume autobiographical
content more readily when watching films, especially
experimental films, by women. As makers, we are working
with and against these expectations, that there is a
communicative, confessional drive in our work as non -
narrative filmmakers. These filmmakers work directly with
this play of expectations, carefully weighing their
choices: whether to engage the autobiographical, or to
refuse it, and how. These choices may not be directly
outlined at the beginning of the filmmaking process, but
make themselves manifest throughout. Films shift and tell
different stories while they are being made. A first
filmic choice engenders more possible choices; the makers
choose their paths. These choices - - of direct voice,
confessional voice, the modality or refusal to introduce
that which can be recognized as personal - - challenge
each of us. I see these
films as part of a new spectrum of non - fiction film,
with Mimo, and its beautifully filmed recreation
of a personal memory, on one side, and The
Sleepers on the other, hovering in the tension
between voyeurism and the desire for narrative. Between
them: Life/Expectancy, which uses archival
materials and texts to create a deeply thoughtful,
personal (yet neither didactic nor confessional), and
moving film. The first two
films, Mimo, and Life/Expectancy stand in
contrast to other works in which the 'I' or 'she' seems
intimately connected to the experience on the screen,
works such as Su Friedrich's Sink or Swim (USA,
1990) , Greta Snider's Futility (USA, 1989) , or
other works of avant - garde cinema by women. Futility
uses archival material in conjunction with a very strong
'I' - based story. The short film, in three parts, is
very personal, describing the experience of terminating
an unwanted pregnancy in the first and second sections,
and using a more distanced epistolary, but very specific
form in the third. In Futility, the reader of the
film's texts makes us aware of her reading, clearing her
throat between sections, or announcing 'this is the
second one.' It is an intimate story, and an intimate,
and seemingly very personal form of address. Friedrich's
Sink or Swim uses a mixture of home movie and
filmed image. It is a film which explores the
relationship between a father and a daughter. While
Sink or Swim chooses to use the 'she' rather than
the 'I,' the stories and examples of interactions between
father and daughter feel very specific and personal. This
is one of the great strengths of this film, Friedrich's
ability to hold the personal example in suspension with a
more general look at fathers and daughters, as in the
voices singing a modified children's song on the
soundtrack. Still, Sink
or Swim works with what seems to me a single voice,
unlike the multiple voices which make themselves known in
Michelle Fleming's Life/Expectancy or Sarah Jane
Lapp's Mimo. While that film also uses a 'she'
character, its voice - over is read by a man, further
complicating a viewer's desire to impose autobiographical
tendencies on the work. Both Fleming and Lapp's films
look outward, gathering words of others from archives or
interviews, and present them in concert with the personal
voice. The first person voice - over does not play a
substantial role in these films. Instead, they weave,
embrace, and confront the autobiographical, and the
audience's expectations of it. Amie Siegel's film, The
Sleepers, brings up questions surrounding of the
autobiographical by directly refusing its presence in the
film. The film engages instead with voyeurism and
narrative, confronting the viewer's desire for narrative
and autobiographical identification which traditionally
accompanies the cinematic experience. I feel
privileged to write about these filmmakers and their
recent work, and thank them in advance for their
willingness to be interviewed, their good spirits, and of
course for their works. Czech
Republic, 1996, 16mm, 15 min., color and black &
white, English & Czech, English, Hebrew w/Eng.
subtitles. Sarah Jane
Lapp was a Fulbright fellow in Prague, in 1994. She left
for Central Europe straight from college, leaving her
home for a land far away. In her film Mimo,
exchanges between Lapp and her elderly neighbor Gusta
Sibova, an immigrant to Prague herself (from Romania),
play a significant role in the film. Gusta speaks about
singing, spirituality, and the holiness of Torah. She
also plays a character in the film, the 'Gusta not
Gusta,' as Sarah Jane describes below. Gusta dons a
crocheted shawl and walks to the Jewish Cemetery in her
neighborhood of Zizkov. This cemetery has been almost
completely displaced by an enormous television tower,
which dominates the Prague skyline. Gusta goes to the
cemetery and instead of placing small stones on the
ancient graves, according to Jewish tradition, lays
marbles on them. Gusta's
stories and simple actions interweave in the film with a
personal scene, reconstructed from memory. The scene
describes a young woman's departure from home, the last
hours before leaving for a faraway land. In this scene, a
father tries to find an old Super - 8 film camera to give
his daughter, and spilling an enormous box of marbles in
his clumsy search. Marbles are
the objects which weave these stories together, marbles
as memories laid on gravestones, marbles as the madeline
which evoke personal memory while searching for a
spiritual connection in a foreign land. Marbles spill
from great heights in memory, making a mess, impelling
closeness between father and daughter and marking a
physical and emotional departure. I spoke with Sarah Jane
about her experiences with the film. JP:
Please describe a bit living in Zizkov, and if and why
this neighborhood affected you. SJL:
Zizkov, like Prague, like the Czech Republic, represented
a system of overlapping palimpsests. Such historically
challenging topography offered at least one lesson: that
one should never take anything at face value. Of course
metatext is everywhere if you look for it, but in Zizkov,
even the schnitzel seemed to have a subtext. I lived near
an old Jewish cemetery upon which a television tower had
been built, displacing and/or liquidating many graves,
buried Torahs. etc. Around the perimeter of this cemetery
one found many pubs. These pubs often kept blackboards
outside their doors announcing the daily specials or
proprietary requests like 'Whites only.' The banned
population, the Romany (Czech Gypsies) resided on the
terraced hills. Tourist books told you to watch your
possessions, to beware, especially in Zizkov. Beware
indeed. Czech Romany, disenfranchised like most European
Gypsies, appeared in the public imagination as thieving
exotica. PhDs at my school insisted that their children
not go to school with 'those children.' Which children?
Or did they mean the children of one of the 10,000
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian refugees moving through the
Czech Republic in the 1990s? And so, the chain of
displacements continued and what a link was
Zizkov. I lived across
the street from Telecom. Every week, Telecom's employees
flooded into the street to avoid another bomb (scare?). I
lived above [Czech artist] Frantisek Skala's
beautiful bar, Akropolis, but my own apartment offered no
bastion of sanity either. One day we had a sink, the next
day it had inexplicably vanished. And the day after, our
landlord and his dog appeared naked on our floor. Both
alive, maybe sleeping. And the day after that - a squat
woman calling herself a psychotronic, knocked on our
door, insisting she had been ordered to 'clean' our
apartment. Her tools: a saucer, a teacup of water, and a
very tall, silent adolescent male holding a burning
candle near his ear. This bizarre
political and social alchemy clearly contributed to my
film endeavors - as did my naivete at age twenty-one, an
age where everyone wants to squeeze the most magic from
life. Mimo was my first film and I worked by
intuition. My script, on one hand, was a piece of prose
poetry I had written about my departure from the States.
On the other hand, under the auspices of a Fulbright
fellowship, I had set out to investigate and possibly
document how women in the Jewish community had
constructed or reconstructed their spirituality after the
Velvet revolution. The interviews I conduced evolved into
two films: Mimo, and its sister film,
Raj...How nice it would be to screen these films
in the old neighborhood... JP: The
film describes both a present and a memory of the past,
and makes connections with others who may be living a
similar, dual experience. Can you talk a bit about why
you chose to restage the scene of the memory? SJL:
I can't imagine I'll ever shoot 'The Civil War, the
sequel.' But somehow I find value in the re-enactment of
the personal. Cinema-therapy? I was just obsessed with
this memory of my father, with the precipice of
departure, and I wanted to turn it over and over in my
hand, like a marble, I suppose.... JP: The
film is very complex in relating the marbles to the
stones placed on graves to commemorate the dead, to the
story of the bulldozed Jewish Cemetery. Similarly, Gusta
has numerous roles in the film, in my view. She is the
rememberer, the daughter, and also the witness. Could you
talk about what you think Gusta represents in the film?
Or what many things she does for and in the
film? SJL:...I
cast as a way of eulogizing. I prefer to work with people
whom I believe should have their personae committed to
celluloid -- film is an archival material and anyone who
makes it through the chemical pathways will survive a
hundred years or more. Or so I like to hope. And so any
performer I choose, I cast as She Herself and as She the
Persona I Project onto Her. That interface, that 'Gusta
not Gusta' is what results in Mimo. So Gusta
Sibova on one hand was my neighbor. The eighty - plus
year old woman who called me and my boyfriend Ville to
bring her buckets of water when the neighborhood
waterworks periodically didn't; who gave me schnitzel on
a napkin...Gusta was also the voice I heard in synagogue,
every song she produced sounding like the epiphany I
always wished I could have. In the film I
don't render her as a fully psychologized character, but
neither do I contextualize her as a former Romanian
citizen, who served as a translator for forty years, who
teaches Hebrew and Torah to local students, etc. I keep
her as the ephemeral half-life she always seemed to be to
me. Maybe if I were Bergman or Chantal Akerman I might
have sublimated the idea of Gusta into a fictional figure
who shimmered just as much as my memory of her.
Alas. JP:
This brings me to the less oblique question, I hope. I'd
like to hear what you have to say about the relationship
between invention, interview, and autobiography. I think
Mimo does an amazing job of weaving those things
together. So it is somehow an invented story, or series
of stories, especially the highly dramaticblack and white
section, but also a story inspired or influenced by the
interview with Gusta, and of course since I know you, it
is to me completely autobiographical. Where and how did
you choose to locate the autobiographical within the
film, and why did you make the choices you made, to
represent these things? SJL:...I
think filmmaking offers a singular opportunity to access
interiority. Whether one decides to contextualize or
present the catalyst for such a journey is up to the
maker. Personally, I like to present as many layers of
reality as enter the process. No, not true. I spend two
years cutting a short film so that I don't present every
single slice of reality - like the thunderstorms, the
flat tires, the suddenly dead production coordinators,
and so forth. You know, when you scan the word
"interiority" with Spellcheck, the computer offers
'inferiority.' A humbling thought for the editing
room. Mimo
presented an opportunity for pan - Slavic collaboration
and I feel the dialogues I held with consulting editor
Krasimira Velickova, with sound recordist Jiri Klenka,
and especially with cinematographer Ramunas Grecius
articulate for me the meta - language that film offers.
As with other forms of language acquisition, one does not
just speak a purified native tongue, but an abrogated
language that bears the imprint of time, humans,
obstacles, joys. Such is the language of filmmaking (or
any artmaking). When I realized that the four of us has
traversed a singular emotional trajectory, well, what a
miracle. What a gifted experience. Life/Expectancy
Michele Fleming, USA 16mm 30 minutes 1999 'Her mother
never told her stories.' It is a phrase which resonates
throughout Michelle Fleming's Life/Expectancy; a
film whose main character is able to tell great
beginnings and endings, but not middles. It is a film
about the passage into midlife. The middle of the story;
the middle of the life cycle. Life/Expectancy
evokes the suspended time between beginning and
end. Life/Expectancy
is exquisitely shot in black and white; it is a
meditative piece, full of windows and shadows,
observations of the kind where one sits and looks, not
searching, just watching quietly. A meditation on the
passage through mid-life. Yet just beneath the surface of
the quiet, questions, conflicts, and voices abound. The
beautiful roses pictured in the film poke at each other
with menacing thorns; the fish swimming in a tank are
actually piranhas, the passage through mid-life may seem
to pass unnoticed, but it is a deeply moving and
difficult time. The film suspends the viewer in the
realization that life passes, indiscriminately, over each
of us. Life/Expectancy
is an introspective work; instead of emphasizing a
driving plot line, it develops through image repetition
and the very strong commentary of the archival audio.
These pointed audio moments, from films such as Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf (USA 1966) and They Shoot
Horses, Don't They?(USA 1969) bite into the slow and
serious comments of the voice - over. Michelle Fleming
talks more about her extraordinary working methods and
use of archival sound in the following
interview. JP: I
would like to ask you about your unique working methods.
You once told me how you work, shooting reversal film and
then A/B rolling the original[1],
but I'd like to hear more about this process in detail,
and also if you could talk a little about why you have
chosen to use this process, which involves such a
different experience of the editing process. MF: The
means by which I created my last film were traditional --
what most would call old-fashioned. I shot the material
on film, and edited the film itself by hand. I used black
and white reversal camera stock and because of this I
could edit the original footage with no need to generate
a workprint. I A/B/C rolled my original footage,
prescribing overlapping super-impositions and dissolves
to be realized by lab printing as the final step. This is
a creative process and a classic, material-film centered
methodology that finds its origins in the work of figures
such as Will Hindle and Bruce Baillie. I was fortunate
enough to explore this method ... as a personal, singular
culmination in the exercise of my own imagination. My
mind ... builds and forges links from textual fragment to
fragment, from image to image, image-fragment to
text-fragment to sound-fragment. Associations ensue.
Fragments ... blend with one another, resulting in
renewed force ... My crucial intent is that my film will
evoke a certain receptiveness in the spectator to an
imaginative state that parallels...the imaginative
processes that I used in the making of the
work. JP:
Your use of archival materials, especially archival
sound, is quite striking in the film. Could you talk
about your choices there? The audio seems very personal.
Do you see relationships between your choices of archival
sound and autobiography? By this, I think I mean, when I
see the film, I attribute an autobiographical impulse to
the choices of archival audio. Is this the direction the
audio is meant to take us? I think it is very interesting
that instead of a confessional-type voice-over, you have
a man's voice and these conversations from other
films. MF: I
was teaching a 'Film I' class and I was showing Su
Friedrich's Gently down the Stream (USA 1981)
which as you know is silent, with text scratched in the
emulsion. I always ask my classes after they see the work
if they hear a voice reading the text in their head while
they are watching it ... usually I get a wide spread of
responses from: 'I hear my own voice' to 'I hear an
anonymous woman's voice.' But this time I got nothing.
Nobody heard a thing. Finally a student spoke up and said
'Don't you think it's kind of sick to hear voices [in
your head]?'I responded with something like 'I hope
not, because I hear them all the time...' Lines from
songs, quotes, comments from friends (and foes), lines
from movies, quips from commercials and sitcoms...they
all literally pop up in my head all the time. Along with
more intuitive guides that often seem to speak. Anyway, I
became interested in collecting some of these voices ...
the more famous the better. I would literally begin a
conversation with these voices and started cutting them
into my own text [in the film]. So these voices
either lead the conversation or respond to it. They add a
whole level of 'complication' to the film ... issues and
comments that go on in my head all the time... I have to say
that my process is always a matter of collection. I find
something and I pick it up. I write about it, or in
response to it, or find an image that seems appropriate
to it...I find ways to weave this collection. The voices,
the text, the images, the footnotes all ... are intended
to open up poetic lines of communication. I still think
this is an important more of communication that has
nothing to do with solid facts of points of view, but has
everything to do with potential and discovery. Growing,
getting past what you always held as true without
question. JP: The
roses, and the time-lapse scene out the window, and the
nondescript views out the window, and the exquisite
curtain blowing. These windows, shadows, and non-views
are very compelling in your film. Why so many windows?
For me, the feeling of being inside and looking out comes
through very strongly. But there is more there, in the
arranging and rearranging of the roses, like life
stories. Could you talk about these images specifically
and what they mean and meant to you? MF: I
had time off ... I spent a year reading, thinking, and
making this film. Nearly the whole piece ... was shot out
my window. It's what I looked at as I thought and worked.
From the surface of the glass at night when it gets cold
and there is condensation, to filming some summertime
event/celebration that my neighbors threw, to the big
snowstorm ... I responded to whatever was there and
weaved it into the film... I was
interested in the rose because I wanted to look at 'the
underneath' of things. We get so swept away by the beauty
and the wondrous, intoxicating fragrance of these flowers
that we don't look at the equally amazing defense system
nature has given the rose. Many people never learn about
this nastier underside ... but I feel that it is critical
if we are going to really explore human nature to explore
darkness... The film is
partially about the contemplation of a liminal passage
into mid-life and what this particular persona was
thinking about at that time. And so literally takes place
in my most familiar surrounding (with thanks to
Bachelard). When I was younger I thought I would be a lot
smarter by now. There is the shock of realizing that the
struggle and search gets more intense and urgent with age
... unless you ossify into a single philosophy that
denies the existence of all else. JP: And
the relationship to autobiography? MF:
Well, I'll quote footnote [an element from the
film] #7: 'Autobiography: 'When someone asks you
later if your work is autobiographical, you answer, 'No,
not exactly,' and smile enigmatically.'-- Diane
Schoemperlen, Forms of Devotion, (New York:
Viking, 1988) The
Sleepers 45 min, 16mm, color, sound, 1999 The
Sleepers is a fascinating film which hovering tensely
between voyeurism and, as Amie puts it so well above,
'unfulfilled narrative desires.' The viewer watching
The Sleepers experiences 45 intensely engrossing
minutes looking into Chicago apartment windows in the
evenings, capturing fragments of the quotidian, the
banal, and the potentially mysterious. However, no
narrative is permitted to emerge from our
voyeurism. The
Sleepers engrosses because, as viewers we are
permitted to watch and watch, seemingly without
cessation. Yet soon our watching begins to turn in on us.
We realize that nothing too exciting is happening in the
framed, softly lit windows. At each turn, our narrative
desire is thwarted. This causes a conflicting, tense, yet
still completely compelling experience. We are forced to
acknowledge our voyeurism in the duration of the film.
And with this acknowledgement comes the understanding
that the cinematic experience is inherently a voyeuristic
one, and that the desire for a narrative to happen on
screen is the belief that film is designed to ultimately
satisfy our voyeurism. The soundtrack
of The Sleepers works between exterior and
interior sound; thus aurally we are brought into and back
out of spaces. The soundtrack does not allow a
psychological entry into characters or into the
filmmaker's identity in any way. Even in the singular
scene in the film in which the camera goes into a well -
appointed apartment to observe, nothing is revealed. A
woman goes to a drawer, takes out a CD, and puts it into
the CD player. This is all. No drama, no explosion. At
the 'central moment' of the film we encounter only an
empty center, as we are yet again confronted with our own
desire for psychological narrative. The Sleepers
then propels us back outside to our voyeuristic perch in
the dark Chicago night. JP:
Amie, What I find fascinating about The Sleepers is the
way it refuses any imposition of the autobiographical.
The viewer is simply not permitted to make any
assumptions about the maker, and also not able to create
a fantasy - narrative from the worlds we are observing
through the windows. AS:
Before jumping into [your question], I should
mention that a refusal to make 'autobiographical work,'
that is, work that is somehow directly evocative of my
own experience, is not so much that I find it in any way
lacking, but that in the Nineties I think we experienced
(and are still experiencing) a limitation imposed on our
identities as a result of society's need to categorize
them. There are many
filmmakers who seem content to let the themes and
programming of their work be dictated by the terms by
which society (in its most unimaginative, parochial form)
defines them. Terms that push people into a herd as
dictated by their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
It's not that I see anything wrong or inherently negative
in that phenomenon, it's just that personally I do not
want to be limited to an autobiographical discourse. I am
interested in the quality and individual premise of the
artwork, not just its presence in the face of an
absence. The reason I
made The Sleepers, became interested in shooting
into people's windows at night, is a bit autobiographical
in that I had grown up in Chicago, going to friends' and
relatives' apartments where just outside the window,
fifty stories above the street, a small movie would be
unfolding in someone else's apartment across the way. The
odd juxtaposition of that view, being able to see both
the vast landscape of the city and evidence of someone's
private, interior life in the same pictorial moment
always struck me as fascinating, uncanny even. JP: Can
you talk about the desire on the viewer's part to make an
autobiographical or narrative connection with the film?
AS: First of all I think it's very interesting
that 'narrative' and 'autobiography' for you are linked.
I think that those two terms are linked only in that
autobiography is part of the system of identification
that rules conventional narrative. And here I don't mean
the filmmaker's own experience but the viewer's.
Projection of the self onto the screen is part and parcel
of the narrative cinematic experience, thus all narrative
is autobiographical for the viewer. In The
Sleepers, you have a sort of 'doubling' experience as
a viewer in that you are watching onscreen the reframing
of another experience of watching, voyeurism. Here it is
the absence of narrative (Who is watching? Are they
alone? Do they know the people across the street?) which
provides a kind of currency that is autobiographical in
its concern. And at the same time, those exact questions
are being asked of the people being filmed along with
another set of questions (Do they know they are being
filmed? Is the action set up?) JP: In
fact, I do see The Sleepers as a refusal, or
repudiation even of narrative and autobiographical
desires. AS: The
film for me is not about narrative, but about viewership.
It is narrative expectation that the situation of
voyeurism elicits, a kind of half-written story where you
have all the props, the set, and the characters (the
furniture and knick-knacks, the glowing
[interior] space of the apartment, the figures
that move around inside that apartment) but you don't
know exactly what is going on or what relationships
connect those people. And that is where the viewer's own
work comes in to finish writing the story, so to
speak. There are
scenes in the film that are almost void of any
alteration, they unfold as I shot them. And there are
others that provide a certain wealth of added information
-- musical accompaniment (emotional register), dialogue
(enactment of conflict or banality), sound effects
(specificity to their actions) -- in other words, scenes
which provide a slightly more detailed set of narrative
clues. While that first kind of scene allows the viewer
space in which to create narrative, the latter is more
replete with the tropes of narrative (music, dialogue,
sound effects, parallel editing). Each allow and refuse
the advance of narrative. And this kind of phrasing of
narrative expectation is what I was after with The
Sleepers. In every other
film I'd seen about voyeurism, the line that separated
the watched and the watcher was always crossed, so the
narrative expectation became wrapped up in that almost
always erotic tension (Rear Window (USA 1954),
Naked (UK 1993), Peeping Tom) (UK 1960),
not the pure tension of looking. But I was more
interested in how the situation of looking itself is
inherently erotic, that is, both creates and defers
expectation in the visual information simultaneously
given and withheld from the viewer. This kind of build -
up and deferral is symptomatic of both the erotic and the
cinematic, and I was interested in creating a space where
that dynamic could unfold without giving in to the
unusual trope of a character through whom we experience
that tension. That is why we -- we the camera, we the
audience -- eventually go inside an apartment. We are
there without distance, without the character, the voyeur
who acts as our cinematic foil. I think here is where you
experience a refusal of the autobiographical most
strongly. There is no voice - over revealing the thoughts
of a central voyeur. There is no 'climax' or
'explanation.' I see that
kind of absence of a character on whom to push off the
film's conflicts as a Marker-like refusal of the
autobiographical. In Sans Soleil (France 1982),
Marker doesn't visually depict someone traveling through
Japanese landscape in order to have us identify with that
figure onscreen, he makes us experience the products of
that person, their images of a culture, and thus engages
issues of representation. At the same time, though,
Marker creates epistolary personae through the voice-over
that guides the film. And that is certainly a kind of
'bow' to the autobiographical, if not narrative. I didn't
even want that to occur in The Sleepers. I felt it
would specify an experience, voyeurism, one of whose main
characteristics is anonymity. I think it is one of the
things people find the most difficulty about The
Sleepers. But there are others who find that it's
most rewarding aspect. JP: Do
you think your gaze in the film is distant, or more
empathic? I think that
phrase presumes a level of personal involvement
(autobiography) that isn't part of the formal constraints
of the work. Since I didn't include a voice - over and
any allusion to my experience, I don't think my gaze is
foregrounded in The Sleepers. It is certainly
present, choosing which moments to film, framing them and
re-contextualizing them with sound effects and music and
elements of performativity ... but I don't think it is a
formal device, per se. In the ways it is present,
I would hope that it is not wholly either distant or
empathic but has moments of distance and moments of,
well, engagement, moving around and tugging at the
different tensions and conflicts within the situations of
looking, constructing and deconstructing voyeurism. I
have a hard time with the word 'empathy' since that is
the title of my new film and it is questionable to me
whether empathy really exists... I believe
these three films represent a new point on the spectrum
in the world of non-fiction cinema. From the
re-presentation of memory, to the intentional refusal of
narrative desire, these three films come to questions of
the personal and autobiographical in striking new ways.
The intentionality of address, deliberate choices and
shifts by each filmmaker are extraordinary evidence of a
film practice which is reshaping the traditions handed
down over the past thirty years in avant-garde cinema.
These kinds of thoughtful, provocative works are, I hope,
evidence of a new trend in non-fiction filmmaking. A
trend in which traditions are challenged in a direct and
intense way; a trend in which and where new kinds of
dialogue and inquiry emerge. I am delighted to have the
opportunity to discuss these works with the filmmakers
and thank them again for their inspiration. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]'A/B
ROLLING: The consecutive shots of negative are cut up and
assembled alternately in two separate rolls, with black
leader between the shots on each roll. Since the first
shot on Roll A corresponds with black leader on the
second, the next shot on B corresponds with black leader
on A, and so on, a checkerboard pattern is achieved
between the two rolls. The shots from both rolls are
printed consecutively and in order on a single film, thus
preventing any splices from appearing in the printing of
16mm film. Sometimes a C or even D roll might be
incorporated for additional effects.'
6,235 words
Abstract
In 1997
I interviewed my grandmother, Belle Ginsburg, about her
mother Sadie (Zelda) Ginsburg. I was making a film
entitled The Whole History of That, examining the
failures and desires which accompanied my search for
roots in Central Europe. At the end of our interview,
having told me what little she knew about her mother, my
grandmother said 'Id love to give you more information -
- but - - unless I make something up. What should I make
up?' And with this, the film found its logical
conclusion. It refused to allow my autobiographical
desires any solid place on which to rest.
To begin,
then.
A
confession
Autobiography
and 'women's film.'
Why these
three films?
'Mimo'
('Beyond')
Part
documentary, part memory exchange of two sojourners in
a strange land: behind the locked vestiges of a
cemetery in Zizkov, Prague, childhood marbles descend
onto tombstone marble, inducing song and strangely
intersecting spiritualities. 'Mimo' which is perhaps
simply a celluloid gift for my elderly neighbor who
stars in it, will either be seen as very obtuse or
very - - I don't know what. - - SJ Lapp from the San
Francisco Jewish Film Festival catalogue
Life/Expectancy
Part meditation on a woman's midlife search for meaning,
part essay on and experiment in cinematic form, Michele
Fleming's Life/expectancy creates a rich visual
and conceptual tapestry of autobiography. Provocative and
seductive, this film gives us, in Fleming's words, a
'glimpse of stories that refuse to be told'. -- SF
Cinematheque brochure, San Francisco, CA 2000The
Sleepers
Shot entirely at night, The Sleepers uses 'the
urban [Chicago] architecture of distant windows
to explore the tensions between public and private, the
performative and the real, the lyrical and the
vernacular.' The evening rituals of unsuspecting
apartment dwellers become objects of voyeuristic pleasure
and subjects of unfulfilled narrative desires. -- Amie
SiegelInterview
with Amie Siegel
Finally:
Endnotes
Filmographies
and biographical notes
on filmmakers interviewed.
