First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in ‘My Father, The Genius,’ a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in ‘Diaries,’ in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.
Artists who use their own lives as the subject matter for their art always have to make a decision about how much revelation is too much. David Rakoff, whom many know from his work on This American Life, wrote frankly and transcendentally about his declining health (including an inability in his last years to use one of his arms) after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him. But Rakoff didn’t have to worry that his revelations would hurt those closest to him; he lived alone, without a partner or children.
When they reveal “everything,” those artists who are in relationships aren’t just exposing their own lives to the public–they can’t help also exposing intimate details about their loved ones. Author Ayelet Waldman has received criticism for revelations about both her husband (author Michael Chabon) and her kids in her work. Sex writer and essayist Susie Bright swore off using her personal life as fodder for her work years ago and though she seems to be in a successful decades-long relationship (and sometimes collaborates with her now adult daughter), her writing doesn’t have the same spark as it did earlier in her career.
First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in My Father, The Genius, a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in Diaries, in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.
Near the beginning of their excellent documentaryOne Cut, One Life(which will be in theaters starting Wednesday, May 13), Small and Pincus, each seeming to take a turn behind the camera, discuss plans to collaborate on their final film together (they had previously worked on the post-Katrina documentary The Axe In The Attic). Ed has been diagnosed with a fatal disease which would eventually turn into leukemia. Lucia is working through her grief over the deaths of two of her close friends, one from a hit-and-run driver, the other murdered by an ex-boyfriend.
Ed and Lucia
Ed, who is over 70, has other health issues (he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s some years before and speaks slowly and carefully), but they agree that they can probably work around them. The problem is Ed’s wife, Jane, who is adamant that she doesn’t want them to film what might be the last months of his life. We’re so used to wives being a drag on “great” men in film (Pauline Kael referred to this role as the “‘please don’t go up to break the sound barrier tonight, dear’ type”) that we’re ready to think of Jane as the villain until she tells us, “I have enough to deal with in my life right now. My husband has received a death sentence, and I don’t see why I have to give him over to anybody else.”
Jane, who was filmed over five years in Diaries, is familiar with the intrusion a camera is in one’s day-to-day life and has no desire to relive it. She’s also insecure about Ed’s feelings for Lucia.
Ed documented his and Jane’s open marriage in the 70s, but after Diaries was completed they moved to Vermont to run a flower farm. When they made an appearance at a screening of Diaries in the 90s, with matching glasses and grey hair, their arms around each other, they seemed to have become a more conventional couple.
In the 2000s, Ed’s introduction to Lucia reignited his interest in filmmaking (though he still kept the farm). Lucia tells us that she became close to both Ed and Jane (who was a member of the feminist health collective that wrote the original Our Bodies Ourselves) during the making of Axe, but then they, by mutual agreement, distanced themselves when the film was finished. Lucia tells us that aside from a few “flings” she hasn’t been in a relationship in years and that working together for as many hours as a film takes, mixes up her feelings of love and intimacy, though she clarifies that her relationship with Ed is platonic.
Ed Pincus
Ed seems less intent on keeping boundaries clear. He tells Lucia he loves her and at one point Jane catches them alone in a situation that sets off alarm bells for her–and like photographers in a war zone, Ed and Lucia immediately pick up their cameras and start shooting the conflict. Whenever we see Lucia talking to the camera, she looks drained; the elements in her life that might distract her from her grief instead serve as reminders. Her big, black dog originally belonged to the woman who was murdered. Her cute New York apartment was the one she shared with the woman who was killed in the hit-and-run. But when Jane looks at Lucia she sees a blonde 25 years younger than she is, whom her husband seems to adore.
Mixed up in all of this drama is Ed’s worsening health. Receiving bad news on camera he simply says, ” Well, that’s sobering.” In stunning cinematography we see the seasons at the farm: fall, winter, spring, summer and then spring again, when a newly cue-ball-bald Ed tells the camera that the doctor had said he probably wouldn’t live past March, so he’s grateful. Ed lived two seasons longer and died in November of 2013. When I saw the film last year as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston, Small did a poignant Q & A after the screening. One of the first things she told us was Jane had chosen not to attend.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
These same voices weren’t heard or listened to in the various investigations conducted by the LAPD in the 1980s. The film tells the story of Enietra Washington, Franklin’s only known survivor. In 1988, after Franklin picked her up and attempted to kill her, she gave the police a description of Franklin’s car (an orange Pinto) and described his face to a sketch artist.
Pam Brooks guides filmmaker Nick Broomfield around her LA neighborhood in Tales of the Grim Sleeper.
This post by Leigh Kolb previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.
The chilling new documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper makes it clear that our society values the lives of white people differently than Black people.
At the beginning of director Nick Broomfield’s new documentary, the audience sees a Google Map of Lonnie Franklin Jr.’s home in South Central Los Angeles. In 2010, Franklin was arrested and charged with 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder—he heads to trial this June. Many say, however, that Franklin killed more than 100 women in the 25 years since 1985. All of his alleged victims were Black. “How did this happen?” Broomfield asks in voice-over.
How could it happen? Later in the film, Pamela Brooks, a resident of the neighborhood and a former sex worker supplies the answer: “We don’t mean nothing to them. It’s Black women. I’m a Black woman. Who gives a fuck about me?” Brooks offers comic relief at times and hard, tragic truths at other times. She evaded Franklin’s attempts to lure her in one night. He would often pick up sex workers in the middle of the night—promising them crack—and then take them to his home to photograph them, assault them, and often kill them. The numerous cases that Franklin was allegedly involved in are referred to by police as “NHI” cases: “No Humans Involved”—as if killing a Black woman (especially a sex worker or drug addict) doesn’t involve a human.
Broomfield has worked on numerous intimate, low-budget films before, including documentaries about Sarah Palin, Tupac, and military killings of civilians in Iraq. In Tales of the Grim Sleeper, Broomfield could have easily constructed a film in which his authoritative voice drove a persuasive narrative. Instead, he allows the people—Franklin’s friends, victims, and neighborhood residents who fought for justice—to dominate the screen. Brooks’ knowledge and connections specifically give him access to the world that he, as a white British man, is not a part of.
Lonnie Franklin’s booking photo, as seen in Tales of the Grim Sleeper.
These same voices weren’t heard or listened to in the various investigations conducted by the LAPD in the 1980s. The film tells the story of Enietra Washington, Franklin’s only known survivor. In 1988, after Franklin picked her up and attempted to kill her, she gave the police a description of Franklin’s car (an orange Pinto) and described his face to a sketch artist. The sketch was never released and neither were details about his car. While Franklin was “hunting” women and killing them, the police didn’t even tell the public that the killings were the work of a serial murderer. Washington explains the role of racism in the police handling of the case. “Every Black woman is a hooker, don’t you know?” she says with a flippant resignation, explaining why the information wasn’t deemed relevant. It was 20 years before the public was shown the sketch and given details about the suspected serial killer.
To combat that lax institutional attitude, a neighborhood group called the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders formed in the 1980s to attempt to get more media and law enforcement attention on the crimes. One of the most powerful voices in Tales of the Grim Sleeper is Margaret Prescod, a leader of the Coalition. She deserves her own documentary and she makes delivers many of the most powerful truths in the film. “We’re here to say, loud and clear, that every life is of value. Could you imagine if these murders had happened in Beverly Hills?” she asks.
Tales of the Grim Sleeperaired on HBO on April 27, but I first saw it at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo. After the film, both Broomfield and Brooks took the stage. Brooks received wild applause, which intensified after she said that she was still clean and sober. She commented on the institutional cycle that allowed the murders to continue for so long. Broomfield added that the issues presented in the documentary and the issues that were unveiled in Ferguson are national issues, revealing “systematic institutional racism.”
While watching Tales of the Grim Sleeper, I couldn’t stop thinking about 2012 documentary The Central Park Five, a film by Sarah Burns, Ken Burns, and David McMahon that tells the story of the five men wrongfully convicted for raping and beating a jogger in Central Park in 1989. The jogger was a young, white woman who worked as an investment banker. The crime made national news—that year, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding the return of the death penalty for “criminals of every age.” Four Black men and one Hispanic man were convicted of the crime. In 2002—after the young men had served years of prison time—a serial rapist admitted to the rape and DNA tests corroborated his confession. In contrast to their trials, the vacating of the five young men’s convictions was quiet.
The New York Daily News front page reporting on the 1989 beating. Via PBS.
Pairing these films creates a powerful narrative that reveals something about whose lives matter in our society. Contrasting every part of these cases—both of which originated in the 1980s, but have been working through the police and justice system for 20 years—shows how law enforcement and media help shape the narrative that Black lives matter less. Certainly more people know about the Central Park Jogger than they do about the dozens of women in South Central Los Angeles who were beaten, raped, strangled, and shot. These women, it would seem, are disposable. And more people know about the “Central Park Five”—Kharey “Korey” Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana—being convicted, rather than their innocence.
While the films chronicle events that happen on the opposite sides of America, the strength in both of the films is that people are allowed to speak for themselves and we are held responsible as not-so-innocent bystanders. At the end of Tales of the Grim Sleeper, photos of Black women—Franklin’s victims—flash by on the screen, just slowly enough that we feel properly uncomfortable and ashamed of the society we live in.
In an interview with TheNew York Times in 2012, The Central Park Five co-director Sarah Burns said of her film, “Part of our goal is simply to inform people about what happened in this case. But we also want people to think about how this happened.”
Broomfield clearly attempts—and succeeds—to reach that same goal in Tales of the Grim Sleeper. He asks at the beginning of the film, “How did this happen?” The answer is much greater than Los Angeles—the answer stretches from Los Angeles, to Ferguson, to New York City. It’s America’s problem.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
It does not rejoice in the freedom of the open road. There are no cool, seductive lovers or beautiful cars. Wanda is not a charismatic counter-culture heroine or anti-heroine. She’s not a heroic working-class figure either. Loden’s portrait, however, aims to shed light on the psychological condition of young, working-class women disconnected from societal demands and expectations.
Set in coal-mining Pennsylvania, Wanda (1970) is the story of a directionless working-class woman who leaves her husband and young children for a life on the road. Barbara Loden (1932-1980) not only plays the title role of Wanda, she also wrote and directed the film. Although it would, sadly, be the only feature she would make, it remains one of the most culturally significant portraits of American womanhood of its era, as well as one of the greatest independent films of all time.
We see Wanda at the beginning of the film sleeping on her married sister’s couch, but she soon embarks on a journey to nowhere. Unable to secure and maintain a job, her situation becomes increasingly precarious. She is ditched by a man at a rest stop outside of town following a one-night stand, and robbed of her money when she falls asleep alone in a movie theater. She meets a small-time, hopeless crook, Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) and develops a relationship of sorts with him. He’s an aggressive, charmless man but he offers a kind of security. Initially hesitant, she becomes Mr. Dennis’s accomplice in a bank robbery. It all ends disastrously, and at the close of the film we see her surrounded by strangers in a bar, as isolated and aimless as she was at the start of her journey.
Wanda
Some may find Wanda’s inertness and passivity baffling, even exasperating. We are not given much insight into her former life. We only have her husband’s testimony in court that she was a poor homemaker and neglectful mother. Was she bullied and belittled by her husband? Why does she not fight for custody of her kids? In the courtroom, she instructs the judge to give her husband the divorce he wants and states that the children “will be better off with him.” Although it is what society dictated for women, perhaps Wanda never even wanted a family.
Loden’s description of Wanda in a 1972 interview on the Mike Douglas Show is quite instructive:
“She’s really running away from everything…She doesn’t know what she wants but she knows what she doesn’t want, and she’s trying to get out of this very ugly type of existence but she doesn’t have the equipment that a person that has been exposed to more different kind of people that would help her… She can’t cope with life..”
It is, indeed, evident that no one was there for Wanda growing up–no loving, supportive parent/s, inspirational teacher or mentor. Loden, interestingly, got the inspiration for the film from a newspaper article telling the curious tale of a female accomplice to a bankrobber who thanked the judge for sentencing her to twenty years in jail but it is also semi-autobiographical. A native of North Carolina, Loden did not come from a privileged home. Brought up by strictly religious grandparents following her parents’ divorce, she endured a hard childhood. Loden equally understands Wanda’s psyche. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times (1971) she explained, “I used to be a lot like that… I had no identity of my own. I just became what I thought people wanted me to become.”
Numbing the pain
Crucially, the director seems to recognize that countless working-class American women of her background and generation were never taught to develop their very identity and assert themselves. Although Hollywood tries to propagate the myth, not everyone survives shitty childhoods through self-education and force of will. There are, also, indications that Wanda was abused and/or neglected as a child. To say she has poor sense of self-worth is an understatement. Unlike mainstream American movies, Wanda, moreover, recognizes that human beings of all backgrounds repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Loden does not judge her protagonist and nor should we. Judging Wanda does not help us understand her. In fact, it reflects a position of privilege.
Barbara Loden’s own journey was remarkable and successful though ultimately tragic. Unlike her heroine, she was graced with opportunity and talent, as well as encouraged to realize her creative ambitions. Loden was a dancer and model before becoming a screen and theatre actress. She was married to director Elia Kazan and starred in his films Wild River (1960) and Splendor in The Grass (1961). As said, Wanda was her first and last film. Other projects remained unrealized up until her death. No doubt misogyny played an ugly, starring part in keeping her out of the film business. She tragically died of breast cancer in 1980 at the age of 48.
With Mr. Dennis
Wanda was critically acclaimed when it was first released- it won the International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1970- but in the years that followed, it fell into relative obscurity in the United States (Loden and Wanda have always been more appreciated in France).
Shot on a small budget, Wanda is a stark film devoid of sentiment. Nicolas Proferes was the cinematographer and editor, and in terms of its look and form, it’s a grainy, unpolished film that reeks of the real. It is, in fact, a road movie but without the usual romantic qualities of the genre. It does not rejoice in the freedom of the open road. There are no cool, seductive lovers or beautiful cars. Wanda is not a charismatic counter-culture heroine or anti-heroine. She’s not a heroic working-class figure either. Loden’s portrait, however, aims to shed light on the psychological condition of young, working-class women disconnected from societal demands and expectations. Some may find her portrait of female identity lack and alienation a tough viewing experience but it is a rewarding one. Loden’s low key performance, it should be noted, is, also, entirely persuasive.
A lost woman
Although the film is beginning to be rediscovered and revisited, Wanda needs to be even more appreciated. Loden’s story too should also be more widely known. As we are only now beginning to fully realize, the history of women in film has, criminally, been one of forgetting. We need to remember and honor Barbara Loden as a director of one of the most grittiest and unconventional American films of the 20th century.
Mabel Normand was once known as “The Queen of Comedy” and “The Female Chaplin.” Her name was featured in the title of her shorts as their star attraction, which she soon parlayed into creative control as director. Normand mentored Charlie Chaplin as well as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who went on to mentor Buster Keaton in his turn. Mabel is, therefore, a cornerstone in the development of the American slapstick auteur, but one whose role is regularly overlooked.
Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.
Mabel Normand: madcap maverick
Mabel Normandwas once known as “The Queen of Comedy” and “The Female Chaplin.” Her name was featured in the title of her shorts as their star attraction, which she soon parlayed into creative control as director. Normand mentored Charlie Chaplin as well as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who went on to mentor Buster Keaton in his turn. Mabel is, therefore, a cornerstone in the development of the American slapstick auteur, but one whose role is regularly overlooked. Her indirect connection with scandals, from Hollywood shootings to Arbuckle’s sensational trial, was used to tarnish her image and spark campaigns to ban her films, exploited by what biographer Thomas Sherman calls “behind-the-scenes Hollywood power brokers seeking to reshape the existing order.” Because of her early death in 1930 from tuberculosis, Normand is now remembered mainly through portraits by male co-workers, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin, rather than her own words.
“Say anything you like, but don’t say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”– Mabel Normand (close friend of Mary Pickford)
Normand began her career as a model and bathing beauty.In 1910, she joined D.W. Griffith’s Biograph, where she met Mack Sennett and showed potential as a serious actress in The Squaw’s Love, The Mender of Nets and The Eternal Mother. At the rival Vitagraph, she was mentored in film comedy by the duo of Flora Finch and John Bunny, saying “every fiber in my body responded to Flora Finch’s celebrated comedies.” Comedienne Ruth Stonehouse had also been on the scene since 1907, but Normand would become the first director of this cinematic comedienne pack. As Mack Sennett’s lover, Normand left Biograph for Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in 1912. In 1914, Normand began to direct shorts and starred with her protégé, Charlie Chaplin, in Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature-length comedy, a fat-shaming extravaganza that nevertheless ends with solidarity between its female rivals and the rejection of their manipulative suitor. Dissatisfied with simplistic slapstick, Mabel strove for emotional authenticity, believing “if you seem to have any idea that you’re playing at something, you won’t get across” and claiming “no director ever taught me a thing.” Such naturalistic theories visibly influence the later aesthetic of Chaplin and Arbuckle. As Normand had in Mabel At The Wheel, Tamara de Lempicka would later use the image of driving to craft an icon of the empowered New Woman.
“Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti” – 1925
In 1915, Normand’s engagement to Sennett broke up over his affair, with Normand suffering major concussion when rival Mae Busch hit her with a vase. This marked the end of Normand’s directing career, after less than two years. A male director would surely be assessed for future promise, yet even Normand’s defender, Thomas Sherman, writes dismissively that “she never had pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer.” Roscoe Arbuckle, however, highlighted Normand’s active collaboration, saying “Mabel alone is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture” (see Fatty and Mabel Adrift). Of Chaplin, Normand said, “We reciprocated. I would direct Charlie in his scenes, and he would direct me in mine. We worked together in developing the comedy action, taking a basic idea and constantly adding new gags.”
More than a collaborator, Normand’s biography contradicts claims of her limited ambition. Spurred to leave Keystone in 1916 by difficult relations with Mack Sennett, Sennett lured her back by offering her her own studio. The fact that Normand swallowed her pride, for the sake of her own studio, surely indicates how important creative control was to her. She dismissed three directors before handpicking F. Richard Jones to craft her star vehicle, tomboy Cinderella story Mickey, from a scenario by Anita “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes“ Loos. Normand was involved in every aspect of production. The release of Mickey was shelved for over a year, which Sennett blamed on lukewarm responses from distributors, pushing Normand to sign a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. Once released, Mabel Normand’s Mickey became the highest grossing film of 1918, only too late to save her studio.
Normand with Cheyenne co-star and friend, Minnie Devereaux
Mabel Normand was noted for her generosity in refraining from upstaging other performers, and for her insistence on a slapstick equality in which she took a pie to the face as often as she threw one, in shorts like That Ragtime Band. She was the original “girl tied to the train tracks” in Barney Oldfield’s Race For A Life, but rescued her love interest on screen as often as she was rescued. Normand’s slapstick should be appreciated for its pioneering stunt-work as much as comedy. Mabel’s stunts included: leading a lion on a string, piloting a plane, diving off a cliff into a river, wrestling a tame bear, riding a horse bareback, jumping off a second story roof, dangling from a third story roof, being thrown from a moving vehicle, being dragged through mud on a rope, brick-throwing fights, and driving speeding race cars.
Mabel’s Strange Predicament – 1914
“I had nobody to tell me what to do. Dramatic actresses had the stage to fall back on, the sure-fire hits of theatrical history in pose and facial expression; but I had to do something that nobody had ever done before.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer)
The film that developed Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, Mabel’s Strange Predicament,begins like later Chaplin films, with the pathos of the disheveled Tramp’s rejection by Mabel’s hard-hearted snob. The focus then shifts to Mabel’s own predicament, locked out of her room in pajamas and falling prey to farcically escalating sexual misunderstandings. Pajamas were considered so provocative that the film was banned in Sweden, explaining Mabel’s panic. Mabel’s own “sweetheart” almost strangles her after finding her under his friend’s bed (hiding from Chaplin’s persistent advances). Her sweetheart’s married friend reveals willingness to harass Mabel, as soon as the two are alone. A wedge is thereby driven between Mabel and Alice Davenport, who sees Mabel as sexual competition. In all this, Chaplin is utterly useless, blindly pressing his own suit. Only Mabel’s dog offers unconditional friendship. This kinship with animals would fuel many set-pieces in Mickey. Despite the film’s flippancy and happy ending, the overall impression is of a Mabel constantly stifled by the possessiveness of others.
By shifting the focus from Chaplin’s scorned heart to Mabel’s predicament, our interpretation of both characters shifts, too. Mabel begins the film as the snooty girl, but ends as the victim of exhausting demands on her affection. Conversely, Chaplin begins sympathetically as the archetypal Tramp – a whimsically drunken, lovelorn underdog – but ends as an oblivious and entitled sex pest. Most accounts agree that Chaplin was infatuated with Normand, fueling tension with Sennett. In Mabel’s Strange Predicament, we understand her beauty as a nuisance and hindrance to Mabel’s liberation, not a mere motivator for men. Perhaps the resulting unflattering impression of Chaplin explains the film’s top-rated IMDb review by Michael DeZubiria, calling it “a disappointment for Chaplin fans, but it is a curiosity piece to see what results when he works under a different, and far less talented, director.” A Cinema History, however, spotlights the skill of the “far less talented” 20-year-old Normand’s dynamic editing, keeping a tight pace with cross-cutting and short duration shots.
“I hated to be simply a means by which someone else was creating something.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being an auteur)
Mabel At The Wheelshowcases Normand’s daring as a stuntwoman, brawling, tumbling from moving vehicles into mud, and racing cars. Its dynamic climax also shows her mastery of parallel editing, rapidly cutting between simultaneous events to build tension, a hallmark of her original mentor, D.W. Griffith. Mabel at the Wheel is the film where tensions with Chaplin exploded, with Sennett restrained from firing him only by distributors clamoring for more Chaplin pictures. IMDb’s trivia suggests that this is owing to Mabel being “quick to dismiss [Chaplin’s] own ideas for more refined comic business,” though her slapstick is visibly subtler and more naturalistic than Chaplin’s at this point. As Mabel at the Wheel itself depicts, when men fight over Mabel, it’s always Mabel who gets hit. Chaplin’s autobiography, My Life In Pictures, and Thomas Sherman both suggest the real problem was Chaplin’s inability to “countenance this girl, years younger than himself, directing him in his films,” despite Normand being his mentor in cinema. The jealous saboteur and shrieking bully that Chaplin plays in Mabel At The Wheel is therefore interesting, not only for contrasting with his later self-authored image, but for reflecting his reported behavior on set.
Chaplin never found a comic partnership to rival Mabel’s with Arbuckle, Margaret Dumont’s with Groucho Marx, Flora Finch’s with John Bunny, Lucille Ball’s with Vivian Vance or Stan Laurel’s with Oliver Hardy. He never again found, or perhaps permitted, a co-star with Mabel’s ability to rival both his physical daring and his emotional range, despite the undeniable spark this gives their interplay. A “Battle of the Sexes” angle, that debates whether Chaplin or Normand is more talented, surely misses the point: couldn’t both have grown to their fullest potential through equal collaboration? Wouldn’t Chaplin have sparked off madcap Mabel, as her naturalist theories inspired the developing emotional depth of his comedy? Wouldn’t Mabel, who had never performed comedy for a live audience, have developed discipline and sharper timing by learning from Chaplin’s years of vaudeville experience? Chaplin’s insecurity is not solely responsible for torpedoing Normand’s directing career, but his support could certainly have saved it.
“To make a farce heroine more than a mere doll, you must think out the situation yourself and, above all, you must pay great attention to every little detail in the scene. The little bits of business that seem insignificant are what make good comedy“ – Mabel Normand
Mabel’s Blunder,written and directed by Normand,suffers from Mabel’s lack of a really talented co-star, but further develops themes from her earlier films. As Chaplin does in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Mabel’s boss and future father-in-law finds himself sexually harassing a man who has been substituted for Mabel, making male viewers imagine themselves as the harassed woman. Mabel’s forced smile, while harassed by her boss, pointedly contrasts with her privately expressed disgust. Normand again symbolizes her independence in Mabel’s Blunder by taking the wheel, posing as a chauffeur to spy on her cheating fiancé. Mistaken for a man, Mabel is attacked by a jealous suitor for talking to another woman, once more exploring how jealousy suffocates female freedom. Her cheating fiancé applauds the jealous suitor, exposing his double standards. The pointedness of this gender commentary is undermined, however, by a traditional happy ending in which the “other woman” is harmlessly revealed as the fiancé’s sister, while the implications of his own father’s harassing Mabel are never really confronted. All in all, Mabel’s gender reversals are not as biting as Alice Guy’s, but the two have a comparable comic perspective, a distinctive voice that was suppressed by the exclusion of female filmmakers.
While Lois Weber and Mabel Normand were helping to shape Hollywood’s cinematic style, back in Alice Guy’s homeland, France, Germaine Dulac was busily birthing experimental film and auteur theory. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist. Stay tuned!
In my own life, I’m embracing the idea that films can make a difference, and that they do. It’s not just the content of the film, but how we make them, how we finance them, how we share them.
Scene from Test Shoot for Of Dust and Bones
This is a guest post by Diane Bell.
Last year, like many people I know, I was overwhelmed by the terrible events unfolding across our world. From Ukraine to Gaza, from the streets of Ferguson, Missouri to the ongoing war in Syria, it seemed like the world was reaching breaking point. It felt like it was all falling apart.
At the same time, I was facing my own small battles, finishing my second film, Bleeding Heart, which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Fest. Bleeding Heart is a kind of feminist fantasy thriller starring Jessica Biel as an affluent yoga teacher and Zosia Mamet as her biological sister, a young sex worker trapped in an abusive relationship. It was born from my desire to see on screen a story I rarely see: a woman rescuing another, a celebration of strength in sisterhood and the sacrifices we can and should make for it.
In the depths of my struggle to finish it, I wrestled with the question of why I make films. The process can be so long and hard, financial rewards so meager; what is the point? Why do it? In the face of so much real suffering and true hardship in the world, is it just a vanity? Wouldn’t it be better to pack it all in and do something truly meaningful? Something that could help the world be a better place? Isn’t that why we’re all here?
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/IB08M3b0rYM”]
Concept trailer from test shoot for Of Dust and Bones
As I meditated on these questions, I kept coming back to this belief: films can change our world. The stories on our screens don’t just reflect our reality, they create it. And that is why it is essential that many different voices are empowered to make movies and why as audiences we must seek out the voices that inspire us and support them however we can. We can’t let the only movies out there be those that support the Big Lies (no matter how entertaining those movies can sometimes be). We need films that tell small, honest truths, that shed light onto our shared humanity, that enable us to explore the problems we face individually and collectively, and help us see a way towards positive change in our troubled world.
After coming to these conclusions, with my producing partner, Chris Byrne, I launched the Rebel Heart Film Workshop to teach two-day intensives on how to make a standout indie film. These workshops are not only for people who already consider themselves narrative film directors, but also for storytellers of all kinds: actors, writers, producers, poets, activists, documentarians, artists. Based on our own experiences making our first film, the Sundance award winning Obselidia, we break down the process of making a film to 16 simple steps and provide a clear blueprint for how to make a stand out indie. My hope is that through these workshops we will empower diverse voices to tell their stories in films – and to do it successfully.
To that end, we share the honest truth about making films. There’s no gloss, no lies. We share our budget, our schedule, the amounts of money we made from different sources. Crucially: we share our mistakes as well as the things we did right, something incredibly rare in our industry – and in doing so, we give other filmmakers a shot at making better choices with their films, creating a situation where they can make films over and over, regardless of whether their first or second (or third or fourth for that matter) is as outwardly successful as they hoped.
Still from Bleeding Heart
Through teaching these workshops, I realized that I had to walk the talk. What I was teaching about building community, about making creatively risky films that come from the heart: this is what I had to do again myself. And so I wrote a film called Of Dust and Bones.
This film is as far from mainstream as you could imagine. It was borne totally from my reflections on the global situation last year, particularly the ongoing devastation in Syria, as well as my horror at the beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by ISIS. These are not sexy, easy to market, Hollywood subjects, but it’s where my heart was.
I started to dig into the idea of a film about the widow of a war journalist who–following his brutal murder–has retreated to a reclusive life in the desert. The only sane reaction to an insane world, she believes, is to have nothing to do with it (something I often feel myself). An uninvited guest arrives: her dead husband’s colleague, and he’s come with an agenda. He wants the rights to her husband’s last work for a film that he is making – rights that she doesn’t want to give him.
From Test Shoot for Of Dust and Bones
The film wrestles with the question: can a film change the world? Can a picture? What is worth sacrificing to get that picture or make that film?
These aren’t easy questions and I don’t think the film will give easy answers. In my own life, I’m embracing the idea that films can make a difference, and that they do. It’s not just the content of the film, but how we make them, how we finance them, how we share them. To that end, I’m trying to make this film in a far more community based way than my previous works. I’ve been blogging about it on my website and we launched a crowdfunding campaign, not just to raise crucial finance, but also to involve a village of people in the making of it.
The world still often seems like an incredibly dark, chaotic, violent place, but I honestly believe the only hope we have is to come together, support each other, and create strong community networks that are founded upon shared dreams and stories.
We can’t do it alone – any of us. But together we have a real chance to create the world we want to live in. Let’s do it.
Diane Bell is a writer and director. Her second film, Bleeding heart, a thriller starring Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet, premiered Tribeca 2015. Her first feature, Obselidia, premiered in Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2010, winning two awards and was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards. She recently launched the Rebel Heart Film Workshop, teaching how to make a stand out indie film, and is currently raising funds for her next feature, Of Dust and Bones.
That separation is reinforced by much of the film’s comedy, but Margaret isn’t positioned as an object of ridicule or disgust, as is often the case with fat and/or gender non-conforming characters. She is naive, gauche, and in over her head, but she is also the character with whom the audience empathizes most.
This guest post by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.
This article contains spoilers for The Foxy Merkins.
Selected for the NEXT series at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival along with films like Obvious Child and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Foxy Merkins is a comedy by and about queer women with an episodic structure and humor fueled by social awkwardness and mundane absurdism (think Louie). Simply put, it’s part fish out of water comedy, part buddy film, and all lesbian hookers. Set in contemporary New York City, the film creates a world of sex work in homage to Midnight Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, but populated by women who have sex with other women. As with its progenitors, this subculture is scandalous, but hardly clandestine. These sex workers bide their time on the sidewalk in broad daylight until approached by other women, which occurs with relative frequency.
The film charts unexpected territory by merging stereotypes about seemingly disparate subcultures. Its narrative maintains the beats of taboo sex and danger expected from a story about sex workers, but does so through the filter of lesbian culture and stereotypes. In one exchange between the two main characters, Jo (Jackie Monahan) advises Margaret (Lisa Haas) to market her services by using the hanky code. However, the film’s version isn’t quite the same one used by gay men in the 70s to signify their kinky preferences: “A yellow bandana in your left back pocket means you have more than one cat… a red bandana in your right back pocket means you like women who have been through the Change.”
Jo and Margaret at work. “A lot of the girls hang out in front of Talbots.”
The film predominantly focuses on Margaret, a newbie sex worker with a degree in Women’s Studies who happens to be fat and butch. She is a pastiche of red-blooded hunk Joe Buck (Jon Voight) from Midnight Cowboy and sulky sylph Mike (River Phoenix) from My Own Private Idaho, but her size and gender expression set her apart from their more normative representations of beauty. That separation is reinforced by much of the film’s comedy, but Margaret isn’t positioned as an object of ridicule or disgust, as is often the case with fat and/or gender non-conforming characters. She is naive, gauche, and in over her head, but she is also the character with whom the audience empathizes most.
Margaret bumbles her way through interactions with clients, but this characteristic diverts from the standard depiction of fat and/or gender non-conforming women as undeserving of sexual desire. The Foxy Merkins uses a more nuanced approach. We do see glimpses of her as a sexual being, such as a scene that begins by implying she’s just had an orgasm, even if it quickly turns its focus on her awkwardness. This trait is partially inherited from Joe Buck, who isn’t genteel enough to seduce the rich Manhattanites he targets. It’s charming in its relatability: as someone who can barely navigate small talk in a professional setting, let alone a sexual encounter, I could easily see myself in Margaret’s shoes. But these scenes are also ground for meta-humor, as film trope clashes with cultural expectations. What happens when someone who looks like Margaret assumes the role of soul-searching hustler formerly and famously occupied by normatively attractive men? The Foxy Merkins’ predecessors supply setting, story, and characters, but like a Warner Brothers cartoon character running off their background onto a blank screen, there is a dearth of precedent for a fat, butch film character to communicate sexual allure, either to fellow characters or to an audience who has been groomed to lust after thin, feminine women. The energy that Haas brings to these scenes suggests an undercurrent of resigned bewilderment.
Margaret socially functions as a sexual being by virtue of existing within a subculture of lesbian sex work, but that subculture largely retains real-world beauty standards, rendering her body simultaneously unattractive and sexually commodified. Jo explains to Margaret how she is seen by potential clients: “You’re the type of lesbian they are mortified to be seen with… they do not want to be caught with you. So they’re gonna pay you extra to sneak around with them… honestly, you should have so much more money.” Thin, femme Jo takes on the role of Margaret’s docent, as well as her foil. Carefree (and often careless), Jo opts to do sex work as a way of rebelling against her wealthy upbringing. Despite repeatedly stating that she is not sexually attracted to women, she is more experienced and successful than Margaret in their profession. In one scene, the two walk down a busy Manhattan street as Jo casually claims to have slept with every woman they pass, while Margaret seems to barely keep up with mentally processing what her friend is telling her.
Margaret’s allergies are triggered while visiting a client’s house.
The film continues to grapple with the clashing expectations of Margaret’s profession and appearance through a sequence of encounters with a rich, conservative client (Susan Ziegler). During their first encounter, the client asks Margaret to take her clothes off. In opposition to the sexy tone she ought to set, she chastely removes her bra and underwear once she is under the bedsheet. (Her client coquettishly refers to this maneuver as a “magic trick.”) While another film might construct an erotic scene with gliding closeups and sensual music, this one involves a stationary shot of Margaret squirming and rocking under the sheet as her client waits patiently off to the side, amplified sounds of rustling cloth the only soundtrack. The scene self-consciously buys into the mainstream trope that “nobody wants to see” fat bodies or expressions of queer sexuality. The client obviously wants to see Margaret’s body and have sex with her, but Margaret remains in her culturally sanctioned role of chaste lesbian/unseen fat person to the point of absurdity.
Unsurprisingly, this is not a film that passes up a chance to satirize the right wing. Margaret’s aforementioned client has hired two men (Charles Rogers and Lee Eaton) to dress as cops, burst into her hotel room, and terrorize Margaret, who is unaware that the scene is staged. In the second of three scenes to this effect, Margaret is completely naked. Fat bodies in a state of undress are usually cause for a film protagonist to express disgust, with the expectation that the audience will empathize with that disgust. This time, however, the fat body belongs to our protagonist. She isn’t modestly positioned with her back to the camera or cheekily blocked by an object in the foreground. The audience sees her full frontal in the center of the screen, flanked by the two cops pointing guns at her. As with her “striptease,” the camera is unwavering. This static view heightens our sense of Margaret’s shock and embarrassment, but is also confrontational. This is a film that asks the audience to relate to a fat, lesbian protagonist: if a viewer has been trying to empathize with Margaret by downplaying her size or queerness up to this point in the movie, those characteristics have become starkly unavoidable.
The male gaze that reinforces standards of thinness and straightness and is ubiquitous in cinema, even if only present in a handful of scenes in The Foxy Merkins, is embodied in this scene by the two cops. They repeatedly tell Margaret to drop what she’s holding, despite her protests that she isn’t holding anything and attempts to placate them by making dropping motions with her empty hands. They even insist that she has “something tied around [her] waist” and is wearing “a collared shirt,” as if they have no sense of what a fat woman’s body looks like in the nude. An absurdist feedback loop is created of a command that cannot be followed and cooperation that is inherently uncooperative. This dynamic is reminiscent of the often frustrating relationship that queer and fat people have with a dominant culture that demands compliance even when attempts to do so are demonstrably futile. We still hear voices of authority telling us to “drop it” with regards to weight and desire for non-heteronormative love and sex, despite evidence that diets don’t work in the long run and sexual orientation can’t be changed at will.
But these two men have no genuine authority, they have been ordered to act as police by the client. As Jo later explains to Margaret, “It’s her fetish, it’s her kink. She likes to see people naked with the police.” The client watches these confrontations from behind the bedsheets, distancing herself from the situation by feigning shock and claiming that Margaret showed up in her room uninvited. This rich, white, thin woman who is hiding her own queerness to maintain her privilege actively seeks pleasure from seeing the oppression of marginalized people. Their third date even includes a Black woman, ostensibly the client’s maid, getting shot by the cops. Jo, who has the privileges of her appearance and wealthy upbringing, similarly benefits from the situation, as she has been paid to withhold from Margaret that the scenes aren’t real. The client’s fetish parallels the common use of schadenfreude in film to entertain at the expense of not only fat people, but people of color, sex workers, and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people.
Of course, The Foxy Merkins is a comedy, and the scenarios it presents are not as cruel as the realities it satirizes, or even the films to which it pays homage. The pretend bust is the closest Margaret comes to experiencing violence on the job, and even that ends with the cops and their shooting victim laughing and walking offscreen together. Nevertheless, the lighthearted humor speaks to real disparities in media representation. The audience is not allowed to forget that Margaret is occupying a position that the film industry did not historically intend to include someone of her sexuality, gender expression, or size. Both as a lesbian hooker and as a film character, her existence is a struggle. She ultimately realizes that she must move on from the former role, but as the latter, she is a quiet triumph.
Tessa Racked is a Women’s Studies major who makes a living as a social worker, writes about fat representation in film at Consistent Panda Bear Shape, and dispenses witticisms @tessa_racked. They live in Chicago.
In a close-up Sarah takes a piece of a (year-old) cookie that is trapped deep in the car seat and puts it in her mouth, like a communion wafer: she closes her eyes and, for the first time since before her son went missing, we see her face smooth, for a moment, into bliss. The only other time we see her free from tension and sorrow, is when, in another stunning shot, this one on a rooftop, she states with great confidence, “My son is alive.”
Meadowland, part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (playing this Friday, April 24) has a great first scene–a husband and wife in the front seat of a car with their young son chattering and eating cookies in the back. What we know (from every synopsis of this film) is: the son will soon go missing. So the short car ride and trip to the gas station convenience store becomes a thriller in which we wonder: will it happen now? How about now? At the terrible moment when both parents realize their son is lost the camera lingers separately on their anguished faces, then we’re immediately transported to a year later: the mother, Sarah (Olivia Wilde) drunk at their friends’ apartment while the husband, Phil (Luke Wilson) sits on the couch wearing a tight smile. Wilson turns in another solid performance as a working class guy: after a similar role in The Skeleton Twins, whose cinematographer, Reed Morano, is Meadowland’s director (her first time directing).
The couple, we see in a cab ride home, are still stung with grief, especially since they’ve never found out what happened to their son. A detective visits with vague leads about what might have happened to the boy (the worst scenario possible, perhaps caught and eventually killed by a serial pedophile), but Sarah refuses to even glance at the photos of the suspect.
Morano acts as the film’s cinematographer as well as the director (a more unusual combo than one would expect) and, as in her work in Kill Your Darlings, The Skeleton Twins, and the first season of the recently cancelled Looking, she has a stunning visual sense: impressionistic shots of sky and clouds, and one scene with the camera looking an animal directly in the eye. She also shows a gift for working with actors. In a close-up Sarah takes a piece of a (year-old) cookie that is trapped deep in the car seat and puts it in her mouth, like a communion wafer: she closes her eyes and, for the first time since before her son went missing, we see her face smooth, for a moment, into bliss. The only other time we see her free from tension and sorrow is when, in another stunning shot, this one on a rooftop, she states with great confidence, “My son is alive.”
Olivia Wilde, as Sarah, director Reed Morano shooting behind her
Throughout much of the rest of the action, Wilde as Sarah, with dark circles under her large pale eyes and hollows under her cheeks, resembles the figure in the Munch painting The Scream, especially when she wears a yellow hoodie to wander the city by herself, sometimes imagining she catches a glimpse of her son on the crowded sidewalk, another time teetering too close to the edge of the subway platform.
Phil is a New York city cop, and the film’s script operates under what–considering recent headlines–seems like the naive assumption that he mainly acts as a kindly social worker, as when he comes in for a repeat noise complaint from a young couple who aren’t getting along. Also in the mix is Phil’s brother, Tim (Giovanni Ribisi) who comes to stay with the couple “temporarily.” It’s the sort of role in which the screenwriter (Chris Rossi) asked himself, “How can I convey this character is a self-medicating, self-loathing fuck-up,” so gives him a line early in the film in which the character says… he’s a self-medicating asshole. Ribisi’s performance is equally unsubtle.
Sarah works as a teacher and starts to identify with an autistic student who gets in trouble for stealing school library books about his favorite obsession, elephants. She finds out he is also a foster kid. Rossi can’t seem to stop himself from piling terrible circumstances onto this kid: when Sarah follows his surly, neglectful foster mother (Elisabeth Moss, at first shot from the back and at a distance so we don’t recognize her from Mad Men) after she drops his lunch off at school, Sarah sees her disappear into a gas station bathroom to turn a trick, and when Sarah later engages her in conversation, the woman denies she has any children. She wears sweatpants with “Juicy” across the ass and bright, heavy, blue eye shadow just in case we didn’t get the point that she’s supposed to be tacky as well as a “bad” Mom.
Rossi’s penchant for overkill ruins the film in the last third, in which Sarah becomes increasingly desperate and unhinged. Meadowland is one of those movies in which to show how full of self-loathing a previously level-headed character played by a beautiful actress is, she fucks a really gross (in every sense) guy after we in the audience have repeated to ourselves, ”Please don’t fuck the gross guy. Please don’t!” Sarah also cuts into her arm, has a breakdown in front of her students, tries a highly addictive drug, and takes actions creepily parallel to those the police suspect someone did to her own son.
Pauline Kael once wrote that critics often cry “art” when they should be saying “ouch” and though Kael has been dead for years, this film shows that trend, which she wrote about a half-century ago, is still going strong. Everything that is terrible in Sarah’s life (and Sarah, not Phil, is the film’s central character) just gets worse (with a tiny sliver of redemption at the end that is too little, too late): an adolescent’s idea of “realism.” Better films show us grief over the loss of a child in a more nuanced context. In The Accidental Tourist, William Hurt’s character, Macon, meets a slightly older boy who resembles his dead son (and is the age he would have been had he lived) and the encounter gives Macon some closure. In The Orphanage the mother’s last interaction with her son happens while he is having an incredibly violent tantrum. We sense that part of her effort to reunite with him is to make sure this memory isn’t the last one the two have of each other.
An additional note I mention often in my reviews: maybe I’m a dreamer, but I’m hoping Meadowland will be one of the last films set in New York in which every main character is white. John Leguizamo plays a member of Phil’s grief support group, and Sarah has Black colleagues and students, but otherwise the film might as well take place in Oslo. When I think of a teacher married to a cop in today’s New York City, I don’t picture two white people–or even two straight people. The current mayor of New York is a white guy married to a queer Black woman, but film directors and producers still can’t imagine anyone would be interested in seeing a movie about a similar family onscreen.
Lucy McBath (right) in The Armor of Light
Another film at Tribeca about a mother’s grief for her son is the excellent and multi-layered documentary The Armor of Light (playing this Saturday, April 25) the first film directed by Abigail Disney who has had a prolific career as the producer of films including She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Pray The Devil Back to Hell,and Vessel. Much of the film’s promotional materials emphasize the trajectory of Rob Schenck, a white Evangelical minister and fixture of the far right, who comes to see his “pro-life” views must include a stand against the National Rifle Association (NRA). But the more interesting person in the film (who gets about equal screen time) is Lucy McBath, the mother of a Black teenager, Jordan Davis, shot inside a car at a gas station. Davis’s killer invoked Florida’s “stand your ground” laws in his defense, which state that anyone who “feels” as if his life is in danger is free to shoot and kill the person he thinks is a threat. McBath, whose dentist father was part of the NAACP in 1960s Illinois, immediately understands the racial aspect of this killing and others like it, but Schenck doesn’t bring up race until the film is more than half over. We in the audience see a marked difference in how a white congregation and a Black congregation react to his new rhetoric against guns and the NRA.
What goes unsaid in the conversations of right-wing, white men and the repeated montage of white guys at gun shows is the connection between gun violence and masculinity: the popular fantasy articulated by many of the men to be “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun” by shooting him, something which even many police officers rarely, if ever, do. While the men talk about “protecting their families” I thought about all the women who are threatened or killed by guns their own husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances point at them, a concern to which these men seem oblivious. Instead, they talk about the government taking away their guns with the same vehemence they would about government taking away their balls.
Also fascinating is McBath’s meeting with Schenck in which both cite Bible passages to make their points, but which concludes with McBath in tears telling him, “It’s vitally important that you help. They will listen to you.” McBath states later, when she is alone on camera that although she doesn’t “condone” abortion, she would never interfere with another woman’s reproductive choice, but feels like she and Schenck have some common goals around guns, saying, “This is what this is all about: fighting for life.” We see her testifying in front of Congress, and she eventually quits her job to devote her time to being the spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
I couldn’t help being a little cynical about Schenck’s intentions. He keeps citing the Bible and Jesus for his newfound, anti-gun mindset but with his long support of right-wing politicians (including members of the Tea Party) I wondered if he had read any of the many Bible passages in which Jesus ministers to the poor, the people those same politicians build their careers disparaging while defunding public programs meant to benefit them.
We see the slow, frustrating course McBath and Schenck have ahead when Schenck meets with three other anti-choice stalwarts (all white men, of course) across a table and tries to persuade them the NRA is antithetical to Christian values, asking, “Is that a pro-life ethic?” Two of the men yell at him in response, but he seems to sway the third, a triumph we can’t help hoping will repeat itself at other tables across the country.
There is, nevertheless, something magical about Bessie’s life and career. How did an impoverished, orphaned Black girl who spent her childhood singing on the streets not only survive but succeed in a land that still lynched its Black citizens? There is something profoundly modern and heroic about the woman herself. An independent woman with attitude and talent, she has to be one of the most charismatic feminist icons of the 20th century.
HBO’s Bessie has to be one of the most exciting offerings on 2015’s cultural calendar. Helmed by Dee Rees and starring Queen Latifah in the title role, the telefilm will recall the extraordinary life of the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith. It has all the makings of a quality production. Dee Rees impressed us back in 2011 with her well-observed coming-of-age drama, Pariah. An attractive, charismatic presence, Queen Latifah is, equally, an excellent casting choice. But who was Bessie Smith? Although hugely respected by musicians throughout the generations, many of us remain unfamiliar with the entertainer. In anticipation of Bessie, let’s remind ourselves of the exceptional life and career of the “Empress of the Blues.”
Director Dee Rees
Born in Tennessee in 1894, Bessie Smith was one of the greatest Blues singers of the 20s and 30s. Her childhood was marked by poverty and she lost both of her parents by the age of 9. She sang on the streets before performing in touring groups. A dancer, at first, she was a member of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the same minstrel show as the great Ma Rainey, another Blues singer, by the way, who deserves her own biopic. Bessie signed a contract with Columbia Records in 1923 and was soon catapulted to fame–and riches. Earning an astonishing $2,000 a week, she became, in fact, the highest-paid Black entertainer of her era. She had her own show and her own railroad car.
Her private life was, by all accounts, pretty lively. Her marriage to husband Jack Gee was turbulent and she was particularly fond of gin. She broke many of the rules of her day. Reportedly bisexual, she had affairs with women during her marriage. Bessie Smith was sexual and successful as well as, of course, immensely gifted. The extraordinary depth and power of her voice is evident from this following clip from the short film, St Louis Blues (1929).
“Downhearted Blues,” “Nobody knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home” are among some of the songs Bessie recorded. Her popularity waned–music historians cite the Depression and changes in musical taste–but there were, it seems, indications that she was on the verge of a comeback. Tragically, Bessie Smith was killed in a car accident in 1937 at the age of 43.
Queen Latifah
There is, nevertheless, something magical about Bessie’s life and career. How did an impoverished, orphaned Black girl who spent her childhood singing on the streets not only survive but succeed in a land that still lynched its Black citizens? There is something profoundly modern and heroic about the woman herself. An independent woman with attitude and talent, she has to be one of the most charismatic feminist icons of the 20th century.
Another portrait of the “Empress of the Blues” by van Vechten
Bessie is a refreshing, tantalizing prospect. God knows, of course, that dramatizing the lives of female cultural heroines doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to the powers that be. This is particularly the case, let’s face it, with women of color. But that must change. Movie studios and television companies, moreover, need to pay tribute to people who create more instead of offering romanticized, revisionist accounts of snipers. The Empress of the Blues’s commanding voice and pioneering spirit resonate today. Hopefully, Bessie will help restore her to our collective memory. She occupies a unique, vital place in 20th century popular culture.
But as Sheryl Sandberg’s Ban Bossy campaign states, “When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a ‘leader.’ Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy.’” As a 28-year-old, I can vouch that it’s not just little girls that are affected by “bossy.” I’m trying to Ban Bossy in my own brain (or accept that I am a boss and it’s OK if I’m “bossy”) and it got me thinking about our society’s gender expectations and how they can hold all of us back.
This is a guest post by L Jean Schwartz.
Occasionally recently I’ve wondered, “Am I being bossy?” I’m a writer/director/producer, currently crowdfunding for my first feature film The Average Girl’s Guide to Suicide, and the sole manager of the LLC for our film. So, I am a boss. (Not like this, but a bit like a #bosswitch). But as Sheryl Sandberg’s Ban Bossy campaign states, “When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a ‘leader.’ Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy.’” As a 28-year-old, I can vouch that it’s not just little girls that are affected by “bossy.” I’m trying to Ban Bossy in my own brain (or accept that I am a boss and it’s OK if I’m “bossy”) and it got me thinking about our society’s gender expectations and how they can hold all of us back.
In Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly, she writes that according to society’s rules women have to “be willing to stay as small, sweet, and quiet as possible, and use our time and talent to look pretty.” This made me laugh out loud, because A) I have often felt pressure to be as small, sweet, and quiet as possible, and use my time and talents to look pretty, and B) as a director you generally should not try to be as small, sweet, and quiet as possible or use your time or talents to look pretty. It’s not bad to be small/sweet/quiet/pretty if that’s your nature, but forcing yourself to be as small or quiet as possible is rarely conducive to getting a movie made. Personally I’m not small, not often quiet, I try to be kind (but not saccharin sweet), and I’m no beauty queen. As we’ve been expanding our team, talking to more people about the film, and crowdfunding, I’m constantly running into the societal expectations embedded in my brain. Self-promotion is not small, sweet, or quiet. Making a dark comedy about suicide is not small, sweet, or quiet. Asking people for money is not small, sweet or quiet.
Behind the scenes of making the teaser video for The Average Girl’s Guide to Suicide.
Luckily I’m not alone in this struggle. Brené Brown writes: “…every successful woman whom I’ve interviewed has talked to be about the sometimes daily struggle to push past ‘the rules’ so she can assert herself, advocate for her ideas, and feel comfortable with her power and gifts.” If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you can relate also. Think about how incongruous it is for female CEOs, doctors, or fighter pilots to be concerned with being small/sweet/quiet/pretty. I hope you just laughed. Perhaps the next time you feel pressure in your own life to be small/sweet/quiet/pretty, remind yourself of that laugh you just had.
Women aren’t the only ones who are hampered by society’s expectations; “the rules” for men can be just as suffocating as “the rules” for women. According to Brown these expectations for men can be summed up as: don’t be wrong, don’t be weak, and don’t show fear. If men step outside those lines, they are often shamed. The more I’ve leaned into leadership roles, the more I’ve felt these expectations too and they aren’t fun. Recently I felt so scared about whether we would hit our crowdfunding campaign goal, and felt like I needed to keep a brave face for everyone else and not show my fear. Then I realized the trap I was falling into. I’m lucky to have friends and family who are there for me, and even several friends who have told me that the middle of a crowdfunding is a terrifying desert. Getting support from friends and family and remembering that I’m not alone help me get out of shame spirals.
The ever-inspiring Brené Brown.
There have been several articles recently critiquing the concept of “Strong Female Characters.” The problem isn’t with realistic female characters who show resilience, but instead to women who are…basically dudes. From one such article: “A female character simply having typically masculine traits doesn’t necessarily strengthen her; it only promotes the view that men are the strong ones in the world, and that to be strong means to emulate them.” I would also argue that in real life, to be strong women we don’t need to try to be strong men. I’ve been that girl: trying to be stronger, tougher, and more foul-mouthed than the guys, and it’s exhausting. Because though I can be strong, tough, and sometimes rather foul-mouthed, I am also very empathetic, caring and sensitive. Trying to be as strong and tough as possible doesn’t leave room for empathetic and sensitive, and I believe it’s better to embrace your true nature rather than fake another. A friend has a poster that to me has good examples of how letting go of gender norms can ease the burden on both genders. I look forward to a world where we can accept and celebrate men and women equally for their sensitivity as well as their strength.
Recently there’s a new strong feminine heroine: the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She encourages others to pursue their dreams, and determinedly pursues her own. She likes helping people, she’s good at it, and she also takes care of herself. She’s strong because when she gets knocked down, she gets back up. Kimmy Schmidt shows that being kind, optimistic, and supportive can be part of being strong.
A little rain won’t stop the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt!
As a woman and a writer, it’s encouraging to see strong and empathetic characters. My film is about a young woman’s journey to accept herself and create a life she wants to live, and it took several years of working on the script (and “doing the work” in my life) to really understand what self-acceptance feels like. It’s easier to write about a character accepting herself than to accept myself, and it’s still something I work on every day. I love how fictional characters can help teach us in our real lives, and my characters continue to teach me. They push me and challenge me to be as brave as they are, and I hope they can inspire you too.
L Jean Schwartz makes comedies about things you’re not supposed to laugh about, such as LOVELY STALKING YOU, IN SEARCH OF MY FIRST EX-HUSBAND, and THE AVERAGE GIRL’S GUIDE TO SUICIDE. Hailing from San Clemente, California, she fell in love with filmmaking when she made a behind-the-scenes documentary about the film BRICK at age 17. She’s a graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and is currently crowdfunding for her first feature film.
Olson is one of the only butch-identified filmmakers who also makes films about butch identity. The closest another recent film has come to including “butch” anything was ‘Blue Is The Warmest Color,’ a film from a straight male director in which a straight actress, Léa Seydoux, played a recognizable butch. In that role Seydoux was still firmly within the bounds of what straight male directors and producers deem “fuckable“–conventionally pretty and sexy even with short hair, minimal makeup and “tomboy” outfits.
Writer-director Jenni Olson’s latest film, The Royal Road, which received good reviews when it played Sundance earlier this year and will be the closing night offering at Art of The Real, April 26 at the Lincoln Center in New York, has a structure similar to Olson’s 2005 film The Joy of Life: personal narration accompanying static shots of California vistas. All the scenes in Road, as in Life, are living snapshots, still except for moving water, wafting smoke and cars making their way down the roads, absent of people (except in the narration), even the drivers unseen.
Olson is one of the only butch-identified filmmakers who also makes films about butch identity. The closest another recent film has come to including “butch” anything was Blue Is The Warmest Color, a film from a straight male director in which a straight actress, Léa Seydoux, played a recognizable butch. In that role Seydoux was still firmly within the bounds of what straight male directors and producers deem “fuckable“–conventionally pretty and sexy even with short hair, minimal makeup and “tomboy” outfits.
In Road, Olson talks about gender dysphoria and identifying with men, name-checking Hitchcock and Vertigo as well as filming at a couple of its famous locations. But Olson doesn’t seem to have a much deeper understanding of the women in Road’s narration (Olson also does the voice-over) than Hitchcock did of the “troubled” women characters in his films: men who ignore women’s wants and needs have historically portrayed women as “mysterious” or “unpredictable” the same way traffic can be “unpredictable” when you are busy staring at your phone. Olson calls the women “crazy” when a better description would be “fucked up” and Olson admits to being a bit of a fuck-up too.
The film could use more of Olson’s writing, whether we hear about the “square lips” of one woman Olson becomes obsessed with or this description of Los Angeles. “I’m invigorated by the sense of possibility here. People believe that good things will happen at any moment,” which immediately evokes the confident, charismatic people one finds in LA, so convinced they will attain success, their continued obscurity ends up surprising the rest of us as much as it does them. I would have liked more observations like this one and more detail instead of the generic history lesson we get about El Camino Real (the Royal Road of the title), which seems lifted directly from an unimaginative professor’s PowerPoint presentation.
The problem with movies from queer filmmakers about queer people, like films about feminism from feminists, is that we don’t have nearly enough of them, so we expect the few that we see to be all things to all people. Although I fight this desire in myself I can’t help wishing The Royal Road was more vivid: bolder and dirtier. Olson says, “I want to tell you a story of love and loss in San Francisco that reveals more about me than I ever expected to say,” but in this age of first-person essays that are volcanoes of folly and regret, the revelations in the film seem as innocuous as a very young child’s church confession.
At one point Olson talks about identifying with Casanova, whose memoirs were so scandalous that an uncensored version of them couldn’t be published until 150 years after his death. In contrast Olson’s memories of the two women in Road are weirdly chaste–we don’t have a sense of Olson ever getting lost in desire and possibility, let alone the two women, one in San Francisco, the other in Los Angeles (specifically Los Feliz or “The Happy Place” as Olson sardonically translates it) doing so.
Life’s focus on suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge (and Olson’s advocacy for barriers to prevent people from being able to throw themselves off the side) meant that film felt a lot more urgent and emotional than this one does. The women are closed off to Olson, who in turn feels closed off to us, the way an artist should never be with an audience. I didn’t have to fight sleep during Road the way I did during Goodbye To Language but something nagged at me during its even briefer run-time (65 minutes): I should feel a lot more affinity for a 50-something American queer who chases after “unavailable” women than I do for an 80-something straight, French-Swiss guy who loves his dog–but I don’t.
Late in the film, Olson tells us, “All I want to do is read novels and go to the movies,” touching on the collective predilection for getting away from horrible headlines and messy incongruities to give ourselves over, during our rapidly shrinking leisure hours, to dramas that take place in another time (Mad Men, Downton Abbey) or in another world (Game of Thrones). But Olson never gives us the same chance to do the same in Road. Olson says, “I’m inordinately obsessed with the stories of others, seeking within them the key to sharing my own,” but the stories in the film aren’t ones we are likely to obsess over too, which may be this film’s tragedy.
In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called ‘Crossroads,’ which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut.
In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called Crossroads, which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut. Spawning the coming of age anthems “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and “Overprotected,” Crossroads may have been a critical flop but it drew $61 million internationally and will forever remain a cult classic for many millennials, myself included.
Another of Rhimes’ success stories that allowed her to go on to produce some of the hottest dramas on TV was Grey’s Anatomy. Originally sweeping the Golden Globe and Emmy nominations (with a few wins here and there) in its early years, the general consensus about Grey’s today is consternation that it’s still airing after 11 seasons. What originally began as a dramatic look at the lives of a diverse cast of surgical interns arguably devolved into a shark jump of epic proportions with Izzie’s cancer-induced hallucinations and a musical episode. As a lifelong Grey’s fan, I’ll defend it to the death and contend that it has corrected course in the past few years while not being afraid to take risks.
At first glance, two of Rhimes’ early successes might not look so similar, but I’m here to argue that Crossroads acted as a dry run for Grey’s Anatomy. Let me count the ways…
First, both center on a somewhat boring white woman whose less conventional friends turn out to be much more interesting. Crossroads (along with Center Stage) introduced us to Zoe Saldana, the well-to-do popular girl to Spears’ awkward valedictorian and Taryn Manning’s pregnant teen from the wrong side of the tracks, subverting stereotypes of race in the small Georgian town where the movie is set, which has become Rhimes’ calling card.
In Grey’s, Meredith finds immediate kinship with Cristina Yang, and later brings Latina Callie Torres and mixed race half-sister Maggie Pierce into a fold that’s more fucked up than their Crossroads counterparts. Like Orange is the New Black (in which Manning also stars), Meredith and Lucy act as Trojan horses to introduce audiences to the lives of other, more diverse women.
There’s also the awkward, bumbling love-interest-that-wasn’t. In one of Crossroads’ opening scenes, we see a lingerie-clad Lucy about to have sex for the first time with Justin Long’s Henry, who’s pined after Lucy for the three years they’ve been lab partners. Over in Shondaland, it was Meredith who drunkenly succumbed to George’s subtle advances, but it was not to be–she started crying during sex and damaged their friendship, working relationship, and housemate dynamic for a long time. (The one aspect in which Grey’s differs to Crossroads is that Anson Mount’s Ben is certainly no McDreamy.)
Crossroads is a road trip flick whereas Grey’s primarily takes place inside a hospital, but make no mistake: there have been plenty of outings away from the four walls of Seattle Grace/Mercy West/Grey-Sloane Memorial Hospital. These include the men’s camping trip in which Alex and George get into a “slap-fight” (“open-handed combat” to protect their surgeon hands); the residents’ sojourn to San Francisco to take their boards where April and Jackson finally get it on; Cristina’s fellowship at the Mayo Clinic sees her isolated in icy Minnesota; and the car accident involving Callie and Arizona which spawns the abovementioned musical episode, “Song Beneath the Song.”
Speaking of music, Crossroads is a film that utilizes it quite heavily and with Britney Spears as your leading lady, you’d be (“Drive Me) Crazy” not to. In addition to the songs I mentioned above, there’s also the requisite karaoke scene in which Spears, Manning and Saldana sing “I Love Rock & Roll,” also released as a single for Spears. Like The O.C. before it, Grey’s is one of those TV shows that has become better known perhaps for its music than its melodrama. In 2006, the show won a Grammy for best compilation album featuring two of the songs the show is perhaps best known for: “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol and “How to Save a Life” by The Fray. Both have the requisite Madonna singalong while Grey’s has made famous the “five second dance party” and drunken boogie sessions Meredith and Cristina frequently engage in.
Finally, both protagonists have strained family lives. Lucy in Crossroads grew up with her father (Dan Aykroyd) after her mother left them to start a new family; this is part of the reason Lucy tags along on the road trip in the first place. The titular Meredith Grey rivals Lucy in the dysfunctional family department: in addition to her father walking out and her mother’s cold and distant demeanour, Meredith discovers later in life that she has not one but three half-sisters spawned from her parents’ subsequent dalliances (spoiler alert: these sisters three don’t all share the same DNA).
Crossroads’ Mimi (Manning) begins the movie pregnant but miscarries at the culmination of the road trip, while Grey’s Izzie gave the product of her teen pregnancy up for adoption. Where Crossroads doesn’t deal with abortion, Grey’s certainly does, with Cristina undergoing an abortion and a miscarriage for her two pregnancies. For a teen movie, Crossroads isn’t afraid to deal with rape, either, which is how Mimi came to be pregnant in the first place.
At first glance the two Rhimes productions couldn’t be more different, and while Grey’s is far more sophisticated, Crossroads is evidence that Rhimes began her progressive storytelling long before Meredith, Olivia, Annalise and co. hit our TV screens. Who would have thought that Britney Spears would be involved?
Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she writes about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter.
How you define risk – be that financial, ethical, physical or moral – is vital. It shapes who we are and, even more so, what we see in the media and onscreen. We all know that male studio heads define “risk” as films helmed by women (despite the overwhelming stats that women-led films do better financially). It is clear to me that now, more than ever, we need risk-takers in charge. We need risk-takers to make women better represented in film, on both sides of the camera.
This is a guest post by Stacey Davis.
I am a risk taker.
When I say risk, I’m talking about the impulsive, why-the-hell-not, damn-the-consequences kind.
Case in point, several years ago I convinced my husband that we should open an ice cream shop in our neighborhood. Why did I think this was a good idea for two full-time working adults with a toddler at home? Well, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of kids on bikes coming in with piggy bank change clinched in their palms, falling over themselves to buy penny candy.
“It’ll be great” was my best argument for why we should jump off this cliff. And it was great. We had a stream of neighborhood kids pour in with eager faces and wander out with sticky ones. But, despite our enthusiasm, it failed.
After 11 months, we closed the doors. But I’d do it again. I’ve never looked upon that experience as a mistake. Instead, I think, “Damn, if I knew then what I know now, I could have killed it.”
How you define risk – be that financial, ethical, physical or moral – is vital. It shapes who we are and, even more so, what we see in the media and onscreen. We all know that male studio heads define “risk” as films helmed by women (despite the overwhelming stats that women-led films do better financially). It is clear to me that now, more than ever, we need risk-takers in charge. We need risk-takers to make women better represented in film, on both sides of the camera.
So, my question is this: How can we all learn to take more risks?
How can we encourage each other to take them? For starters, we must never let past failures influence future success. A few years after the ice cream shop shuttered, I decided it was time for me to move on from the law firm where I had practiced for the last 12 years. My passion was entertainment law and the only way to pursue that path in Birmingham, Ala. was to set up my own shop.
I never once second-guessed the idea of starting another small business. Consequences be damned, remember? So two months later, I opened my own entertainment law practice, the Law Firm of Stacey A. Davis. It hasn’t been easy, but a year later the doors are still open.
I didn’t let one failure chain me down or stop me from taking another risk. I couldn’t. The fear of sitting behind a desk working another 10 years at a job that was just a job and not a passion was far more insidious than the fear of failure.
As Drew Barrymore said, “If you don’t take risks, you’ll have a wasted soul.” And my soul craved the risk.
Still, I can hear the chorus shout: “It’s easy for you. You’ve got a safety net” or “Your family is so supportive.” Whether or not that’s the case, I encourage everyone to take the plunge themselves. Regardless of your circumstance, it does not feel safe.
During my legal career, I’ve represented a lot of first-time filmmakers who failed to achieve the level of success they wanted with their first film. Hell, some of them didn’t even finish their films. They took a risk and it didn’t pay off. But being afraid of failure only makes future success impossible. It is those filmmakers who shouted the mantra of consequences be damned and jumped off the cliff again (and again) that have etched out a career in this business.
One of my writing instructors once told me every no gets you closer to a yes. I’ve heard a lot of nos. And I looked at each one of them as a way to get one step closer to a yes (granted, that perspective is not always immediate and usually involves a margarita or two).
Call it eternal optimism. Call it the growth mindset. (If you haven’t read Carol Dweck’s Mindset, read it now.) But I believe that the risk mindset is the No. 1 quality a woman filmmaker needs in order to succeed in this industry. You’ve got to fight for it. You’ve got to take it.
So now I’ve moved on to my next adventure. Making my first film, The Sibling Code. I’ve been writing for many years and knew I needed to take the next step. It’s a big risk. Maybe my Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign will fail. Maybe the film will be a flop. Maybe in a year I’ll say, “Damn, if I knew then what I know now, I could have killed it.” But I don’t live for maybes. I don’t get out of bed for maybes. My name is Stacey Davis and I take risks. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Stacey Davis is an entertainment attorney and the writer/producer of The Sibling Code, a comedic short about the love-hate relationship of siblings. Stacey lives in Birmingham with her husband, Nick, and 8- year-old-son, Charlie. Stacey can be reached at sdavis@staceydavislaw.com, www.staceydavislaw.com or @staceydavislaw.
