The World Ten Times Over

Club des Femmes is a positive female space for the re-examination of ideas through art.

Why is it still necessary do you think to create a space to show female work? Are we not in a post-feminist era?
Club des Femmes wants to show film made by women because regardless of post feminist etc it’s still very hard for women filmmakers to get work funded, made and exhibited. We want to show by example that – yes you can! We want to give context and generate discussion about the rich legacy of women’s filmmaking.

We do not agree with the label “post feminist”. We’re living in a time when feminist politics are rarely considered seriously in the UK media. As a culture we’ve moved back to more essentialist position which is very scary.

I read somewhere that counter culture is dead. What is your take on this with respect to film?
We do not agree. Experimental, underground, avant garde cinema – whatever you want to call it – is very much alive and being screened at film festivals, film clubs, film theatres, universities, bars, pubs, parties and homes … anywhere where you can project films onto a white space.

What are the challenges in finding cinemas to show the work?
This is very hard and getting increasingly harder. Cinemas that we used to work with can no longer afford to give us screening slots as they have revenue targets that they must meet. This means small organisations like ours have been pushed out. Having said that, we’ve found working with wonderful festivals like the London Short Film Festival has been a joy as they have been incredibly supportive and we’ve been welcomed with open arms by them and the festival venue, the ICA. It may be hard but we have to look for spaces that value cinema as a cultural commodity and not solely a commercial one.

What can up and coming artist filmmakers learn from those who went before?
Learn your craft and keep politics alive in film. Don’t be afraid of going against the mainstream, they always follow along in the end don’t they anyway?

Club des Femmes links
Club des Femmes
POUT

Lisa Gornick is the only out lesbian filmmaker in the UK who has been consistently making feature films dealing with lesbian life experiences. Her work goes beyond the coming out stories and deals with the complex and contradictory feelings women have for each when sustaining long term lesbian relationships.

You started out as a stand up and actress why the move behind the camera?
Before I got into performing, I was making things up with drawing and words. It was only by the good chance to find a great Saturday drama class that I began to perform too. As a teenager, I was shy and a little frustrated by things so the spontaneity of improvisation was such an amazing release.

I’d always loved going to the cinema more than the theatre in a way - even though I acted mainly on stage - so, I did some studying of video at Battersea adult institute and then went to Bristol University’s post graduate course to study filmmaking - but with the advent of digital filmmaking I really began to take risks and to think maybe I liked this move behind the camera.

You have a ‘just do it’ attitude to filmmaking and you have made 2 features using guerilla filmmaking tactics. Why this route and not the more formal one?
With the low cost of digital and the fact that I had a camera and a computer with editing software, I thought why wait for the green lights of external approval in making a film. I have to say I was feeling pretty depressed about things and it did seem the only was up, to quote Yazz, in terms of just starting to shoot a film.

I saw Festen and was amazed by the potential beauty of shooting on a Sony PD100 - the same camera I had and still have.

Acting to me seemed about waiting. I didn’t want that to happen to  me again. I also realised that once I started and had people, like Campbell, who did camera in both films - give me not only practical help in terms of shooting but also encouragement in terms of the production of the film and getting on with it. I thought to go for it.

I never really explored the formal way because in the early days of making my films, I wanted to do it, not spend ages talking about what I was about to do. I’m now ready to attempt the pitch and I think now I am intrigued to explore the more formal route in terms of waiting at the red light for it to turn green in terms of getting funding.

How would you describe your filmmaking style?
In terms of Do I Love You? and Tick Tock Lullaby my two features I’d describe my filmmaking style as using film/comedy/performance to work out something that is troubling or worrying me. My first desire is not STORY. Everywhere I go that is the sacred filmmaking mantra - what is the story? For so so long, I used to get bored when people asked that. I’d make up a story just to please them with an answer and realised as I was speaking that it wasn’t working.

I’m more interested in using film to explore human dilemmas. Both my films so far have centred around questions around female sexuality - if I want to really give it a label which I know my instincts resist.

I would start by getting up early and writing dialogues around the subject. Then when I get hooked on various characters, I would begin to dream up scenarios and build a certain trajectory for them to follow. So I can’t totally rule out narrative elements.

When I felt I had enough dialogues, or more I was getting lonely, I decided to find the actors. I would say that my films tend to be performer focussed. I am more excited by the actors than I am by smooth and perfected camera moves or exquisite set design. It’s what comes naturally to me and I find it the most compelling part of the filmmaking process.

Where do you draw your influences from?
We are drawing influences all the time. The majority are from friends and family members who often remain unheralded in this type of question as filmmakers tend to trot out Chantal Akerman, Jane Campion, Dorothy Arzner, Jean Luc Godard, Woody Allen and John Cassavetes - all of whom I have watched over the years and been hooked into (as well as countless others).

So many other filmmakers, playwrights and writers have found their way into my pscyhe. You look at how they work and see if this fits with you. But they are the named ones. There are masses of influences from comments friends and family say. Or a picture in a gallery. Or something briefly seen on the internet or television. Or a moment in the street that influences me greatly.

Why do you do the risky thing of mining your personal life for your films?
I’m sure so much goes back to those early improvisation classes as a teenager. The sense of focus that I seemed to get when asked to improvise around my own experience was so intense that it stayed with me as a creative source.

I have always loved the honesty of the writer. The first person writing of cartoonists, authors and filmmakers. A lot of them were men, worrying about the women in their lives. I would still relate to them even though they were often skinny yet macho heterosexual men. A slight irritation as they described their antics was overcome by an intense wonder at their honesty.

I suppose the biggest risk is the fact that it seems to be reality. Once your own personal dilemmas have been routed through into a creative act/performance - they really aren’t objective realism. They are portraits not photographs. There is always a fictional coating on it.

Who is the intended audience for your work?
I don’t work in the way that funders and the market analysers say you should work - that is know who your audience is. If I said my audience was women from the age of 18 to 45 lets say. Then what about the 75 year old heterosexual couple that came to see Tick Tock Lullaby with Obama badges, or the sixteen year old Korean boys or the 22 year old men in Johannesburg who came up to me after my film.

I don’t like targetting audiences. Let people find you and relate to the film however they want to. I love it that teenage boys who are always fed guns and rushing and shouting want to see a group of thirty something women worrying about whether to be a mother or not.

What was the response to your last film Tick Tock Lullabuy?
The producer in me just wants to mention the good moments - those teenage boys who loved the film, the women that came up to me and said keep making films and the young girls who loved the honesty in the films.

There are retractors (don’t worry I hear you) - I presume some tend to worry about my organic process of filmmaking - it’s not a conventional STORY - with beautiful people doing beautiful things and being ecstatically happy about it. Or in terms of the lesbian characters in the film, they are rounded people, women who question things in their lives including their past and present feelings about men. Some lesbians are a bit disturbed by that, but it’s my honest expression. We are none of us perfect.

What are you working on at the moment?
I am working on two new features and also writing some episodic ideas. I soon will start talking about these on the web. The most I can say is that if anyone is interested come to my MySpace page,  I’ll keep you hooked in with my new projects. It will be really lovely to have you there.

Links
Tick Tock Lullaby MySpace page
Valliant Doll
Valliant Doll YouTube

Viva Voce Virus directed by Kathleen Bryson and Kimmo Moykky. Viva Voce Virus is a wild vivid surreal film sci film which deals with the history of queer actors in the cinema being terrified of being ‘outed’. The main story is of the actress Ronnie played by Deni Francis who thinks to be successful she needs to employ the well-worn tactic of having a “beard” boyfriend. Ironically she is playing part a lesbian vampire in the contemporary remake of a B-movie written by dyke director Gloria LaFonche in the 1950’s.

The film draws on the gossip of old Hollywood in a Kenneth Angerish adventure thorugh the history of the closet. Meanwhile the other narrative includes two space travellers who exist in a fantasy world where men can suddenly find their best friend attractive and keep coming back for the blue cocktails in Gay Andy’s.

You are a writer primarily, why now a move into filmmaking?
I don’t think of myself being primarily anything! The truth is I have always done three arts, not one.
Writing, painting and filmmaking/acting. I came over to London to do a post-grad in acting originally in 1994, and in 1997 I was finishing up my MA in film theory right as I started to write my first novel, Mush. I actually began writing/developing The Viva Voce Virus the same year that Mush was published, 2001. I show my paintings every few years as well.

The reason it seems that filmmaking is a recent move is because feature-filmmaking by nature is sloooooooowww, and thats compounded when doing a micro-budget feature. I can whip up a short story in a matter of days: feature films - not so speedy!

What inspired you to make the Viva Voce Virus film?
Two things:

1. A dream I had in 1996 about a satirical movie where two “straight” men crash-landed into an all-gay resort where all the drag queens wore blue terrycloth bathrobes and stirred their blue cocktails with sparkly swizzlesticks. I pretty much dreamt the entire opening scene.

1. An audition I’d had in 2001 where I was one of the final 5 standing out of the original 90, and was on the third callback for a part for which I was eminently qualified. I’d already done the acting audition twice over, and this was just a verbal interview. I saw one of the casting director’s face change when I mentioned a girlfriend. It was kind of horrifically amazing as he struggled to compose himself. You wouldn’t think that type of prejudice exists among liberal people in theatre or film until you experience it first hand. The rule I broke wasn’t being queer - obviously, that’s very common - the rule I broke was talking openly about it.

You co-directed the Viva Voce Virus with Kimmo Moykky - what were the challenges of working collaboratively?
I am fiery yang to his more peaceful yin, which turned out to be complementary when working together. We have spookily similar artistic taste when it comes to films, literature, themes and aesthetics. If we had different opinions about how a shot should be set up, for example, we would both listen to the other person’s reasoning. If we could give a good justification and wanted it more, then the other
person would acquiesce. We kind of kept an unofficial tally: “Hey, you got your way last time, so it’s my turn now.” It balanced!

In six years we only had one 5-minute real argument, and that was the last week of production when we were probably missing like 50 hours of sleep. The real challenge was communicating long-distance during the post-production period once I had moved back to the United States. But we weathered that. We’ll definitely work together again and are actually in development with a second feature together, a futuristic horror piece in the 21 Days Later mode. We’ve been through some very trying situations and it’s great to know that you can be dear friends on the other side of that.

One of the themes about the Viva Voce Virus is the homosexual closet. Why do you think female actresses still stay in the closet more than male actors?
There are a lot of actresses who come out as bisexual, and I believe they truly are. But then what happens is you only ever hear about their boyfriends, and the media colludes with their publicists when they’re dating women to play that aspect down. Two good examples there are Drew Barrymore and Angelina Jolie. The media has no interest either in promoting sexual fluidity - that is just too threatening to consider, because that means any straight person could be the next to come out. Secondly, the almighty cock trumps all. You have men who have made a point of acknowledging their bisexuality like Alan Cumming or Gore Vidal being labeled  as “gay” while  women who call themselves bisexual who have had established relationships with other women being called “straight”. See the pattern? It always defaults to the male member.

With actresses, you’re already working inside this sexist system, and I reckon often it just becomes too much to deal with when compounded with homophobia. There’s a heartbreaking quote from the actress Tammy Lynn Michaels from an interview she did with Television Without Pity, where she says, “My managers and all my agents would be like [frantically], “Don’t tell them you’re gay! You’ll be ruined! You’ll never work again! You’ll be working at McDonald’s in a month!” I was so terrified.” There is incredible pressure to be conventionally attractive in a typically “feminine” mode - and to be perceived as straight.

What do you think about Lyndsay Lohan coming out? What difference will it make?
Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson are interesting, because in a way they’re just going ahead with their relationship without make a big to-do about it. They’re behaving as if it is already an ideal-world situation where everyone accepts lesbian couples on par with straight ones, and more power to them for that.

It’s not as if Hollywood isn’t predominately gay already, so I doubt they’re shunned. Also there are many gay and lesbian couples who are well known in Hollywood that go under the mainstream radar, most of whom who have straight “lovers”-cum-beards for public consumption.

From what I understand, Sam is not the first woman with whom Lindsay has had a relationship - just the first that the general public has picked up on. This wasn’t helped, of course, by Lindsay’s publicists or whoever was working overtime over the last few years to emphasize just how heterosexual she was. This plan really backfired, may I say, as Lindsay started to be seen as slutty and also, perhaps not coincidentally, begin to show signs of emotional strain. My hunch is there are several other public starlets with very well-known breakdowns who have been having lesbian affairs. It must be difficult to deal with the cognitive dissonance of lying to the public and sometimes to oneself.

Your film is very multicultural, was that a conscious choice?
Both Kimmo and myself talked about it at the beginning and decided that we wanted so-called colour-blind casting, and agreed we didn’t conceive of any characters as being African-Caribbean, or Caucasian, or Asian, and we decided that we would cast instead according to gut instinct (with the exception of the lead Deni Francis, whom I actually had in mind while writing the script).

When I wrote the main character Ronnie’s girlfriend, Madeleine, for example, I had a vision in my head of her being blonde and white and perhaps somewhat snotty - I loosely based her on some of the women I’d met working in publishing. But then when we had Semsem Kuheri read for the part, all of a sudden there was a new way of conceptualising the character of Madeleine. There are sometimes good arguments for ethnic-specific casting, but often there aren’t and I think white directors/casting agents/producers have a responsibility to examine their pre-conceived character casting notions.

Something I really love about Mike Figgis films is that he has a variety of people from different backgrounds and they’re not there as tokens or meant to represent something, but are present as true characters. And recently you get TV series like Gray’s Anatomy and Dexter, where the same thing is going on in terms of casting, and that’s just bloody refreshing.

On a semi-related note, at one point in the middle of production, Kimmo and I looked at each other and realized that all of the villains in The Viva Voce Virus were white, which was interesting. That wasn’t a conscious choice, either. I am not sure how that happened, but it seemed fitting that the evil people who had the most power in the film would also be operating from a more powerful angle of relational dynamics when it came to race. They were also all closet cases as well, of course.

There are men and women, straights and gays in a queer film which rocks, why did you go against the grain?
Because that’s what makes up my personal world. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and straight people. Although if you look carefully, there are actually allusions to every single character being to some extent queer, including Ronnie’s straight male best friend. Not all of them are closeted, either, just sexually fluid. And come on, people, not all of us exist in a sexually segregated world. If that makes it harder to label The Viva Voce Virus as a “gay film” or a “lesbian film”, then so be it. You can’t argue with the fact that it’s a queer film, though; it just happened to be a queer film for men, women, straights, gays, lesbians and bisexuals… and others.

When do you plan to show the Viva Voce Virus in the UK?
We just finished the final cut in June and are starting to send it off to festivals this month, so once we’re accepted to a festival in the UK, you better believe we’ll be there, with bells on. Perhaps wearing blue terrycloth bathrobes and brandishing sparkly swizzlesticks.

Links
Viva Voce Virus
Viva Voce Virus blog
Kathleen Bryson’s blog personal blog
Viva Voce Virus Facebook
Viva Voce Virus MySpace

Killer of Sheep is one of the best films I have seen. I laughed, I cried, I was fed beautiful images.

The story is based on the lives of Black people who live in a lower middle class neighborhood, Watts in Los Angeles in the 1970’s. The central character works in a slaughterhouse - killing sheep.

if you are looking for a shoot em up gangster stylee ghetto film forget it. This film is heavily influenced by French New wave filmmakers. It is based more on the emotions generated, and amazing visuals. What you get is the community spirit of ordinary Black folks, the way children play and how someone can keep a relationship and raise a family when earning a pittance at a miserable job. He does not revert to crime to subsidise his income even when invited to do so by friends.

What I loved about this film is that it did not problematise poor black people. They were not dysfunctional and criminal. The pace of the film was languid giving one time to get into the mood of the neighborhood and the relationship between the people.
it was shot for only $10,000 and is even more remarkable for that.

It deserves it’s place as a National Treasure in the Library of Congress

This is a very poignant part of the film and that little girl is Charles Burnett’s daughter. The wife is always trying different ways to make the husband fall in love with her again.