Interviews with Sarah Jane Lapp, Michele Fleming, and Amie Siegel

Uploaded 1 December 2001

In 1997 I interviewed my grandmother, Belle Ginsburg, about her mother Sadie (Zelda) Ginsburg. I was making a film entitled The Whole History of That, examining the failures and desires which accompanied my search for roots in Central Europe. At the end of our interview, having told me what little she knew about her mother, my grandmother said ‘Id love to give you more information – but – unless I make something up. What should I make up?’ And with this, the film found its logical conclusion. It refused to allow my autobiographical desires any solid place on which to rest.

What should I make up? is the title of this autobiographically – inspired essay. I’ve chosen to interview three filmmakers whose work engages with issues surrounding autobiography and representation in striking and innovative ways. I have spoken with Michele Fleming, Sarah Jane Lapp, and Amie Siegel about their recent films, Life/Expectancy (Chicago, 1999), Mimo (Prague, 1995), and The Sleepers (Chicago, 1999).

To begin, then.

I think it is only appropriate to introduce myself and outline the reasons for this exploration. I work with the moving image. I am a woman who makes films and installations in a style or genre which has many names: non – fiction, essay, experimental documentary. The projects grow out of reading, research, and from my personal life. My choice of subject matter in each project is intrinsically linked with autobiography, although it may not manifest itself directly in the projects.

Since 1991, my projects have taken me to tiny border towns between the Czech and Slovak Republics; to interview Lisa Fittko, the German Jewish partisan who accompanied Walter Benjamin on his flight across the Pyrenees; to the Chicago site of a Civil War prison; to trash heaps in San Francisco; to the town where Sigmund Freud was born. In each of these places, questions arise: what is this thing we call history? Is it located in this creek which now divides a village into two countries? Is it under the ground with the bones of these Confederate soldiers? Is it in the stories my grandmother tells? Is its dust scattered on the cobblestones in rural Moravia? Or in the ink of this text? Or is this thing we call history something we’ve invented, and now believe as fact? My pieces are translations among numerous histories. A personal history, a history of a particular site and space, national, cultural histories. These narratives cross, contradict, and reinforce one another. Each of my projects investigates these intersections.

A confession

The impetus for this article comes from autobiography. I am currently at work on a new film, entitled Perseverance and How to Develop It. In the process of making the film, a piece inspired by the discovery of a self – help book from 1915, I find myself at a crossroads. How much, if any, autobiographical information to include directly in the work? And what form should this information take? As an artist with no commissions, and no one to answer to, the choice of subject matter is inherently a personal one. However, what voice should it take? A first – person voice – over? The word ‘I’ or the word ‘she’ or ‘he?’ My voice or someone else’s? Or no voice, letting the images ‘speak for themselves?’ The combinations and inflections of the personal are potentially infinite.

I was stumped, and turned to investigate some recent films by women I much admire. Each one of the works sketched below engages with and against the presence of autobiography in intriguing and complex ways. I believe these films form a new trend in the world of experimental film precisely because of their complex use of the personal.

Neither confessional nor strictly formalist, the films, Mimo, by Sarah Jane Lapp, The Sleepers, by Amie Siegel, and Life/Expectancy, by Michele Fleming all bring cinema into to a new space replete with complex questions and thoughtful responses.

In the spirit of the personal I will also add that I consider these women friends; Lapp, Siegel and I did our graduate work together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Michelle Fleming was and continues to be a much – admired faculty member at the same institution.

I find it striking that such an interesting generation of experimental filmmakers has emerged from this school, and especially in these times of blatant commercialism rampant in institutional settings. In addition, the continued commitment to 16mm film is also worth noting. Why are we still working with film? And how are we engaging with the personal?

Autobiography and ‘women’s film.’

Is an autobiographical impulse inherent in films by women? I don’t believe so. However, I do sense there is a difference in audience expectation of films by men or by women. I believe that audiences assume autobiographical content more readily when watching films, especially experimental films, by women. As makers, we are working with and against these expectations, that there is a communicative, confessional drive in our work as non – narrative filmmakers. These filmmakers work directly with this play of expectations, carefully weighing their choices: whether to engage the autobiographical, or to refuse it, and how. These choices may not be directly outlined at the beginning of the filmmaking process, but make themselves manifest throughout. Films shift and tell different stories while they are being made. A first filmic choice engenders more possible choices; the makers choose their paths. These choices – of direct voice, confessional voice, the modality or refusal to introduce that which can be recognized as personal – challenge each of us.

Why these three films?

I see these films as part of a new spectrum of non – fiction film, with Mimo, and its beautifully filmed recreation of a personal memory, on one side, and The Sleepers on the other, hovering in the tension between voyeurism and the desire for narrative. Between them: Life/Expectancy, which uses archival materials and texts to create a deeply thoughtful, personal (yet neither didactic nor confessional), and moving film.

The first two films, Mimo, and Life/Expectancy stand in contrast to other works in which the ‘I’ or ‘she’ seems intimately connected to the experience on the screen, works such as Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (USA, 1990) , Greta Snider’s Futility (USA, 1989) , or other works of avant-garde cinema by women.

Futility uses archival material in conjunction with a very strong ‘I’ – based story. The short film, in three parts, is very personal, describing the experience of terminating an unwanted pregnancy in the first and second sections, and using a more distanced epistolary, but very specific form in the third. In Futility, the reader of the film’s texts makes us aware of her reading, clearing her throat between sections, or announcing ‘this is the second one.’ It is an intimate story, and an intimate, and seemingly very personal form of address.

Friedrich’s Sink or Swim uses a mixture of home movie and filmed image. It is a film which explores the relationship between a father and a daughter. While Sink or Swim chooses to use the ‘she’ rather than the ‘I,’ the stories and examples of interactions between father and daughter feel very specific and personal. This is one of the great strengths of this film, Friedrich’s ability to hold the personal example in suspension with a more general look at fathers and daughters, as in the voices singing a modified children’s song on the soundtrack.

Still, Sink or Swim works with what seems to me a single voice, unlike the multiple voices which make themselves known in Michelle Fleming’s Life/Expectancy or Sarah Jane Lapp’s Mimo. While that film also uses a ‘she’ character, its voice – over is read by a man, further complicating a viewer’s desire to impose autobiographical tendencies on the work. Both Fleming and Lapp’s films look outward, gathering words of others from archives or interviews, and present them in concert with the personal voice. The first person voice – over does not play a substantial role in these films. Instead, they weave, embrace, and confront the autobiographical, and the audience’s expectations of it. Amie Siegel’s film, The Sleepers, brings up questions surrounding of the autobiographical by directly refusing its presence in the film. The film engages instead with voyeurism and narrative, confronting the viewer’s desire for narrative and autobiographical identification which traditionally accompanies the cinematic experience.

I feel privileged to write about these filmmakers and their recent work, and thank them in advance for their willingness to be interviewed, their good spirits, and of course for their works.

‘Mimo‘ (‘Beyond’)

Czech Republic, 1996, 16mm, 15 min., color and black & white, English & Czech, English, Hebrew w/Eng. subtitles.

Part documentary, part memory exchange of two sojourners in a strange land: behind the locked vestiges of a cemetery in Zizkov, Prague, childhood marbles descend onto tombstone marble, inducing song and strangely intersecting spiritualities. ‘Mimo’ which is perhaps simply a celluloid gift for my elderly neighbor who stars in it, will either be seen as very obtuse or very – I don’t know what. – SJ Lapp from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival catalogue

Sarah Jane Lapp was a Fulbright fellow in Prague, in 1994. She left for Central Europe straight from college, leaving her home for a land far away. In her film Mimo, exchanges between Lapp and her elderly neighbor Gusta Sibova, an immigrant to Prague herself (from Romania), play a significant role in the film. Gusta speaks about singing, spirituality, and the holiness of Torah. She also plays a character in the film, the ‘Gusta not Gusta,’ as Sarah Jane describes below.

Gusta dons a crocheted shawl and walks to the Jewish Cemetery in her neighborhood of Zizkov. This cemetery has been almost completely displaced by an enormous television tower, which dominates the Prague skyline. Gusta goes to the cemetery and instead of placing small stones on the ancient graves, according to Jewish tradition, lays marbles on them.

Gusta’s stories and simple actions interweave in the film with a personal scene, reconstructed from memory. The scene describes a young woman’s departure from home, the last hours before leaving for a faraway land. In this scene, a father tries to find an old Super – 8 film camera to give his daughter, and spilling an enormous box of marbles in his clumsy search.

Marbles are the objects which weave these stories together, marbles as memories laid on gravestones, marbles as the madeline which evoke personal memory while searching for a spiritual connection in a foreign land. Marbles spill from great heights in memory, making a mess, impelling closeness between father and daughter and marking a physical and emotional departure. I spoke with Sarah Jane about her experiences with the film.

JP: Please describe a bit living in Zizkov, and if and why this neighborhood affected you.

SJL: Zizkov, like Prague, like the Czech Republic, represented a system of overlapping palimpsests. Such historically challenging topography offered at least one lesson: that one should never take anything at face value. Of course metatext is everywhere if you look for it, but in Zizkov, even the schnitzel seemed to have a subtext.

I lived near an old Jewish cemetery upon which a television tower had been built, displacing and/or liquidating many graves, buried Torahs. etc. Around the perimeter of this cemetery one found many pubs. These pubs often kept blackboards outside their doors announcing the daily specials or proprietary requests like ‘Whites only.’ The banned population, the Romany (Czech Gypsies) resided on the terraced hills. Tourist books told you to watch your possessions, to beware, especially in Zizkov. Beware indeed. Czech Romany, disenfranchised like most European Gypsies, appeared in the public imagination as thieving exotica. PhDs at my school insisted that their children not go to school with ‘those children.’ Which children? Or did they mean the children of one of the 10,000 Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian refugees moving through the Czech Republic in the 1990s? And so, the chain of displacements continued and what a link was Zizkov.

I lived across the street from Telecom. Every week, Telecom’s employees flooded into the street to avoid another bomb (scare?). I lived above [Czech artist] Frantisek Skala’s beautiful bar, Akropolis, but my own apartment offered no bastion of sanity either. One day we had a sink, the next day it had inexplicably vanished. And the day after, our landlord and his dog appeared naked on our floor. Both alive, maybe sleeping. And the day after that – a squat woman calling herself a psychotronic, knocked on our door, insisting she had been ordered to ‘clean’ our apartment. Her tools: a saucer, a teacup of water, and a very tall, silent adolescent male holding a burning candle near his ear.

This bizarre political and social alchemy clearly contributed to my film endeavors – as did my naivete at age twenty-one, an age where everyone wants to squeeze the most magic from life. Mimo was my first film and I worked by intuition. My script, on one hand, was a piece of prose poetry I had written about my departure from the States. On the other hand, under the auspices of a Fulbright fellowship, I had set out to investigate and possibly document how women in the Jewish community had constructed or reconstructed their spirituality after the Velvet revolution. The interviews I conduced evolved into two films: Mimo, and its sister film, Raj…How nice it would be to screen these films in the old neighborhood…

JP: The film describes both a present and a memory of the past, and makes connections with others who may be living a similar, dual experience. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to restage the scene of the memory? SJL: I can’t imagine I’ll ever shoot ‘The Civil War, the sequel.’ But somehow I find value in the re-enactment of the personal. Cinema-therapy? I was just obsessed with this memory of my father, with the precipice of departure, and I wanted to turn it over and over in my hand, like a marble, I suppose….

JP: The film is very complex in relating the marbles to the stones placed on graves to commemorate the dead, to the story of the bulldozed Jewish Cemetery. Similarly, Gusta has numerous roles in the film, in my view. She is the rememberer, the daughter, and also the witness. Could you talk about what you think Gusta represents in the film? Or what many things she does for and in the film?

SJL:…I cast as a way of eulogizing. I prefer to work with people whom I believe should have their personae committed to celluloid — film is an archival material and anyone who makes it through the chemical pathways will survive a hundred years or more. Or so I like to hope.
And so any performer I choose, I cast as She Herself and as She the Persona I Project onto Her. That interface, that ‘Gusta not Gusta’ is what results in Mimo. So Gusta Sibova on one hand was my neighbor. The eighty – plus year old woman who called me and my boyfriend Ville to bring her buckets of water when the neighborhood waterworks periodically didn’t; who gave me schnitzel on a napkin…Gusta was also the voice I heard in synagogue, every song she produced sounding like the epiphany I always wished I could have.
In the film I don’t render her as a fully psychologized character, but neither do I contextualize her as a former Romanian citizen, who served as a translator for forty years, who teaches Hebrew and Torah to local students, etc. I keep her as the ephemeral half-life she always seemed to be to me. Maybe if I were Bergman or Chantal Akerman I might have sublimated the idea of Gusta into a fictional figure who shimmered just as much as my memory of her. Alas.

JP: This brings me to the less oblique question, I hope. I’d like to hear what you have to say about the relationship between invention, interview, and autobiography. I think Mimo does an amazing job of weaving those things together. So it is somehow an invented story, or series of stories, especially the highly dramaticblack and white section, but also a story inspired or influenced by the interview with Gusta, and of course since I know you, it is to me completely autobiographical. Where and how did you choose to locate the autobiographical within the film, and why did you make the choices you made, to represent these things?

SJL:…I think filmmaking offers a singular opportunity to access interiority. Whether one decides to contextualize or present the catalyst for such a journey is up to the maker. Personally, I like to present as many layers of reality as enter the process. No, not true. I spend two years cutting a short film so that I don’t present every single slice of reality – like the thunderstorms, the flat tires, the suddenly dead production coordinators, and so forth. You know, when you scan the word “interiority” with Spellcheck, the computer offers ‘inferiority.’ A humbling thought for the editing room.

Mimo presented an opportunity for pan – Slavic collaboration and I feel the dialogues I held with consulting editor Krasimira Velickova, with sound recordist Jiri Klenka, and especially with cinematographer Ramunas Grecius articulate for me the meta – language that film offers. As with other forms of language acquisition, one does not just speak a purified native tongue, but an abrogated language that bears the imprint of time, humans, obstacles, joys. Such is the language of filmmaking (or any artmaking). When I realized that the four of us has traversed a singular emotional trajectory, well, what a miracle. What a gifted experience.

Life/Expectancy

Life/Expectancy Michele Fleming, USA 16mm 30 minutes 1999
Part meditation on a woman’s midlife search for meaning, part essay on and experiment in cinematic form, Michele Fleming’sLife/expectancy creates a rich visual and conceptual tapestry of autobiography. Provocative and seductive, this film gives us, in Fleming’s words, a ‘glimpse of stories that refuse to be told’. – SF Cinematheque brochure, San Francisco, CA 2000

‘Her mother never told her stories.’ It is a phrase which resonates throughout Michelle Fleming’s Life/Expectancy; a film whose main character is able to tell great beginnings and endings, but not middles. It is a film about the passage into midlife. The middle of the story; the middle of the life cycle. Life/Expectancy evokes the suspended time between beginning and end.

Life/Expectancy is exquisitely shot in black and white; it is a meditative piece, full of windows and shadows, observations of the kind where one sits and looks, not searching, just watching quietly. A meditation on the passage through mid-life. Yet just beneath the surface of the quiet, questions, conflicts, and voices abound. The beautiful roses pictured in the film poke at each other with menacing thorns; the fish swimming in a tank are actually piranhas, the passage through mid-life may seem to pass unnoticed, but it is a deeply moving and difficult time. The film suspends the viewer in the realization that life passes, indiscriminately, over each of us.

Life/Expectancy is an introspective work; instead of emphasizing a driving plot line, it develops through image repetition and the very strong commentary of the archival audio. These pointed audio moments, from films such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (USA 1966) and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (USA 1969) bite into the slow and serious comments of the voice – over. Michelle Fleming talks more about her extraordinary working methods and use of archival sound in the following interview.

JP: I would like to ask you about your unique working methods. You once told me how you work, shooting reversal film and then A/B rolling the original [1] , but I’d like to hear more about this process in detail, and also if you could talk a little about why you have chosen to use this process, which involves such a different experience of the editing process.

MF: The means by which I created my last film were traditional – what most would call old-fashioned. I shot the material on film, and edited the film itself by hand. I used black and white reversal camera stock and because of this I could edit the original footage with no need to generate a workprint. I A/B/C rolled my original footage, prescribing overlapping super-impositions and dissolves to be realized by lab printing as the final step. This is a creative process and a classic, material-film centered methodology that finds its origins in the work of figures such as Will Hindle and Bruce Baillie. I was fortunate enough to explore this method … as a personal, singular culmination in the exercise of my own imagination. My mind … builds and forges links from textual fragment to fragment, from image to image, image-fragment to text-fragment to sound-fragment. Associations ensue. Fragments … blend with one another, resulting in renewed force … My crucial intent is that my film will evoke a certain receptiveness in the spectator to an imaginative state that parallels…the imaginative processes that I used in the making of the work.

JP: Your use of archival materials, especially archival sound, is quite striking in the film. Could you talk about your choices there? The audio seems very personal. Do you see relationships between your choices of archival sound and autobiography? By this, I think I mean, when I see the film, I attribute an autobiographical impulse to the choices of archival audio. Is this the direction the audio is meant to take us? I think it is very interesting that instead of a confessional-type voice-over, you have a man’s voice and these conversations from other films.

MF: I was teaching a ‘Film I’ class and I was showing Su Friedrich’s Gently Down the Stream (USA 1981) which as you know is silent, with text scratched in the emulsion. I always ask my classes after they see the work if they hear a voice reading the text in their head while they are watching it … usually I get a wide spread of responses from: ‘I hear my own voice’ to ‘I hear an anonymous woman’s voice.’ But this time I got nothing. Nobody heard a thing. Finally a student spoke up and said ‘Don’t you think it’s kind of sick to hear voices [in your head]?’I responded with something like ‘I hope not, because I hear them all the time…’

Lines from songs, quotes, comments from friends (and foes), lines from movies, quips from commercials and sitcoms…they all literally pop up in my head all the time. Along with more intuitive guides that often seem to speak. Anyway, I became interested in collecting some of these voices … the more famous the better. I would literally begin a conversation with these voices and started cutting them into my own text [in the film]. So these voices either lead the conversation or respond to it. They add a whole level of ‘complication’ to the film … issues and comments that go on in my head all the time…

I have to say that my process is always a matter of collection. I find something and I pick it up. I write about it, or in response to it, or find an image that seems appropriate to it…I find ways to weave this collection.
The voices, the text, the images, the footnotes all … are intended to open up poetic lines of communication. I still think this is an important more of communication that has nothing to do with solid facts of points of view, but has everything to do with potential and discovery. Growing, getting past what you always held as true without question.

JP: The roses, and the time-lapse scene out the window, and the nondescript views out the window, and the exquisite curtain blowing. These windows, shadows, and non-views are very compelling in your film. Why so many windows? For me, the feeling of being inside and looking out comes through very strongly. But there is more there, in the arranging and rearranging of the roses, like life stories. Could you talk about these images specifically and what they mean and meant to you?

MF: I had time off … I spent a year reading, thinking, and making this film. Nearly the whole piece … was shot out my window. It’s what I looked at as I thought and worked. From the surface of the glass at night when it gets cold and there is condensation, to filming some summertime event/celebration that my neighbors threw, to the big snowstorm … I responded to whatever was there and weaved it into the film…

I was interested in the rose because I wanted to look at ‘the underneath’ of things. We get so swept away by the beauty and the wondrous, intoxicating fragrance of these flowers that we don’t look at the equally amazing defense system nature has given the rose. Many people never learn about this nastier underside … but I feel that it is critical if we are going to really explore human nature to explore darkness…

The film is partially about the contemplation of a liminal passage into mid-life and what this particular persona was thinking about at that time. And so literally takes place in my most familiar surrounding (with thanks to Bachelard). When I was younger I thought I would be a lot smarter by now. There is the shock of realizing that the struggle and search gets more intense and urgent with age … unless you ossify into a single philosophy that denies the existence of all else.

JP: And the relationship to autobiography?

MF: Well, I’ll quote footnote [an element from the film] #7: ‘Autobiography: ‘When someone asks you later if your work is autobiographical, you answer, ‘No, not exactly,’ and smile enigmatically.’ – Diane Schoemperlen, Forms of Devotion, (New York: Viking, 1988)

The Sleepers

The Sleepers 45 min, 16mm, color, sound, 1999
Shot entirely at night, The Sleepers uses ‘the urban [Chicago] architecture of distant windows to explore the tensions between public and private, the performative and the real, the lyrical and the vernacular.’ The evening rituals of unsuspecting apartment dwellers become objects of voyeuristic pleasure and subjects of unfulfilled narrative desires. – Amie Siegel

The Sleepers is a fascinating film which hovering tensely between voyeurism and, as Amie puts it so well above, ‘unfulfilled narrative desires.’ The viewer watching The Sleepers experiences 45 intensely engrossing minutes looking into Chicago apartment windows in the evenings, capturing fragments of the quotidian, the banal, and the potentially mysterious. However, no narrative is permitted to emerge from our voyeurism.

The Sleepers engrosses because, as viewers we are permitted to watch and watch, seemingly without cessation. Yet soon our watching begins to turn in on us. We realize that nothing too exciting is happening in the framed, softly lit windows. At each turn, our narrative desire is thwarted. This causes a conflicting, tense, yet still completely compelling experience. We are forced to acknowledge our voyeurism in the duration of the film. And with this acknowledgement comes the understanding that the cinematic experience is inherently a voyeuristic one, and that the desire for a narrative to happen on screen is the belief that film is designed to ultimately satisfy our voyeurism.

The soundtrack of The Sleepers works between exterior and interior sound; thus aurally we are brought into and back out of spaces. The soundtrack does not allow a psychological entry into characters or into the filmmaker’s identity in any way. Even in the singular scene in the film in which the camera goes into a well – appointed apartment to observe, nothing is revealed. A woman goes to a drawer, takes out a CD, and puts it into the CD player. This is all. No drama, no explosion. At the ‘central moment’ of the film we encounter only an empty center, as we are yet again confronted with our own desire for psychological narrative. The Sleepers then propels us back outside to our voyeuristic perch in the dark Chicago night.

Interview with Amie Siegel

JP: Amie, What I find fascinating about The Sleepers is the way it refuses any imposition of the autobiographical. The viewer is simply not permitted to make any assumptions about the maker, and also not able to create a fantasy – narrative from the worlds we are observing through the windows.

AS: Before jumping into [your question], I should mention that a refusal to make ‘autobiographical work,’ that is, work that is somehow directly evocative of my own experience, is not so much that I find it in any way lacking, but that in the Nineties I think we experienced (and are still experiencing) a limitation imposed on our identities as a result of society’s need to categorize them.

There are many filmmakers who seem content to let the themes and programming of their work be dictated by the terms by which society (in its most unimaginative, parochial form) defines them. Terms that push people into a herd as dictated by their race, gender, or sexual orientation. It’s not that I see anything wrong or inherently negative in that phenomenon, it’s just that personally I do not want to be limited to an autobiographical discourse. I am interested in the quality and individual premise of the artwork, not just its presence in the face of an absence.

The reason I made The Sleepers, became interested in shooting into people’s windows at night, is a bit autobiographical in that I had grown up in Chicago, going to friends’ and relatives’ apartments where just outside the window, fifty stories above the street, a small movie would be unfolding in someone else’s apartment across the way. The odd juxtaposition of that view, being able to see both the vast landscape of the city and evidence of someone’s private, interior life in the same pictorial moment always struck me as fascinating, uncanny even.

JP: Can you talk about the desire on the viewer’s part to make an autobiographical or narrative connection with the film? AS: First of all I think it’s very interesting that ‘narrative’ and ‘autobiography’ for you are linked. I think that those two terms are linked only in that autobiography is part of the system of identification that rules conventional narrative. And here I don’t mean the filmmaker’s own experience but the viewer’s. Projection of the self onto the screen is part and parcel of the narrative cinematic experience, thus all narrative is autobiographical for the viewer. In The Sleepers, you have a sort of ‘doubling’ experience as a viewer in that you are watching onscreen the reframing of another experience of watching, voyeurism. Here it is the absence of narrative (Who is watching? Are they alone? Do they know the people across the street?) which provides a kind of currency that is autobiographical in its concern. And at the same time, those exact questions are being asked of the people being filmed along with another set of questions (Do they know they are being filmed? Is the action set up?)

JP: In fact, I do see The Sleepers as a refusal, or repudiation even of narrative and autobiographical desires.

AS: The film for me is not about narrative, but about viewership. It is narrative expectation that the situation of voyeurism elicits, a kind of half-written story where you have all the props, the set, and the characters (the furniture and knick-knacks, the glowing [interior] space of the apartment, the figures that move around inside that apartment) but you don’t know exactly what is going on or what relationships connect those people. And that is where the viewer’s own work comes in to finish writing the story, so to speak.

There are scenes in the film that are almost void of any alteration, they unfold as I shot them. And there are others that provide a certain wealth of added information – musical accompaniment (emotional register), dialogue (enactment of conflict or banality), sound effects (specificity to their actions) – in other words, scenes which provide a slightly more detailed set of narrative clues. While that first kind of scene allows the viewer space in which to create narrative, the latter is more replete with the tropes of narrative (music, dialogue, sound effects, parallel editing). Each allow and refuse the advance of narrative. And this kind of phrasing of narrative expectation is what I was after with The Sleepers.

In every other film I’d seen about voyeurism, the line that separated the watched and the watcher was always crossed, so the narrative expectation became wrapped up in that almost always erotic tension (Rear Window (USA 1954), Naked (UK 1993), Peeping Tom) (UK 1960), not the pure tension of looking. But I was more interested in how the situation of looking itself is inherently erotic, that is, both creates and defers expectation in the visual information simultaneously given and withheld from the viewer. This kind of build – up and deferral is symptomatic of both the erotic and the cinematic, and I was interested in creating a space where that dynamic could unfold without giving in to the unusual trope of a character through whom we experience that tension. That is why we – we the camera, we the audience – eventually go inside an apartment. We are there without distance, without the character, the voyeur who acts as our cinematic foil. I think here is where you experience a refusal of the autobiographical most strongly. There is no voice – over revealing the thoughts of a central voyeur. There is no ‘climax’ or ‘explanation.’

I see that kind of absence of a character on whom to push off the film’s conflicts as a Marker-like refusal of the autobiographical. In Sans Soleil (France 1982), Marker doesn’t visually depict someone traveling through Japanese landscape in order to have us identify with that figure onscreen, he makes us experience the products of that person, their images of a culture, and thus engages issues of representation. At the same time, though, Marker creates epistolary personae through the voice-over that guides the film. And that is certainly a kind of ‘bow’ to the autobiographical, if not narrative. I didn’t even want that to occur in The Sleepers. I felt it would specify an experience, voyeurism, one of whose main characteristics is anonymity. I think it is one of the things people find the most difficulty about The Sleepers. But there are others who find that it’s most rewarding aspect.

JP: Do you think your gaze in the film is distant, or more empathic?

I think that phrase presumes a level of personal involvement (autobiography) that isn’t part of the formal constraints of the work. Since I didn’t include a voice – over and any allusion to my experience, I don’t think my gaze is foregrounded in The Sleepers. It is certainly present, choosing which moments to film, framing them and re-contextualizing them with sound effects and music and elements of performativity … but I don’t think it is a formal device, per se. In the ways it is present, I would hope that it is not wholly either distant or empathic but has moments of distance and moments of, well, engagement, moving around and tugging at the different tensions and conflicts within the situations of looking, constructing and deconstructing voyeurism. I have a hard time with the word ’empathy’ since that is the title of my new film and it is questionable to me whether empathy really exists…

Finally:

I believe these three films represent a new point on the spectrum in the world of non-fiction cinema. From the re-presentation of memory, to the intentional refusal of narrative desire, these three films come to questions of the personal and autobiographical in striking new ways. The intentionality of address, deliberate choices and shifts by each filmmaker are extraordinary evidence of a film practice which is reshaping the traditions handed down over the past thirty years in avant-garde cinema. These kinds of thoughtful, provocative works are, I hope, evidence of a new trend in non-fiction filmmaking. A trend in which traditions are challenged in a direct and intense way; a trend in which and where new kinds of dialogue and inquiry emerge. I am delighted to have the opportunity to discuss these works with the filmmakers and thank them again for their inspiration.

Endnotes

[1] ‘A/B ROLLING: The consecutive shots of negative are cut up and assembled alternately in two separate rolls, with black leader between the shots on each roll. Since the first shot on Roll A corresponds with black leader on the second, the next shot on B corresponds with black leader on A, and so on, a checkerboard pattern is achieved between the two rolls. The shots from both rolls are printed consecutively and in order on a single film, thus preventing any splices from appearing in the printing of 16mm film. Sometimes a C or even D roll might be incorporated for additional effects.’

Filmographies and biographical notes on filmmakers interviewed.

Jenny Perlin

Uploaded 1 December 2001
Filmographies and biographical notes
To contact filmmakers or to request their films, please contact the filmmakers directly.

Sarah Jane Lapp 200 St. Marks Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11238
Tel: 718 – 230 – 7789 email: cinemagoat@yahoo.com

Michelle Fleming
Professor, Film Dept
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112. South Michigan Ave
Chicago IL 60603
email: MFlemi@artic.edu

Amie Siegel
email: asiegel@umbc.edu
Jenny Perlin
JPerlin@slc.edu or
nilrep@hotmail.com

Sarah Jane Lapp

Filmography; Commissions (writer, producer, director, editor, animator)
Seven films 1996 – 1999

A compilation of seven 16mm and 35mm films which use hand – drawn animation, live action, and experimental non – fiction to explore the interface of religious imagination, memory, and comic impulse.
Happy are the Happy (your best joke, please,). 18 min., 16mm War survivors tell their best jokes. (USA/Czech Republic1999) Co – directed with Jenny Perlin
The Neighborhood Cat. 2 min., 16mm A hand – drawn animation starring a cranky cat. (USA 1999)
Revised lesson plan for private Kim Jae Won. 3 min., 16mm A care package for a Korean soldier. (USA 1997)
Mimo. 15min., 16mm A memory exchange between two strangers. (USA/Czech Republic1996)
Raj. 8 min., 16mm Spirituality and faith, re – animated. (USA/Czech Republic 1996)
Mantan elokuvavikko. 45 sec., 35mm Animated Trailer for Mantan Elokuvaviikko Film Festival. (USA/Czech Republic/Finland 1996)
Alexander. 11 sec., 35mm Animated Trailer for Mantan Elokuvaviikko Film Festival. (USA/Czech Republic/Finland 1996)
Additional Filmography
Kites for Kate 4 min. film/video Hand – drawn animation on the language of secrets for Kate Shaw. (USA 2000) co – directed with Colette Sandstedt & David Rauch
Private Apology. 5 min., 16mm Live action meditation on floss and fidelity (USA 2000)
#30. 1 min., 16mm Hand – drawn anniversary animation. (USA 2000)
Gaella: Bitul 1994, 23 min. 16mm/video Interview with a young woman from Zagreb. (USA. 1994)

Print source: please contact Sarah Jane Lapp for all films. Please note that Jane Balfour Films no longer handles Raj or Mimo. Mimo can also be found in The Judah L. Magnes Museum Video Archive.

Visiting Artist & One – Woman Screenings
2000 Artists’ Television Access Intermedia Arts/Minneapolis MAKOR/New York University of Baltimore/Maryland Hamline University/Minneapolis: ‘Literature, Art, & Social Change’
1999 The School of the Art Institute of Chicago: ‘Religious Imagination & Cinema’

Selected Group Screenings
Happy are the Happy is currently on tour with the 2001 Black Maria, Madcat & Women in the Director’s Chair Film Festivals. Venues include one hundred museums, universities, libraries, cinematheques, and art centers nationwide.
* Armand Hammer Museum/Los Angeles: L.A. Film Forum
* Artists’ Television Access/San Francisco: ‘Seven Films’ one – woman show
* Artists’ Television Access/San Francisco: Group Show
* Artists’ Television Access/San Francisco: ‘World Travelers’ MadCat Film Festival
* Betty Rymer Gallery/Chicago: ‘Not On Any Map’
* British Film Institute/London: London Jewish Film Festival
* Brno International Film Festival/Brno, Czech Republic
* Bumbershoot Arts Festival/Seattle: One Reel Film Festival
* Castro Theatre/San Francisco: SF Jewish Film Festival
* Center for Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens/San Francisco: SF Cinematheque
* Center for Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens/SF: Multi – Cultural Film & Video Festival
* Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs: Chicago Filmmakers
* Channel 11 – WTTW/Chicago: ‘Image Union’ (broadcasts)
* Channel 54 – DUTV/Philadelphia: ‘Tuesday Night Special’ (broadcast)
* Galerie Piano Nobile/Zurich
* Gallery 2/Chicago: ‘Textuality’
* Hamline University/Minneapolis: ‘Literature, Art, and Social Change’
* Intermedia Arts/Minneapolis: ‘Seven Films’
* Judah L. Magnes Museum/Berkeley: Competition Winners (3 month exhibition)
* Mary Ross Reed Theatre: Great Plains Film Festival
* Maine Jewish Film Festival
* Media Link/Yugoslavia
* Kick The Machine/Bangkok
* Kino Arsenal/Berlin: ‘Megalopolis,Wounds & Visions’
* Kino Sade/Finland: ‘Mantan Elokuvaviikko’
* Kongresove Centrum/Prague: Festival FAMU
* MAKOR/New York: ‘Seven Films’, ‘Reel Jews Animation’
* National Theatre of London: London Jewish Film Festival
* New Orleans Film & Video Society: Cinema 16 Film Festival
* Pacific Film Archive: MadCat Film Festival
* Pacific Film Archive: Judah Magnes Museum Awards
* Plan B/Sante Fe: ‘The Moving Word’
* South by Southwest Film Festival/Austin
* The Film Center/Chicago: ‘Regional Student Academy Award Winners’
* The School of the Art Institute of Chicago: ‘Religious Imagination in Cinema’
* The Slade School/London
* University of Iowa/Iowa City: ‘The Moving Word’
* University of Maryland/Baltimore: Visiting artist
* University of California/Berkeley: San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
* University of California/San Diego: ‘The Moving Word’
* Up & Coming Filmmakers Festival/Hanover
* Walker Art Center/Minneapolis: ‘Women in the Director’s Chair’
* Whitney Museum/New York: Independent Study Program
* Women on the Edge/Webcast
* Women in the Director’s Chair Film & Video Festival /Tour/USA

Fellowships & Grants
2000 The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Grant The Jerome Foundation/New York Media Arts Grant
1997 – 99 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Full Merit Scholarship, 2 Yr. MFA in Filmmaking
CEC International Partners/Artslink (NEA) Collaborative Arts Grant w/ J. Perlin
1994 – 95 J. William Fulbright Fellowship/ Czech Republic Brown University Ittleson Research & Travel Grant
1993 University of Southern California/CEU Prague Writer’s Workshop Scholarship
1994 Winner, College of St. Catherine’s Emerging Writer’s Competition
Residencies
2000 The MacDowell Colony/New Hampshire The Atlantic Center for the Arts/Civitella Ranieri Foundation/Italy

Awards
* 2001 Black Maria Film Festival Juror’s Citation Award/2nd Place*
* 1999 IFP North/Minnesota Independent Feature Film Fund Finalist
* Student Academy Award Regional Winner*
* School of the Art Institute Graduate Merit/Travel Award
* 1996 Experimental Film Award Winner, MIMO, Judah L. Magnes Museum
* * for the film HAPPYA RE THE HAPPY(Your best joke, please)
* Publications & Dramatic Productions
* ‘Sweetface/Strikers.’ Cabinet. New York October 2000
* ‘Sweetface.’ Cunning/Kenning . Iowa City March 2000.
* ‘The Stone of Love’ and ‘The Fortunist.’ Illustrations. Open Spaces. 1998 – 99
* ‘From the Eczema Anthology.’ Tulane University. 1997
* ‘From the Eczema Anthology.’ Monologues for Women. Heinemann. 1994
* ‘The Pinata.’ New Plays Festival, directed by Alexandra Posen. Providence 1994
* ‘The Maternal Line Begins in Des Moines.’ Production Workshop. Providence. 1994
Reviews
* ‘Critic’s Choice: Sarah Jane Lapp.’ San Francisco Bay Guardian. 25 October, 2000
* ‘Seven Films: 1996 – 1999. City Pages. Minneapolis. 2000
* ‘Your Best Film, Please.’ Siren. Minneapolis. 2000
* ‘Fall Line – up of New Filmmakers.’ Chicago Tribune. 1999
* ‘Shorts/South by Southwest Film Festival.’ Austin Chronicle. 1999
* ‘Women in the Directors’ Chair. The Independent/AIVF. New York. 1997
* ‘Critic’s Choice.’ City Pages. Minneapolis. 1997
Education & Professional Training
* 1999 The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA in Filmmaking.
* 1995 Studio Bratri v Triku/ Prague. Animation Apprentice.
* 1994 – 95 Akademie muzickych umeni, Filmova a TV Fakulta (FAMU)/ Prague. Fulbright Fellow.
* 1994 Brown University/Providence. B.A. Honors Creative Writing, Phi Beta Kappa.

Sarah Jane Lapp was born in Minneapolis in 1972. She has taught writing and film production in Chicago (Young Chicago Authors, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and currently lives in Brooklyn where she is working on two new films.

Life/Expectancy – 1999 film by Michele Fleming, 16mm, black & white/sound, 30 minutes

Life/Expectancy meditates on a woman’s midlife search for meaning. In order to find ‘her own story’ the woman feels – in every cell of her body, to risk a cliché, – that she must find a code of memory that lies beyond herself, something that also involves a code of cultural value. The Misfits, Intolerance, Sunset Boulevard and Lady from Shanghai emerge as selected film narratives and tales from the larger culture that draw her in. As a visionary artist, she must excavate these works on her own terms. She recreates brief, captivating segments from the films in order to isolate the emotional core and fundamental impulse of storytelling that she is convinced these fragments bear. As the project unfolds, the woman finds herself necessarily drawn to other fragmentary visual frames: thorns on rose stems, light passing on the dining room floor, flip books, a film projector, bodies darting in public space, the blankness provided by a fresh snow. Drawn to these external reflections of her own demons and their uncanny power to blend inexplicably in ways that subvert and defer symbolic expectations, the woman realizes that there are no grand narratives that work for her and that the heart of midlife resides for some wanderers in glimpses of stories that refuse to be told or, apparently, in ‘footnotes’ that survive the loss of the tales with which they were once associated. This is what she has now – vibrant footnotes to life and nothing more. However, in these drifting remains with their curious capacity to blend experimentally with one another she discovers the means to sacrifice the beating warmth of a sentimental heart and to replace it with a guarded, harsh and eccentric wisdom that gives new form to the psyche.

Life/Expectancy is a fiction. It is a non – fiction. This film is an essay. It is a bad…but beautiful… dream. This film is an experiment in poetic form. It is personal. It is about no one. Cinema is the core of exploration and it is cinema that has left her trace in a moment already gone by the time it is seen. Can a medium experience a mid – life crisis, or at a hundred years old, is she left only to curse her offsprings and die?

‘Fleming pulls out all the stops in this bravura expiation of maternity and middle age. Jaw dropping visuals rub up against Orson Welles’s funhouse mirror shootout in The Lady from Shanghai and Monroe’s wrestle with Clark Gable in The Misfits. Movies are never far away here, in this pseudo – autobiography, as noir moments of the everyday are collaged with cut – ups from a half dozen flicks – most notably Taylor and Burton savaging one another in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Fleming makes a series of hairraising turns around the scions of psychoanalysis, easing herself from the long shadow of her storyless mother. Ravishing, brutal and emotive, this is one film unafraid to wear its heart and its brains on its sleeve, and marks Fleming’s arrival as a major American filmmaking talent. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the cinema.’ – Michael Hoolboom, curator of the Experimental Film Section of the IMAGES Film Festival

Screened:
* Oak Park Art Center – As a part of The Literature in Film Program,Oak Park, IL, January 2001
* Film Forum – Los Angles, CA, November 2000
* San Francisco Cinematheque – San Francisco, October 2000
* Madcat Film Festival – San Francisco, September 2000
* 27th Athens International Film & Video Festival – Athens, Ohio, May 2000
* Women’s Art Resource Cemtre – Toronto, Ontario, Canada, April 2000
* IMAGES Film Festival – Toronto, Ontario, Canada, April 2000
* 38th Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival – Special Jury Award, March 2000
* The Black Maria Film Festival – National Tour and Director’s Choice Award, January – May 2000
* The Rochester International Film Festival – Certificate of Merit for Cinematic Excellence, January 2000
* Bangkok Experimental Film Festival – Bangkok, Thailand, December 1999
* Chicago Cultural Center – Chicago, Illinois (Chicago’s Own), September 1999
* Experimental Visions – Rhode Island School of Design, April 1999
* Sabbatical Screening – The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, March 1999

Biographical notes
Michele Fleming has made short format personal experimental films for the last twenty years. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and has garnered numerous prizes over the years. Despite the pressures of technology, demand for ‘production values’, or expansion into long format or expanded co – operative work, Fleming remains devoted to the ‘hand – made’ or single author approach to filmmaking. Taking on issues as wide ranging as exploration of memory and loss, the impact of AIDS on the personal psyche, the poetic rendering of the cruelest and most destructive (but often completely socially accepted) aspects of human behavior, or the notion of ‘mid – life crisis’, her films remain as traces or personal documents.
Fleming is currently an Associate Professor of Filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught for the last ten years. Previous to this time she worked extensively as a curator of Film and Video.

Personal films:
1999
Life/Expectancy
b&w, sound, 30 minutes
1995
Ornithology
color, sound, 21 minutes
1993
devotio moderna
color, sound, 10 minutes
1990
Private Property (public domain)
color, sound, 12 minutes
1989
Left – Handed Memories
color, sound, 15 minutes
1987
Tropical Depression
color, sound, 10 minutes
1984
Invitation to the Dance
color, sound, 13 minutes
1984
One
color, sound, 1.5 minutes
1983
Other Voices, Other Views
color, sound, 7.5 minutes
1982
The Selves
sepia, sound, 10 minutes
1981
The Dream: A Neutral Necessity
color, sound, 7.5 minutes