A Jitney Elopement
With Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Leo White.
Another Essanay that feels like it could have been made at Keystone, except this one demonstrates the more methodical pacing that Chaplin was able to pursue at Essanay. The premise is one of Chaplin's favorite: it involves him impersonating a count in order to marry the girl he loves.
The "bogus count" routine has its roots in Chaplin's work in his Keystone short Caught in a Cabaret, and also figures in plot descriptions of the now-lost Her Friend the Bandit. It was a theme he would return to at Mutual, with The Count, and would even include variations on it in later films such as The Idle Class (where Charlie the tramp infiltrates a swanky costume party by trading on his resemblance to the wealthy host), City Lights (posing as a millionaire for the blind girl), The Great Dictator (the Jewish Barber masquerades as Adenoid Hynkel in the final sequence to deliver a message of hope to the nations of the world), and certainly Monsieur Verdoux, in which the title character is a virtual chameleon, marrying then murdering women for their money.
As usual with this premise in Chaplin's work, the fun comes from watching how he interacts with his hosts. Like a fish out of water, the fastidious yet crude tramp struggles with the finer social graces. At the dinner table, he sprinkles so much pepper on his food that he gives Edna and her father sneezing fits. The dinner table sequence is also a fine example of Chaplin's evolving directing style: by keeping all three figures in the frame, he allows the sequence to play out in an extended take with minimal editing, allowing the material to build and being able to control the timing within the shot through the performances.
The charade falls apart when the real count (Leo White in full form) shows up. A chase ensues, with Charlie whisking Edna away in his "jitney". The chase is well-staged, utilizing strategic undercranking for maximum effect, and one of the rare examples from his post-Keystone work of Chaplin ending a film with such a sequence. The action is fairly standard breakneck stuff, but the way in which it is shot offers an interesting alternative to the Keystone method, employing fewer shots as the cars circle eachother before the car containing Edna's father and the real count plunges off a pier.
There is also one of the stunning visual moments in the chase -- the Murphy Windmill (on the corner of Lincoln Ave. and Great Highway, according to Film in America). Critics frequently carp about Chaplin's drab visuals in his films, but he had a great eye for finding poetic beauty in seemingly ordinary locations. The windmill is certainly striking on its own of course, and it was an inspired choice to use it as the backdrop to this otherwise routine ending to a slapstick comedy.
A Jitney Elopement may not be one of Chaplin's best Essanays, but it allowed him to explore one of his favorite themes and offers solid examples of his mature filmmaking style, which would come into full bloom in his next film.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Chaplin at Essanay - Part II
The Champion
With Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White, Lloyd Bacon.
The Champion opens with one of those little scenes that Chaplin did so well, and that made him such an audience favorite: sitting on a stoop with a little bulldog, he prepares a sausage for his meager lunch, but offers some to the dog, who sniffs at it but turns it down. A simple bit, and totally unrelated to anything else in the film, but it's a charming and cute bit of business that immediately establishes Charlie as an underdog.
Noticing a sign advertising for sparring partners against champion pugilist Spike Dugan, Charlie takes up the challenge. Slipping a horseshoe inside his glove, he knocks out the champion, and the trainer puts the new star fighter on the fast track to prepare for an upcoming prizefight against champion boxer Bob Uppercut.
Chaplin has a lot of fun playing with the props in the gymnasium setting, swinging around a pair of Indian clubs, playing with an outsize barbell, and jumping rope. He also finds time to flirt with the trainer's pretty daughter, and sabotages a briber, offering him cash to throw the fight, by soaking him in the showers. The big fight contains some well-choreographed comic sparring, but it can't help feeling like a warm-up for the intricate and brilliant boxing ballet in the much later City Lights.
The Champion is a good example of Chaplin's ability to get lots of comic mileage out of a single setting. The scenes in the training facilities show off his ability to find the comic potential in a variety of props. The playfulness of the film shows Chaplin establishing a special relationship with his audience. Perhaps the most charming moment in the film occurs in a shot which is repeated again at the very end. As Charlie and Edna playfully kiss, they stop, look directly into the camera with a smile, as Charlie obscures their kissing by holding up a giant beer bottle. It's one of those little moments that some of Chaplin's critics would probably find overly-cute, winking at the audience to gain sympathy. But it's also a perfect example of the special qualities of Chaplin as a performer that made audiences around the world immediately identify with him.
In the Park
With Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White.
A throwback to the "park" comedies so popular at Keystone, this one-reel effort is little more than a series of gags centered around the misunderstandings and altercations between different characters Charlie encounters while out for a day in the park. Often cited as a virtual remake of the earlier Keystone Twenty Minutes of Love, In the Park is overall an unremarkable effort and shows signs of the occasional lack of inspiration that must have resulted from the hectic production schedule of these early shorts. Some of the better moments include Charlie seated next to an amorous couple on a park bench and watching them like a lovesick puppy; his reactions to their exaggerated spooning providing some of the funniest moments in the film.
In the Park also shows how Edna Purviance, even in a relatively minor and uneventful part, brought such radiance to her roles. Her vivacious charm and playfulness perfectly matched Chaplin's character and it's easy to see how much her natural sense of humor became such an essential part of these comedies.
With Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White, Lloyd Bacon.
The Champion opens with one of those little scenes that Chaplin did so well, and that made him such an audience favorite: sitting on a stoop with a little bulldog, he prepares a sausage for his meager lunch, but offers some to the dog, who sniffs at it but turns it down. A simple bit, and totally unrelated to anything else in the film, but it's a charming and cute bit of business that immediately establishes Charlie as an underdog.
Noticing a sign advertising for sparring partners against champion pugilist Spike Dugan, Charlie takes up the challenge. Slipping a horseshoe inside his glove, he knocks out the champion, and the trainer puts the new star fighter on the fast track to prepare for an upcoming prizefight against champion boxer Bob Uppercut.
Chaplin has a lot of fun playing with the props in the gymnasium setting, swinging around a pair of Indian clubs, playing with an outsize barbell, and jumping rope. He also finds time to flirt with the trainer's pretty daughter, and sabotages a briber, offering him cash to throw the fight, by soaking him in the showers. The big fight contains some well-choreographed comic sparring, but it can't help feeling like a warm-up for the intricate and brilliant boxing ballet in the much later City Lights.
The Champion is a good example of Chaplin's ability to get lots of comic mileage out of a single setting. The scenes in the training facilities show off his ability to find the comic potential in a variety of props. The playfulness of the film shows Chaplin establishing a special relationship with his audience. Perhaps the most charming moment in the film occurs in a shot which is repeated again at the very end. As Charlie and Edna playfully kiss, they stop, look directly into the camera with a smile, as Charlie obscures their kissing by holding up a giant beer bottle. It's one of those little moments that some of Chaplin's critics would probably find overly-cute, winking at the audience to gain sympathy. But it's also a perfect example of the special qualities of Chaplin as a performer that made audiences around the world immediately identify with him.
In the Park
With Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White.
A throwback to the "park" comedies so popular at Keystone, this one-reel effort is little more than a series of gags centered around the misunderstandings and altercations between different characters Charlie encounters while out for a day in the park. Often cited as a virtual remake of the earlier Keystone Twenty Minutes of Love, In the Park is overall an unremarkable effort and shows signs of the occasional lack of inspiration that must have resulted from the hectic production schedule of these early shorts. Some of the better moments include Charlie seated next to an amorous couple on a park bench and watching them like a lovesick puppy; his reactions to their exaggerated spooning providing some of the funniest moments in the film.
In the Park also shows how Edna Purviance, even in a relatively minor and uneventful part, brought such radiance to her roles. Her vivacious charm and playfulness perfectly matched Chaplin's character and it's easy to see how much her natural sense of humor became such an essential part of these comedies.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Chaplin at Essanay - Part I
Beginning in 2010, I had begun re-visiting Chaplin's Keystone comedies and decided to write a series of short pieces on that formative period of his screen career. Following this, I decided to look at the comedies he made for Essanay in 1915-16, a tremendously important period in Chaplin's career. With the Essanay comedies, Chaplin found his filmmaking style and further developed the screen character which would become an international icon in 1915. Key works such as The Tramp looked forward to his later, mature classics in the masterful handling of comedy and pathos. During this time Chaplin also established his reliable stock company of players, including leading lady Edna Purviance, with whom he would continue to work in the coming years.
While there have already been countless volumes written on Chaplin's filmography (Charlie Chaplin by Theodore Huff and The Films of Charlie Chaplin by Gerald McDonald, Michael Conway and Mark Ricci being key sources), and books focusing on his work for Essanay (including Charlie Chaplin at Keystone and Essanay: Dawn of the Tramp by Ted Okuda, Chaplin at Essanay: A Film Artist in Transition, 1915-1916 by James L. Neibaur, and the article "Essanay - Chaplin Brand" by Jeffrey Vance, adapted from his book Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema), these essays are intended as continued examination and appreciation of this important part of Chaplin's filmmaking career.
A note on the sources: The copies of the films I viewed are the ones included on the DVD set pictured above: "Charlie Chaplin Short Comedy Classics: The Complete Restored Essanay & Mutual Collection" (Image Entertainment, 2003).
A note on the credits: Unless otherwise noted, all films were written and directed by Charlie Chaplin, produced by Jess Robbins, and photographed by Harry Ensign (the cinematographer of His New Job is unknown).
His New Job
With Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin, Charlotte Mineau, Leo White.
Chaplin’s first effort under his new Essanay contract was a throwback to the roughhouse business of his Keystone days. Appropriately enough, the “new job” of the title refers to Charlie becoming an actor at the “Lockstone Studio” (an obvious nod to his former boss). Charlie shows up for an audition, causing no end of frustration for the receptionist as he tries to make his way into the boss’s office. A new co-star is introduced when Ben Turpin shows up for an audition. Though Turpin reportedly disliked working with Chaplin, the two of them work well together and display a comic chemistry that would be better exploited in their following film together, A Night Out. Turpin was a highly talented comic, best known today for his trade-mark crossed eyes and brush mustache. At first, his brand of humor might seem mismatched for Chaplin’s comic universe, but his brash vulgarity makes for a good contrast with Chaplin’s dignified Tramp. In one such moment, Turpin crosses his leg, placing his shoe on Charlie’s knee, which Charlie reacts to with exaggerated disgust. A moment later, after a confrontation, Charlie retaliates by snatching Turpin’s cigarette out of his mouth and lighting it with a match struck on Turpin’s neck.
We then move into the production stages, where an historical drama is being shot. Charlie is hired as a prop man, and wreaks no end of havoc. He is then called in to replace an actor in the historical drama at the last moment. As the crew is setting up, Charlie gets into scrapes with newly-hired prop man Ben Turpin, including kicking him through the scenery and running a handsaw across his backside! There is some funny business with the props, too, including a sword that gets bent out of shape when Charlie whacks himself in the head with it. He then knocks over a pillar which lands on top of him, and before long, chaos ensues when a fight breaks out on the set.
Filmed at the Essanay facilities in Chicago, Illinois, the film is entirely stage-bound, lacking any of the natural outdoor locations regularly seen in the Keystone comedies. As a result, the film feels claustrophobic. Given its film studio setting, this is appropriate, but the contrast between the more freewheeling Keystones and the more structured approach at Essanay is evident. Chaplin was unhappy working at the Chicago studio, and also with some of the production practices there, such as the presence of a scenario department (headed by future columnist Louella Parsons), and having to run the dailies in negative form to save on expenses. Perhaps due to these production conditions, His New Job feels overwritten, suffering from too much plot, and not allowing Charlie as much time to develop bits of character business that the slower pace of the Essanay comedies would afford him in future projects. It’s not surprising, then, that for his next film, Chaplin would re-locate to Essanay’s West Coast studio in Niles, California, located near the San Francisco Bay area.
In Chaplin’s body of work, His New Job is a minor effort, re-visiting material that had already been played more effectively in Keystones such as A Film Johnny and The Masquerader. Chaplin would revisit this “behind the scenes” comedy a year later with the Mutual comedy Behind the Screen, and during his time at First National would begin work on the uncompleted How to Make Movies, a satirical look at the production process at the Chaplin studio which would remain unfinished. His New Job does provide an interesting glimpse of Essanay’s Chicago facility, and includes a couple of interesting camera moves on a dolly, all the more striking because these kinds of shots were so rare even in American dramas of the time, let alone comedies. Chaplin would later avoid this sort of camera movement for its own sake, though in this case, it’s tempting to read their use as a parody of the technique in such historical spectacles as Cabiria and Intolerance. A side note: two future stars make early appearances in this film as extras – Agnes Ayres and Gloria Swanson.
A Night Out
With Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin, Edna Purviance, Leo White, Bud Jamison.
If His New Job suffered from too much plot, A Night Out rectifies that problem with a simple two-act setup. The first of Chaplin’s Essanay comedies made in Niles, he is again paired with Ben Turpin, this time to even greater effect. The two play a pair of drunks out for a night on the town. The first part of the film is set in a posh nightclub, where Charlie and Ben run afoul of a French count (played by Leo White, who quickly became one of Chaplin’s most reliable character players). Their drunken behavior erupts into a battle with the count, and the two are eventually tossed out by the headwaiter (played by Bud Jamison, another important player in Chaplin’s stock company at Essanay). The scene brings to mind the nightclub routine in the later City Lights, with Charlie’s bad behavior so out of place in the upscale surroundings. A bit of business that Ben Turpin performs, in which he constantly begins to remove his jacket, ready to fight at the slightest provocation, also recalls Chaplin’s later performance in City Lights’ nightclub sequence.
The second part of the film takes place in a hotel, which the two inebriates have checked in to for the night. By coincidence, the nightclub headwaiter and his wife are staying at the same hotel. When the wife pursues her runaway dog into Charlie’s room, her husband shows up, and the inevitable complications ensue. After this farcical turn, the film ends with the still-inebriated Charlie and Ben fighting it out in their hotel room.
In his very first scene in the film, Chaplin immediately establishes himself as fastidious yet undeniably brash, picking his teeth with his bamboo cane, then twirling the cane and snapping it into place, before walking out of the shot with his now-iconic shuffle. Chaplin also appears in a slight variation on his usual costume here, with rather more dapper and better-fitting attire, and also a lighter-colored bowler. He still precipitates the chaos, but always manages to somehow stay outside of it. Despite the rough slapstick, Chaplin still finds plenty of moments to engage in little bits of character business, such as brushing his teeth with the stem of a palm leaf at a fountain.
A Night Out marks a number of firsts in Chaplin’s filmography. In addition to being his first film made for Essanay in Niles, it is also the first to feature his long-time leading lady, Edna Purviance. Purviance had a natural charm and beauty, and conveyed a real sense of fun and humor, that perfectly complemented Chaplin’s screen persona. She would work with Chaplin until 1923, at which time he directed her in a dramatic role in A Woman of Paris. After making one more film, Purviance retired, although she remained on the Chaplin studio payroll until her death in 1958.
A Night Out also marks the end of Chaplin’s pairing with Ben Turpin. Although he would later appear in a bit part in The Champion, and in the extended four-reel version of Burlesque on Carmen, Turpin’s screen partnership with Chaplin was short-lived. Their comic by-play recalls Chaplin’s earlier pairing off with Roscoe Arbuckle in films like The Rounders. Turpin had been with Essanay almost since its beginning in Chicago, and would enjoy a long career in films that lasted until his death in 1940. His final appearance was a cameo as the plumber (“It looked alright to me!”) in Laurel and Hardy’s Saps at Sea, and his distinctive look, with his shock of unruly hair, crossed eyes, and brush mustache, would become an iconic emblem of silent comedy. A fitting tribute to his legacy came in 1949 when his photo would make the cover of LIFE Magazine in illustration of James Agee’s seminal appreciation of silent film comedy, “Comedy’s Greatest Era”.
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Interview with filmmaker Russell Sheaffer
I recently had a chance to interview experimental and documentary filmmaker/scholar Russell
Sheaffer about his latest film, MASCULINITY/FEMININITY. I've known Russell since our time
together in NYU's Cinema Studies graduate program. Since we both share backgrounds in film
production and theory, with an interest in how the two disciplines can work together, I've long been
interested in his work, which he now continues in his doctoral studies at Indiana University,
exploring the subject of gender through combined media production and theoretical approaches.
Russell's work has screened at such prestigious venues as MoMA, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Torino GLBT Film Festival, Boston LGBT Film Festival, and the Anthology Film Archives. A short film that he co-wrote and co-directed with James Franco, MASCULINITY & ME, was featured in Franco's solo exhibition, "The Dangerous Book Four Boys", in New York and Berlin.
In this interview, Russell discusses his latest project, MASCULINITY/FEMININITY, and his ideas on combining film theory and practice:
MATT BARRY: Can you tell us a little about how the project of MASCULINITY/FEMININITY got started?
RUSSELL SHEAFFER: MASCULINITY/FEMININITY started back when I was at NYU with you. I was in a class that Chris Straayer was teaching, which was on the body writ large. James Franco and I had been in some classes together and were in this seminar and were given the chance to collaborate in lieu of a paper – a traditional academic paper. We took some questions that James had been asked by Esquire that were really loaded heteronormative understandings of what masculinity is and what it means to become a “masculine” male. Like, “what’s the greatest example of manhood you've ever seen?” and these bull shit things.
We crafted our own responses to them, shot them, and then sort of amalgamated them together into this 22-minute piece. When we finished the film, it played in James’ solo show at the Clocktower in New York, and then in Berlin and all over the place. I decided I wanted to expand on the themes that we were ruminating over and try to craft a larger piece that was really interested in the opportunity for praxis that we had been given -- asking scholars, filmmakers, theorists, and artists of all different kinds to take these questions as a starting point and really perform anything that they wanted, because in my mind gender is all about a performance in one way or another.
So, in a very loose way, I wanted to give people these questions – totally loaded questions – as a prompt that would allow them to perform however they wanted.
MB: As far as the actual production, could you just talk a little bit about how you've used Kickstarter and crowd-sourcing and that process? For a project that doesn't have the conventional theatrical, “indie film” outlets that one typically has – for something that is basically an academic project and has an academic focus – could you explain how you go about the pre-production process on something like that?
RS: In terms of pre-production, that is something that is difficult in a lot of ways. How do you fund raise? How do you budget for something that will likely never make money? We’ll be really lucky if we make the budget back for the film. But I think that films like this are really important as exercises in combining ways of thinking and as ways to confront people with experiences that counter how they’re used to seeing images. So I've really focused on really strategic budgeting, really working like a lot of micro-budget people do where any expense you don’t need gets cut – sleeping on friends’ couches whenever you can, using frequent flyer miles to pay for crew travel, all of that kind of stuff is really important to budgeting. But then Kickstarter is a really great way, too… it is a really great way to bring together a community that wants to see something like this made that wouldn't be produced otherwise. 50 people, 100 people, 200 people can really make the difference in seeing something like this get made. We raised something like $7,500 and the big thing that I knew we couldn't do unless we raised that money was actually shoot on Super 8 – get the stock, develop it, transfer it – all of that is a somewhat expensive process. That money from the community made the aesthetic of the whole film possible.
MB: When you first proposed the idea of doing the videos at NYU as an alternative to the written paper, were there any particular challenges that you had in convincing them to let you do that?
RS: I think there are some reservations overall, like thinking about the academic institution as an institution that cranks out a product that it understands and that it can manage – the University can really conceptualize what a paper looks like, what a manuscript looks like, what a peer-reviewed journal essay or article looks like and what that contributes to the field in some way. I think it’s difficult for some departments, some individuals to conceptualize how a film operates similarly when there isn't the regimented, peer-reviewed system that we use for writing.
NYU and Chris Straayer in particular seemed really receptive to a blending in a way that I think a lot of people aren't. So it didn't seem like that much of a stretch for Chris to get into the mindset that it’s equally important to actually create that cultural product as a way to critique it, as a way to talk about it, to think through what it does and how it breathes. I think it’s a really amazing and unique opportunity to encounter people who think that way, and NYU seemed like one of those places where a lot of the faculty are able to think in that way.
IU [Indiana University] has been similar in that respect, of really being supportive of people who think about their disciplines in fresh ways. The Department of Communication and Culture was founded as a way to become interdisciplinary, to combine rhetoric and performance and ethnography and film and media studies all in to one giant department. It’s sort of foundational to them to be able to think outside of the box in the way that you do scholarship. Now, the powers-thatbe at Indiana University are planning a huge “media school” merger that I’m not particularly sure about. There is a huge push for “professionalization” and, while I understand that drive, I think it’s really important that they maintain a mindset that says, “yes, media making can be a critical, scholarly act.”
MB: Right. Talking about filmmaking in academia, it’s always interesting to me because it’s sort of logical to me to think in terms of both production and theory, because when you have the backgrounds in both, one side is always informing the other. With more traditional programs that are more focused, more separated into one or the other, I know it’s a lot harder to find people who are receptive to these ideas. I’m curious when you first became interested in merging the two disciplines and seeing how you could combine them to get ideas across on both sides?
RS: I don’t know if there was a specific moment. I think, like you, I come from a place where I did film studies as an undergrad, thinking about film criticism and cultural theory and then immediately after I graduated I started working on documentaries and other peoples’ films. Somehow, in my brain, it was just a logical connection, it was obvious that the two inform each other. If you can’t think about the ways that images are constructed, and how they work, and the cultural politics that surround them, you have some pretty lacking movies. If you can’t think about the way that films are produced, you have some pretty lacking criticism.
It’s important that those two things come in dialogue with each other. Obviously there are a lot of people who don’t feel that way, that really disagree. But it just seems like that’s the way my brain works. Then, getting to NYU, there were actually professors who were thinking that way, like it was obvious that you could make a film and it could be just as valid a scholarly pursuit as anything else. I think really cemented that idea in my brain that these two things can work together even when academic departments say that they can’t. It’s something that we need to push for and we need to be thinking about as artists but also as scholars.
MB: To get back to MASCULINITY/FEMININITY, you have some really interesting subjects featured in the film. Could you talk about some of the people you have in there and what it was like working with them?
RS: I have learned from academic experience and production experience that if you want something, you just have to ask for it. It’s not always just going to magically materialize, but people seem really receptive when you’re willing to let them know what you’re doing and ask for their help. I made a list where I asked myself, “if I were going to make a film where I ask a bunch of people to perform gender in one way or another, who would those people be?” I sent out emails and amazingly, maybe 90% of people were really receptive to the idea, or super into the concept of the amalgamation of theoretical work and production work, and thought that the questions I was asking were just as bull shit as I thought they were -- they were really excited to do it.
I’d been trying to get the project off the ground for a while and Monika Treut, who is a really phenomenal German filmmaker that made a movie called SEDUCTION: THE CRUEL WOMAN, which is one of my favorites, was at IU for a semester. I was telling her about the project and she was immediately like, this is great - we should make questions for women and do all these different things. We immediately started thinking, “what questions would you ask ‘women’ that were equally as ridiculous as those that we have for ‘men?’” So Monika signed on, and then I emailed Barbara Hammer…and once Barbara Hammer was on board, it was just like a snowball. Once Barbara Hammer was involved, everybody was excited, which is great. It was super, super gracious of Barbara to donate an hour of her time. She was like, yeah, this is great – come to New York and let’s do this. That led to so much: B. Ruby Rich, Carolee Schneemann, Susan Stryker, and so many other really amazing scholars and artists. Everybody who’s involved has been really excited, gracious, and willing to donate an hour of their time and do something wild and different.
MB: Could you talk briefly about your decision to shoot on Super 8? I thought that was interesting because it’s a format you don’t see used a lot, even with people shooting on film.
RS: Yeah, I’m really interested in Super 8 as a medium. A lot of what I do with production work is really medium-specific. When I’m shooting on 16mm, there’s a reason I’m shooting on 16mm. When I’m shooting on Super 8, there’s a reason I want to shoot on Super 8. With this film in particular, from the very first moment that James shared the questions from Esquire with me, it seemed like such a flimsy understanding of what gender was. It’s such a minuscule way of thinking about it.
To me, Super 8 is a way, theoretically, to embrace that in the medium, to embrace the idea that an understanding of gender like these questions do, is really flimsy, it falls apart, it doesn't work right. When you throw these reels, these Kodak reels, into the old 1960s cameras that we’re using, they literally jam more than half the time. So we’ll have no idea when we’re shooting, really…but I think it’s a really important theoretical exercise to embrace the idea that the film stock is going to fail, that gender as a solid construct is bound to fail, and that it’s the sort of flimsy construction that produces difficult-to-decipher images. Super 8, to me, seemed like a really obvious choice when thinking through the sort of content we were dealing with and the theoretical frames that we were embracing.
MB: It’s interesting, I remember at the Orphan Film Symposium there was some footage run from the Kinsey archives, and talking about the fragile nature of Super 8 brings to mind how a lot of these films that depict different aspects of gender and sexuality more broadly are in danger of being lost to time because of the fragile nature of these prints. Going through the Kinsey archives, I imagine you've come across some films that really shatter the traditional notions of gender and sexuality from different periods in which they were produced.
RS: Yeah, the work that I’m doing right now here at IU is really looking at… stag films – sexually explicit films – that were produced before 1930. The Kinsey has almost 60 films that they think were produced before 1930. It’s really fascinating to me to look at the way that people are encountering their bodies, obviously in a time that’s separated from us right now, but also in the ways that things are really very similar. Particularly, I’m really interested in the way that these films screened, trying to chart out how sexually explicit material circulates, especially in the early years of the 20th century. There’s mind-blowingly incredible material in the Kinsey that is just sitting there waiting to be accessed and thought about and preserved. It’s an incredible resource for that kind of stuff.
MB: I've always found it fascinating because of how much it goes against the mainstream media depictions of sexuality, beyond just the issue of gender, but in general it just shatters so many notions that the mainstream media would depict. And it reminds me in many ways of what you’re doing in looking at these questions that James Franco was asked by Esquire, and going against mainstream conceptions and really examining everything. I think there are some interesting parallels there.
RS: I think so, too. I think that people, when they encounter really early stag, in a certain way it’s like an immediate rupture for them. The idea that people were filming sex acts in 1920 is somehow difficult for a lot of people to grasp. And I think that breaking down the questions in a similar way is an attempt at rupturing that really normative train of thought that says: gender is like this, sex is like this, time is like this, you know, that everything is in a nice straight line.
MB: Can you describe what kind of life a film like MASCULINITY/FEMININITY can expect to have once it’s released out into the world?
RS: We’ll be working to get it out to festivals for sure and I’m working on alternate installation and text-based versions, too, but the film has always been interested in engaging with theory in a way that I think will be really productive in university settings. Once the project is done, we’ll start taking it around to universities, getting people in dialogue with it, getting people in dialogue with the theories that the performers are drawing on, sharing their own ideas in conversation with the performances in the film. I think the biggest goal for MASCULINITY/FEMININITY is to get people to engage with this way of thinking.
For more information on Russell's films, please check out his website, Artless Media, "like" the official MASCULINITY/FEMININITY page on Facebook, and watch the official trailer here.
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Masculinity/Femininity - Official Trailer (HD) from Russell Sheaffer on Vimeo.
Russell's work has screened at such prestigious venues as MoMA, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Torino GLBT Film Festival, Boston LGBT Film Festival, and the Anthology Film Archives. A short film that he co-wrote and co-directed with James Franco, MASCULINITY & ME, was featured in Franco's solo exhibition, "The Dangerous Book Four Boys", in New York and Berlin.
In this interview, Russell discusses his latest project, MASCULINITY/FEMININITY, and his ideas on combining film theory and practice:
MATT BARRY: Can you tell us a little about how the project of MASCULINITY/FEMININITY got started?
RUSSELL SHEAFFER: MASCULINITY/FEMININITY started back when I was at NYU with you. I was in a class that Chris Straayer was teaching, which was on the body writ large. James Franco and I had been in some classes together and were in this seminar and were given the chance to collaborate in lieu of a paper – a traditional academic paper. We took some questions that James had been asked by Esquire that were really loaded heteronormative understandings of what masculinity is and what it means to become a “masculine” male. Like, “what’s the greatest example of manhood you've ever seen?” and these bull shit things.
We crafted our own responses to them, shot them, and then sort of amalgamated them together into this 22-minute piece. When we finished the film, it played in James’ solo show at the Clocktower in New York, and then in Berlin and all over the place. I decided I wanted to expand on the themes that we were ruminating over and try to craft a larger piece that was really interested in the opportunity for praxis that we had been given -- asking scholars, filmmakers, theorists, and artists of all different kinds to take these questions as a starting point and really perform anything that they wanted, because in my mind gender is all about a performance in one way or another.
So, in a very loose way, I wanted to give people these questions – totally loaded questions – as a prompt that would allow them to perform however they wanted.
MB: As far as the actual production, could you just talk a little bit about how you've used Kickstarter and crowd-sourcing and that process? For a project that doesn't have the conventional theatrical, “indie film” outlets that one typically has – for something that is basically an academic project and has an academic focus – could you explain how you go about the pre-production process on something like that?
RS: In terms of pre-production, that is something that is difficult in a lot of ways. How do you fund raise? How do you budget for something that will likely never make money? We’ll be really lucky if we make the budget back for the film. But I think that films like this are really important as exercises in combining ways of thinking and as ways to confront people with experiences that counter how they’re used to seeing images. So I've really focused on really strategic budgeting, really working like a lot of micro-budget people do where any expense you don’t need gets cut – sleeping on friends’ couches whenever you can, using frequent flyer miles to pay for crew travel, all of that kind of stuff is really important to budgeting. But then Kickstarter is a really great way, too… it is a really great way to bring together a community that wants to see something like this made that wouldn't be produced otherwise. 50 people, 100 people, 200 people can really make the difference in seeing something like this get made. We raised something like $7,500 and the big thing that I knew we couldn't do unless we raised that money was actually shoot on Super 8 – get the stock, develop it, transfer it – all of that is a somewhat expensive process. That money from the community made the aesthetic of the whole film possible.
MB: When you first proposed the idea of doing the videos at NYU as an alternative to the written paper, were there any particular challenges that you had in convincing them to let you do that?
RS: I think there are some reservations overall, like thinking about the academic institution as an institution that cranks out a product that it understands and that it can manage – the University can really conceptualize what a paper looks like, what a manuscript looks like, what a peer-reviewed journal essay or article looks like and what that contributes to the field in some way. I think it’s difficult for some departments, some individuals to conceptualize how a film operates similarly when there isn't the regimented, peer-reviewed system that we use for writing.
NYU and Chris Straayer in particular seemed really receptive to a blending in a way that I think a lot of people aren't. So it didn't seem like that much of a stretch for Chris to get into the mindset that it’s equally important to actually create that cultural product as a way to critique it, as a way to talk about it, to think through what it does and how it breathes. I think it’s a really amazing and unique opportunity to encounter people who think that way, and NYU seemed like one of those places where a lot of the faculty are able to think in that way.
IU [Indiana University] has been similar in that respect, of really being supportive of people who think about their disciplines in fresh ways. The Department of Communication and Culture was founded as a way to become interdisciplinary, to combine rhetoric and performance and ethnography and film and media studies all in to one giant department. It’s sort of foundational to them to be able to think outside of the box in the way that you do scholarship. Now, the powers-thatbe at Indiana University are planning a huge “media school” merger that I’m not particularly sure about. There is a huge push for “professionalization” and, while I understand that drive, I think it’s really important that they maintain a mindset that says, “yes, media making can be a critical, scholarly act.”
MB: Right. Talking about filmmaking in academia, it’s always interesting to me because it’s sort of logical to me to think in terms of both production and theory, because when you have the backgrounds in both, one side is always informing the other. With more traditional programs that are more focused, more separated into one or the other, I know it’s a lot harder to find people who are receptive to these ideas. I’m curious when you first became interested in merging the two disciplines and seeing how you could combine them to get ideas across on both sides?
RS: I don’t know if there was a specific moment. I think, like you, I come from a place where I did film studies as an undergrad, thinking about film criticism and cultural theory and then immediately after I graduated I started working on documentaries and other peoples’ films. Somehow, in my brain, it was just a logical connection, it was obvious that the two inform each other. If you can’t think about the ways that images are constructed, and how they work, and the cultural politics that surround them, you have some pretty lacking movies. If you can’t think about the way that films are produced, you have some pretty lacking criticism.
It’s important that those two things come in dialogue with each other. Obviously there are a lot of people who don’t feel that way, that really disagree. But it just seems like that’s the way my brain works. Then, getting to NYU, there were actually professors who were thinking that way, like it was obvious that you could make a film and it could be just as valid a scholarly pursuit as anything else. I think really cemented that idea in my brain that these two things can work together even when academic departments say that they can’t. It’s something that we need to push for and we need to be thinking about as artists but also as scholars.
MB: To get back to MASCULINITY/FEMININITY, you have some really interesting subjects featured in the film. Could you talk about some of the people you have in there and what it was like working with them?
RS: I have learned from academic experience and production experience that if you want something, you just have to ask for it. It’s not always just going to magically materialize, but people seem really receptive when you’re willing to let them know what you’re doing and ask for their help. I made a list where I asked myself, “if I were going to make a film where I ask a bunch of people to perform gender in one way or another, who would those people be?” I sent out emails and amazingly, maybe 90% of people were really receptive to the idea, or super into the concept of the amalgamation of theoretical work and production work, and thought that the questions I was asking were just as bull shit as I thought they were -- they were really excited to do it.
I’d been trying to get the project off the ground for a while and Monika Treut, who is a really phenomenal German filmmaker that made a movie called SEDUCTION: THE CRUEL WOMAN, which is one of my favorites, was at IU for a semester. I was telling her about the project and she was immediately like, this is great - we should make questions for women and do all these different things. We immediately started thinking, “what questions would you ask ‘women’ that were equally as ridiculous as those that we have for ‘men?’” So Monika signed on, and then I emailed Barbara Hammer…and once Barbara Hammer was on board, it was just like a snowball. Once Barbara Hammer was involved, everybody was excited, which is great. It was super, super gracious of Barbara to donate an hour of her time. She was like, yeah, this is great – come to New York and let’s do this. That led to so much: B. Ruby Rich, Carolee Schneemann, Susan Stryker, and so many other really amazing scholars and artists. Everybody who’s involved has been really excited, gracious, and willing to donate an hour of their time and do something wild and different.
MB: Could you talk briefly about your decision to shoot on Super 8? I thought that was interesting because it’s a format you don’t see used a lot, even with people shooting on film.
RS: Yeah, I’m really interested in Super 8 as a medium. A lot of what I do with production work is really medium-specific. When I’m shooting on 16mm, there’s a reason I’m shooting on 16mm. When I’m shooting on Super 8, there’s a reason I want to shoot on Super 8. With this film in particular, from the very first moment that James shared the questions from Esquire with me, it seemed like such a flimsy understanding of what gender was. It’s such a minuscule way of thinking about it.
To me, Super 8 is a way, theoretically, to embrace that in the medium, to embrace the idea that an understanding of gender like these questions do, is really flimsy, it falls apart, it doesn't work right. When you throw these reels, these Kodak reels, into the old 1960s cameras that we’re using, they literally jam more than half the time. So we’ll have no idea when we’re shooting, really…but I think it’s a really important theoretical exercise to embrace the idea that the film stock is going to fail, that gender as a solid construct is bound to fail, and that it’s the sort of flimsy construction that produces difficult-to-decipher images. Super 8, to me, seemed like a really obvious choice when thinking through the sort of content we were dealing with and the theoretical frames that we were embracing.
MB: It’s interesting, I remember at the Orphan Film Symposium there was some footage run from the Kinsey archives, and talking about the fragile nature of Super 8 brings to mind how a lot of these films that depict different aspects of gender and sexuality more broadly are in danger of being lost to time because of the fragile nature of these prints. Going through the Kinsey archives, I imagine you've come across some films that really shatter the traditional notions of gender and sexuality from different periods in which they were produced.
RS: Yeah, the work that I’m doing right now here at IU is really looking at… stag films – sexually explicit films – that were produced before 1930. The Kinsey has almost 60 films that they think were produced before 1930. It’s really fascinating to me to look at the way that people are encountering their bodies, obviously in a time that’s separated from us right now, but also in the ways that things are really very similar. Particularly, I’m really interested in the way that these films screened, trying to chart out how sexually explicit material circulates, especially in the early years of the 20th century. There’s mind-blowingly incredible material in the Kinsey that is just sitting there waiting to be accessed and thought about and preserved. It’s an incredible resource for that kind of stuff.
MB: I've always found it fascinating because of how much it goes against the mainstream media depictions of sexuality, beyond just the issue of gender, but in general it just shatters so many notions that the mainstream media would depict. And it reminds me in many ways of what you’re doing in looking at these questions that James Franco was asked by Esquire, and going against mainstream conceptions and really examining everything. I think there are some interesting parallels there.
RS: I think so, too. I think that people, when they encounter really early stag, in a certain way it’s like an immediate rupture for them. The idea that people were filming sex acts in 1920 is somehow difficult for a lot of people to grasp. And I think that breaking down the questions in a similar way is an attempt at rupturing that really normative train of thought that says: gender is like this, sex is like this, time is like this, you know, that everything is in a nice straight line.
MB: Can you describe what kind of life a film like MASCULINITY/FEMININITY can expect to have once it’s released out into the world?
RS: We’ll be working to get it out to festivals for sure and I’m working on alternate installation and text-based versions, too, but the film has always been interested in engaging with theory in a way that I think will be really productive in university settings. Once the project is done, we’ll start taking it around to universities, getting people in dialogue with it, getting people in dialogue with the theories that the performers are drawing on, sharing their own ideas in conversation with the performances in the film. I think the biggest goal for MASCULINITY/FEMININITY is to get people to engage with this way of thinking.
For more information on Russell's films, please check out his website, Artless Media, "like" the official MASCULINITY/FEMININITY page on Facebook, and watch the official trailer here.
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Masculinity/Femininity - Official Trailer (HD) from Russell Sheaffer on Vimeo.
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