A CONVERSATION WITH MARIAH GARNETT
Mariah Garnett brings into her films the histories of the bodies of those whose stories are portrayed. Her intimate relationships then become part of the filmic language of the process making the work. Whether it is a feature length experimental documentary in which she reimagines through embodiment her young father as mediated through the BBC film archive, an intimate “reading” between two close friends, or when an old Fassbinder play is brought into a re-union road trip with her sister, history is layered and cachéd into the present encounter that is unfolding on screen. We are discussing three of her films.
1)
YOU WILL NEVER BE A WOMAN. YOU MUST LIVE THE REST OF YOUR DAYS ENTIRELY AS A MAN AND YOU WILL ONLY GROW MORE MASCULINE WITH EVERY PASSING YEAR. THERE IS NO WAY OUT
[2008, A.L. STEINER, ZACKARY DRUCKER, VAN BARNES, AND MARIAH GARNETT]
LIOR SHAMRIZ: We’re curious to learn about the process of creating the film. Zachary Drucker and Van Barnes repeat sentences to each other. They seem to be channeling dark masochistic voices. Many of the things they say are very negative, some are anti-trans slurs: “I want you to split me open and fuck my guts out … pull my intestines out of my asshole and feed them back to me like the scam eating trash I am”, “you will never be a woman”, “you will only grow more masculine”, etc. Some are more positive however. The repetition of the line “you’re turning me on” is a long beautiful moment in the film for example. My interpretation was that at least some of the things they say to each other, were thrown at them in the past. Those lines now resurface in something that almost feels like a ritual. Is that what’s happening?
They make us think of an intimate play. What prompted the decision to have them project those words to each other during the filmmaking process? Are they related to an experience in your own relationships that inspired that approach to the project?
MARIAH GARNETT: Van and Zackary have been friends for many, many years. In that video they were pushing the tradition of reading to the extreme. Reading has basically come to mean "witty insult" since RuPaul's Drag Race popularized it, but it also can be seen as a way for transwomen or gender non-conforming folks to gird themselves against what the world would inevitably hit them with. So insults, which reveal where a transwoman wasn't passing, were actually a way of protecting them against potential violence out in the world, and so reading is also, perversely, an act of care. Of course, this video pushes and distorts that tradition to the extreme. The full title, which is actually “You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out” comes from an outdated psychiatric evaluation form diagnosing gender dysphoria, which asks the question, "You will never, ever be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man, and you will only get more masculine with each passing year. There is no way out. What is your reaction?" A lot of that dialog was improvised, some of it came from Zackary's writing, and Zackary was also doing a lot of work recombining language from a slang dictionary from the 1970's called "The Queen's Vernacular" at the time. This piece is in line with a lot of her other works from that time. On set, Zackary would lead with these pieces of language and Van would basically riff off them. This video was a collaboration, so I wasn't prompting them to use this type of language, nor was it "my approach." If anything, it was Zackary's.
ELBE TRAKAL: Do you see the film as a document of the practice of reading or does it represent a more intimate relationship to film-work? I kept thinking about you and about the camera while watching the film – maybe because of the represented intimacy or the video quality. You mention that the film pushes the concept of reading to the extreme, and to me beyond the instructional and pedagogical value of reading lies also an erotic concept of “roasting”, which is connected to masochism as a fantasy play. Film, for its indexical and objectivist documentary quality, always falls short of representing that fantasy, and we are left with something that is performatively removed from the heat of the fantasy. In constructing the shots, your presence in the room is tangible and creates quite a different experience from the one I would experience if the performers were filming each other in your absence.
Within the performative representation I was reminded of what Brecht called “Estrangement Effect” (Verfremdungseffekt), the use of which I also notice in your later films. Do you see that exchange of the fantasy for its representation as a work of care for the viewer? Or does the use of the “Estrangement Effect” do something else for you?
MG: This was a collaborative project, and A.L. Steiner filmed most of it. I was more active in the editing, though I was on set, primarily recording sound. For the most part, I was not holding the camera. Things just seemed to unfold organically on set, and we all informed the outcome in various ways. Zackary had text prepared, Van kind of riffed off the text Zackary had prepared, Steiner and I responded to the text by choosing locations and framing, though again, she shot most of it. Reading here is reframed as an act of affection and intimacy, though of course mangled because it's portraying two transwomen in an ambiguous romantic state that would definitely not be endorsed or likely even tolerated by the world outside that apartment. So that creeps in. Steiner and I were watching a lot of Fassbinder at the time, who was informed by Brecht, so there's probably some of that in there. It definitely wasn't an act of care for the viewer, as we weren't really thinking about a viewer, more about our own pleasure. Again, it was a long time ago and I was one of 4 people making choices that went into the film.
2)
GARBAGE, THE CITY AND DEATH [2010]
LS: I understand that you worked with your half-sister on this project, and that the process of production coincided with traveling together in California. You mention that the project was born out of “a long visit between long-lost sisters who did not grow up together”. I’d love to hear more about that process. What initiated it? How did it materialize? Could you tell us why you chose to re-stage a “forbidden” Fassbinder play? Why that play? How did the production function as a process of connecting with your sister? What did she think about the project? Has she performed to the camera before? Did the process bear meaning to your family?
MG: I first heard of that play on a visit to Berlin with A.L. Steiner in the mid-2000's. There was a display about it in the Jewish Museum. It was controversial and protested (by the Jewish community) for presumely being anti-semitic in the 1980's and boycotted when they tried to perform it in Frankfurt. Steiner and I started making work from that script but didn't do anything with it. A few years later, when my sister came to the USA for the first time, I thought of it again. I think part of that was motivated by her accent, but also because, as in most of Fassbinder's work, there's this stifling closeness that results in resentment and madness, which is how I imagine a family might be, if it were actually close. I have no full siblings, so I mapped this relationship onto that one. There's something about transgression in there: transgressing what a sibling relationship should be, changing the genders, using a forbidden play and language that I would never write. In the 1980s my dad migrated from Ireland to Austria, a country that is famously hostile to outsiders, and being a hippy/punk and an artist had put him in a somewhat marginal relationship to mainstream Austria, or even artworld Austria (particularly at the time). I actually had wanted to expand this and film it in Vienna at my brother’s and sister's apartment with a larger cast, but I never really got it together. So this piece was initially shot as kind of a test for a film that never got made. Perhaps it still could. Oh, and in relationship to being drawn to the controversial work, Fassbinder is a weird character because he's ideologically anti-fascist but totally fascist in his personal and work relationships, and it’s really obvious that he's grappling with fascism and its effects both personally and culturally in his work. The fact that it was banned just made me more interested in finding out why, and then I read the play and it is a totally insane, campy Brechtian melodrama about a post-fascist state, that is critiquing fascism at the same time as its characters are all inescapably affected by it. My sister and I filmed it during her last weekend in L.A. We drove out to the desert for a night with a friend and made a little road trip out of it. It was fun to connect with her in this other way, through theater, and she turned out to be a fantastic actress. I think she liked it. She was struck by how "ugly" a lot of the language was, and said we could never show it to our dad (which we ended up doing) and noted what an asshole my character was. But I think she liked it? I don't really know. I wouldn't say it brought us closer, it was just a different way of interacting, and that was fun.
ET: Your reference to Fassbinder’s working style as fascist is interesting to me. I always connected his working style first to patriarchy, while being a gay man, and second to exposing capitalist film structures in the exploitation of others and of oneself. Either way, Fassbinder picks up destructive elements in the themes of his films and turns them against himself and against his performers and crew in the production process. Personally I have both disgust and longing for this kind of a close circle – the sort of attraction/repulsion to the cult around him. Perhaps it’s not so far from something like the DAU (2019, Ilya Khrzhanovsky) project, which intended to be exploitative in the work methodology, as it claims to represent Stalinist totalitarianism on every level of its production. Fassbinder also said that you only learn about filmmaking on the film set. What are your ideals concerning production methods? Did you develop them yourself over time?
MG: I used to work in commercial production in L.A., so I think the style of directing I've developed is in direct opposition to that, and to ideas of auteurism in general, though, at the same time I don't want to work collectively, and I do see the films as mine. I often try to create a power dynamic in relation to my subjects, where I am subordinate. I do not want to be an authority figure on set, or really ever in life, except when I am alone with the material in the editing room. I know that someone needs to be "directing" so that things get done on set, but I try to keep things feeling like a conversation, rather than "my vision." I don't really have a vision. I often have a loose set of ideas that I bring to a scenario, or shoot, or location, and then things unfold in relation to those ideas, which I try to capture. So I'm very much a performer as well as a “documenter” or a director. When I am doing narrative reconstructions or more ambitious shoots, where I need to hire a crew, I often defer to a DP's ideas about framing shots. I like this aspect of production a lot, to be working with technicians who are far more skilled at what they do than I am, and listening to their ideas and opinions. So in some ways I approach narrative shoots more like a documentary, than, say, Fassbinder, who sounds like quite the tyrant. Have you read Love Is Colder Than Death (1987, Robert Katz)? I highly recommend it. He may have been exposing the exploitation of the film industry, but he was also doing it. I'm always looking for a way to not be exploitative, by putting myself in the films, paying people, and keeping days short. There's this myth that to make something good you can't be humane, that everyone should be grateful to participate in the creation of a great work of art, that you have to push push push through to get to something truly great. I think this is just an extension of rape culture and capitalism. I don't want to try to "get" anything out of anyone. I want to see what's there already, and have a conversation with it.
ET: Do you have any role-models and why or why not?
All of my idols are inhumane auteur filmmakers to varying degrees: Fassbinder, Herzog, Youssef Chahine... I love their work, but I don't emulate their production methods, because I find them exhausting and I'm not very good at it. I'd rather spend more money or get less footage and cap my day at 6 hours, than push myself and everyone else to the brink. I do think a lot of this has to do with the difference between a documentary or observational mindset and a narrative fiction or creationist mindset. I don't want to create anything. I want to work with what's already there.
3)
TROUBLE [2019]
Trouble (Mariah Garnett, 2019)
LS: The approach of connecting personal history and community with the filmic process seems to come back in the process of making Trouble ten years later. But the journey in Trouble is less about the relationship that develops with a specific person, but rather one with a society, or with a history and memory of communities (your father’s hometown, your family, etc). Were you aiming at a certain goal (personal, artistic, communal) by embarking on the journey?
MG: I knew I wanted to make a feature film, that was one goal. I also wanted to get to know my dad better and also to get to know more about Belfast and its history. I didn't really have any idea what I was in for when I started.
LS: Could you talk about your relationship with the different potential audiences of the work, for example people here in L.A., your family, film festivals audience etc.?
MG: As far as the audience is concerned, I did have trouble figuring out how to navigate that. I wasn't really thinking about an art versus film festival audience. I almost never care about this distinction, and am happy to show the film in different contexts and see what the reactions to it are. But I was very concerned about how the film would translate culturally. I wanted it to be legible to people in the U.S. without oversimplifying and stereotyping the Northern Irish communities portrayed in the film, or my dad and his story. I am certain I didn't succeed 100% in that regard, but that's virtually impossible.
LS: Were there visual signifiers / symbols / ideas that lead you through the process? For example, the burning tower seems to have a significant meaning to the journey, as it later receives its own separate video work.
MG: The burning tower is an annual Ulster Protestant celebration of the victory of King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over Catholic King James. On the 12th of July they have big parades that march all over Northern Ireland with pipe and drum bands, and on the 11th night they burn these giant bonfires. This almost always escalates sectarian tensions. So it's an identity-based symbol that kind of functions as an historical reenactment of the Troubles in current day society. A lot of the builders are also associated with paramilitaries. In August, Catholics have an anti-internment march, where they burn bonfires too, and there are often riots and sectarian clashes. It all flares up over the summer. I went to film them because I wanted to get some idea of what that sectarian tension actually felt like, so I could imagine what it was like for my dad. It turns out it was way more than I could really deal with, so I only filmed the protestant fires and march.
LS: In Trouble you are inhabiting (lip-syncing) your father’s voice. This makes us think of drag and queer performativity. Lip-syncing can have different purposes: It can, for example, allow a performer to almost momentarily ‘become’ someone the society doesn’t necessarily allow them to be, or on the other hand, to dismantle and subvert the voice of an authority figure or institution. You have a rich relationship with queer performance in Los Angeles (in your work with Dynasty Handbag for example). Could you tell us a little about that part of your practice? Do you find the two connected or is a different thing at play here?
MG: The lip synching in Trouble comes from a few places. Initially, my dad suggested I reenact the footage of him as a young man to avoid having to pay licensing fees to the BBC. Doing an Irish accent just seemed ridiculous and doing it in an American accent seemed equally problematic. So I decided to lip-sync. I wasn't necessarily thinking of drag when I initially embarked on making that reenactment footage. Of course I was thinking about queerness and its relationship to the material, as I generally am always thinking about that (at the very least in the form of what my relationship to this material is.) However, I didn't set out to do drag or anything. In fact I was trying to avoid having an overtly campy element to the piece. I had seen a piece by Candice Breitz earlier that year that really stuck with me, where she replaced the voices of the characters in The Brood (1979, David Cronenberg) with those of her own family. So I was thinking about the relationship of voice to image to family to media images. Later on, I discovered that during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the British government made a law that said that the voices of "terrorists" couldn't be broadcast. When they interviewed prominent IRA and other paramilitary figures, they removed their voices and had them dubbed by actors. It’s sort of the opposite of lip synching, like in the Candice Breitz piece. In fact, Gerry Adams was often played by Stephen Rea, the IRA man in The Crying Game (1992, Neil Jordan). And then I heard about these Belfast drag queens, Tina Leggs Tantrum and Trudy Scrumptious, who did a political drag show, where they would cross-dress physically and politically, and read each other on their politics rather than their looks. Finally, I saw The Arbor (2010, Clio Barnard), in which all actors lip synced pre-recorded audio interviews, and I realized I could use this method with the interviews I recorded with my dad, not just the re-enactment footage. In the last scenes I filmed, I lip synced audio interviews I conducted with my dad in 2017, while being dressed as him as a youth, in current-day Belfast. There is a long tradition of verbatim performance in the UK, that I didn't know about when I started. I think this happens a lot; artists have an instinct to go towards a formal choice that is later contextualized or validated by culture at large.
Trouble (Mariah Garnett, 2019)
ET: What is your relationship to the archival BBC News clips that featured your father and, it seems, even presented him as a mythical figure of sorts (as certain people in the film, within the political institutions for example, remember him but haven’t seen him since he had disappeared from their life)? You bring an interesting perspective on using and misusing: Your father was misrepresented in the archival material you found, and consequently you are attempting the same with your reenactment. Re-performance may never achieve an original but the original in your case is already skewed. How can you continue this process? Is misrepresentation also a personal or political tool in other parts of the film? I am thinking for example about the “home movie”, or “travelogue” aspects of your film.
MG: The BBC's skewed portrait of my dad, and the impact it had on his life, has always been family lore. I knew he left because of how the BBC composed their special put him in danger, and it was edited in a way that basically changed what he had to say to fit their narrative. With my re-enactment I was trying to poke fun at the notion of journalistic integrity. When I originally showed that work as Other + Father (2016) I included wall text excerpted from my diary and a monitor with footage of my dad watching the news footage for the first time and pointing out it's factual inaccuracies. I was trying to present a form of historical memory versus historical record. The BBC footage functions as a "fact" in a "historical record" while my reenactment and the other supplemental materials (as well as the rest of the film Trouble) functions more as historical memory. My reenactment is a type of record that privileges subjective lived experiences over (or at least as much as) documents that are produced by institutions. Isn't "the original" always already skewed anyway?
ET: Multiple times in the film we learn that your father doesn’t necessarily want you to make the documentary, but at the same time, it’s something you have to do for yourself. In what way is the filmic process or product still a type of communication with your father, or an answer to his actions and attempts of communication (of leaving your life, of trying to write letters to you etc.)?
MG: I'd say that all of my films are a means of personal communication. In all of them I'm trying to set up a relationship between myself and a subject, and to put that on screen. Trouble probably is the most personal and maybe the most direct means of communication I’ve created so far. I wouldn't say that my dad didn't want me to make the film. We had many conversations about it. He was very generous with me and put a lot of faith in me and never tried to dictate what I did or asked me to change anything. He did seem hesitant, but that's kind of understandable, given his experience with BBC’s documentary and also not really knowing me and my agenda maybe. It's more that I probably would have said ‘yes’ too if the roles were reversed! I think that a part of him did want to tell his story and was happy about the attention, and that a lot of his reluctance came from not wanting to dredge up these memories and the feelings that accompanied them. It was probably a very traumatic time in his life, for reasons that I explain in the film and for others too. Growing up poor in Northern Ireland and coming of age there in the 1960s/70s was no joke, and he was in the epicenter of the war. I may have downplayed this aspect in the film - the level of violence and degree of occupation and resistance. I left it to the viewer to do their own research because there is a lot of material about that out in the world and I knew if I tried to talk too much about that, it would have consumed the film. At the same time I was trying to show the cumulative effect of war/identitarian conflict on an individual through a handful of examples from my dad's life.
ET: Did the film change your relationship? Does this kind of filmmaking touch on personal and familial transformations? It’s perhaps too personal a question, prompted by watching a personal film. I wonder if not all non-industrial filmmaking has the quality of being a form of communication with people we need to talk to, and bears an attempt at personal transformation(s).
MG: Yes, making the film did change our relationship for the better. The process brought us closer together, answered a lot of questions I needed answered and made space for us to finally have a "real" relationship based on actually being around each other and doing things together in real time like cooking meals, going for walks, cracking jokes, etc. I think I needed to clear a lot of these hanging questions out of the way for us to be able to embark on this type of relationship, and once I was able to do that, I realized that these mundane interactions were actually where and how you build intimacy with a family member. I tried to gesture at that in the film too.
ET: I am intrigued by how you dealt with the BBC footage and the violence it contains against your father and against you. I wonder whether the appropriation of the material has the power to push back against that misrepresentation. It reminds me of Irene Lusztig’s film Reconstruction (2001), in which she uses film footage from the late 1950s of a bank robbery that her grandmother in Romania was involved in. The stalinist government at the time created those images through reenactment, in order to use them as propaganda material against criminals. Lustzig then appropriated this material in return. I see in this a problem but also a chance for home videos to be a personalized alternative to the powers of representation that are out there. Home movies, albeit infused with codes and Clichés, offer a powerful counter-narrative to ‘official’ representations. I was thinking about this in regards to East German cinema. There is a wonderful webarchive of East German super 8mm home movies (https://www.open-memory-box.de/), and what you see there is absolutely unrepresented by the state-supported apparatus of documentary cinema, let alone by the puny stump of GDR narrative cinema. What is your relationship to home movies?
MG: Yes, you basically hit the nail on the head there. I was trying to reclaim the narrative and undermine the BBC’s through my own reenactment. I wanted to expose the falsehoods in the film, both practically (through the other material in the film, my dad's reactions) and in a more gestural or visceral way through the verbatim performance. That gesture constantly reminds the viewer of the artifice of the original documentary. I have a tenuous relationship to conventional documentary tropes, specifically to the idea that documentaries are containers for truth, rather than reflections of a filmmaker's subjectivity. This is a bit tricky in the age of “fake news”, as I do believe in truth and in the responsibility of journalists to report fairly and impartially. But I also know that fair and impartial reporting is an impossible ideal and that all news and documentary production has an agenda behind it. So in my own work I try to constantly remind the viewer that what they're watching is subjective, and hopefully there is a grain of truth in that subjectivity. I'm interested in lived-experience as a means of truth-telling or as its own form of historical record, and I suppose home movies are an archive of that in some ways. I don't really think about home movies in particular, though in a way my own films are just elaborate home movies that try to complicate the linear trajectory of official narratives.
Trouble (Mariah Garnett, 2019)