Abigail Severance

Abigail Severance is an independent feminist filmmaker who teaches directing, visual design and critical seminars at CalArts School of Film/Video. She is based in California and raised in New York, New England, and Nova Scotia. Her films are concerned with family and community, politics and history, the hazards of memory, and the powerful act of witnessing. She works in many cinematic forms from fiction to essay to formal experimentation. Her work has screened widely in the U.S. and abroad, including Sundance, the Broad Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, Los Angeles Film Festival, REDCAT, Studio Museum of Harlem, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and 14 more media organization as well as galleries and festivals.

Katie Liu: I'm the interviewer, Katie. Thank you for participating the interview today. Could you please introduce yourself first.

Abigail Severance: My name's Abigail Severance, and I'm an independent filmmaker. I also am on faculty at CalArts.

Katie: My first question is because our class is a feminist media production class, do you consider yourself as a feminist filmmaker. What makes you become a feminist?

Abigail: Well that's a big question. You mean what made me become a feminist? Or what made me think of myself as a feminist filmmaker?

Katie: What made you think of yourself as a feminist filmmaker?

Abigail: In a sense, I don't know that I was ever not feminist, but my mom is a feminist and brought up my sister and me to be a feminist. That was just a sort of core value of my life. Growing up and becoming an adult, I think my sense of what feminism is can apply to filmmaking. I think all filmmakers bring themselves to their work, and each of our own identities is a filter that we make our work through. In addition to being feminist, I'm raised in New England and queer and a feminist. So all of those aspects of my worldview and my identity are things that affect the way that I make film.

I would say more concretely that the work I’ve made is feminist. It's a tough question because I’m trying to explain the word feminist or what feminist work is in general. I think some of my works try to focus on women's experience in a very simple way, but I’m also very interested in what cinema can do in the world socially and intellectually. In fact, it matters to me that in addition to focusing on women's experiences, cinema is also available as a model for egalitarian social justice and morality.

Katie: Thank you. The second question is about your film Eye Witness. How do you consider this film related to feminism? Because from my perspective as a viewer perspective I did feel the film related to feminism - especially the part in the naked performance there is cupping on her back with the electronic and fiction sound of the contact of the wires. So I interpreted those cups on her back as an antenna. And the woman has been metaphorized as an object that has bad contacts. Does that make sense to you?

Abigail: Oh! That's interesting! It's interesting because I don't make symbolic words in a way that is a picture. I say to my students a lot that an image is an image. But on the other hand, I'm very interested in metaphor. It is actually the metaphor of theatrical spectacle created by me and the performer who's doing the crawling. Our conversation in making that piece was about something that brings out toxins. When we look into the surface there is that kind of evidence on the body, the sort of trouble within the body.

Katie: Oh I'm sorry. In that parts when you said the cupping brings up toxins. What does that mean?

Abigail: Things that are poisonous. Like if you have an illness. The technical medical reason for using a cup is to bring blood to the surface. In doing that, the suction of the cups pulls the blood to the surface and cleans it. But you end up for a few days afterward with these bruises. And bruises are also evidence of trauma in the body. Like when you hit your skin on something, and you get a bruise. The bruise is one way to look at it. You can have the evidence of where it happened, and the cups are a little bit like that. They're actually pulling the blood up to the surface. So we were much more interested in - we wished to show the cups in an interesting way, and connect them metaphorically to the idea that there is something that needs to be let out - the way that medicine comes to pull it out. We had lots of students curious about the meaning of the cupping. It's interesting because the sound that you call the bad wire contact is not what it is, but it is what it sounds like. The image of the cup frame by frame makes her look like she's a little bit jumpy. So we just took a real-time image, and it's very micro edited. It follows that electrical sound that you're hearing, so, that was also related to the idea that this position that she's in is not really in a position of shame or humiliation here because she moves so gracefully. She has elegance. I don't know a lot of people that can move the way that she's moving, and she kind of move with her leg. So to me, I think that it's explicit. But I don't get - what was the word that you said about it? - something sort of negative?

Katie: I said she's like an object.

Abigail: Oh Right Yeah. That's not my intention. And then I wonder - do you think it's the sound that makes you think that she's the object - is it related to the movement or related to the sound?

Katie: It's actually the sound and the cup.

Abigail: Oh Interesting! Not the position?

Katie: No not the position. I actually didn't get what the position means.

Abigail: Right because she's on her knees. As she gets close to the camera you can see everything, and you can see her asshole and vagina. To me actually it's quite powerful. You know that her body is kind of moving sort of like a snake and backward. And so she takes the position that is a sexualized position of being degraded sometimes. Right? And yet she is doing something with it that is entirely different. And that section is called "evidence". That’s meant to be both the medicine cups working and bringing the evidence of the toxicity to the surface, but also sort of evidence of - It's the reason the show is called Eye Witness, it's the direct relationship between camera movement and the physical movement of the performer.

And if I make this conversation that we had throughout the whole process of witnessing, and it’s not just going one way, it's not just like the shooter is witnessing the dancer. There is a conversation happening physically and verbally and visually which have meaning that relates to the female body and strength. Even when it's bound. And I mean maybe actually a lot of people don't understand what the cups are.

Katie: Well I can, because it seems Chinese, the cup.

Abigail: Yeah yeah yeah are you Chinese?

Katie: Yeah I am Chinese.

Abigail: Yeah so you've seen them - you know what they are. Especially Asian people could understand what they are.

Katie: Yeah, well - You answered a lot of my questions that I planned to ask later. So the next question is: what does the body movement in that part mean? And what do the body movements in the previous part mean?

Abigail: Well I don't mean to be tricky, but my answer is probably - It means that it's the body moving. (Laugh) Particularly in my more nonfiction work I'm trying my best to not popple for people - But to be the witness, to be something experiential, the same way that if you watch a live dance performance you might be asking what it means, or you might just be looking at the space and architecture and figure - which for me is actually much more interesting than thinking about symbolism or character's story.

So the way that this was made, that maybe affects the way I answer this question, is that Julie and I just went for that first section - and she asked me if I would shoot a rehearsal -- a dress rehearsal on the evening's performance. And I said yes, but I don't do documentation. I'm a video maker, and if you don't care what I shoot, if I can just sort of following my instincts, I'd be happy to do it. And she said Yeah - that's fine, it doesn't have to be... Dancers want documentation. That's just not what I do. So I shot the rehearsal of the piece with her with the ropes around her head, and she was really intrigued by the way that I shot it, and she felt like there was more for us to investigate with the camera. So that piece is very much about witnessing, and I'm not talking about what I did with the shooting. The performance - though she'd done it many times - is very much about surrender and trust, and people were pulling the rope - pulling it and letting her go. So this whole idea is that you can trust somebody with something that could hurt you badly. And it has a sexual component to it - sort of an extremity of intimacy.

Anyway, she was really interested in how I shot the second piece. The black and white section is the two of us just going into a studio experimenting with no plan, and she would just work off of her movement as a warmup for her body. And that leg looping was actually when she was stretching, and we had music playing, and we just started, both of us, to kind of move around each other. And it's really interesting to me to see what develops when I'm also moving around that or responding to that. It's almost like I'm dancing with her too but I'm not going to show myself. So that in some ways the movement - there was no discussion or intention around it’s philosophical or larger meaning. But that sometimes when the audience sees something repeated, or a gesture that looks familiar, they will go on their own journey into memory or into a private philosophical thought. And that's what I'm interested in. It's how I can catch something so that the audience has enough ambiguity that most people can kind of get inside of it, and relate to it in in a very direct way individually. So there's not a universal meaning to it.

Katie: Thank you! Well, your answer is exactly the next question because this is the question I wrote: Is the performer Tolentino a dancer? How did you and the artist Tolentino know each other, and decide to cooperate with each other on this film? How did you and she communicate during the filmmaking process in order to understand each other? Because I can feel that she also has something she wants to deliver through the lens . So how do you guys balance that? How did you make about the balance and create a very good relationship with the performer?

Abigail: I think yeah you're right, I did answer some of that in the previous answer, and maybe I can add a little bit more. We were introduced by another filmmaker, and we were both a part of a broad community of queer artists of my generation, came of age in the 1990s during the activism that was happening around the AIDS crisis, and before they had treatments and medications for that. And so the activism in that community was huge. I mean we spent a whole weekend on the protest. I mean how we can get the Food and Drug Administration to approve medicines more quickly, and a lot of that was done. A lot of that organizing was done by people who were very skilled at visual communication. And there was lots of graphics and very aggressive activism going on.

It's really how the gay community got connected to the lesbian community. Before I think men and women who were queer really lived separate lives. But so many of the people who were taking care of the gay men who were dying were lesbians, and they were getting sick. And so for the first time in history, you had this alliance between men and women and queer, and actually that's where the word "queer" came out.

I feel like in some ways I would have met Julie one way or another - whether it was this person that person who actually introduced us because we're the same queer politicized generation. She does not consider herself a dancer, and she has a different word for it - I think you'd be more accurate to call her a movement artist or durational performance artist. I think we share a history culturally, and the conversation, the actual process between us was very dialogue driven, which is why we decided to include snippets of us talking to each other in the film. Because we each felt like the verbal conversation was important but not so interesting for the audience to track, but just to know that it was not that sort of magic that we had a lot to talk about.

I can never decide if that film is a documentary or documentation or something else. It's hard to put into a form or try to give it a category. But I can tell you that it involves a lot of music, a lot of time a lot of talking about bodies, and a lot of talking about form in a very concrete structural way in terms of like: is this movement large or small? Is this movement fast or slow? So a lot of the discussion was how do we stay away from something hyper performative. And then you feel the shift at the end, that last piece with the medicine. It's very performative, but you should feel that way, where the little section is very sort of sketchy and we're trying things. So in some ways, it is as much about process as it is about movement and the body, the cooperation.

Katie: Yes I understand that. And because in the last piece she was naked and undressed. I don't know if I say it right, but I'm trying to say it's very bold to me. Would It be considered bold here?

Abigail: Yeah I think so. (Laugh) That's an interesting question. Yeah, I think when I show it there is a little bit - you can feel a bit of uneasiness at the end when… I always think I can feel people wondering how close you can get with the camera. Because looking at the vagina and the female genitalia are like horrendously threatening to people. Right? (laugh) We've seen movies with penises sometimes, and we've seen movies where we can see women’s breast a lot, (and) we've seen both sexes’ asses. But unless you're talking about pornography, we don't see female genitalia. We don't see the vagina or the labia...This is not shown in a sexual way. It is shown because it does not need to be hidden. And we both felt like there was no need to cut earlier. There was no need to change her movement in order to have a more modest shot. I think that it might be different in a fictional title. It might be different in a film that has more than one body in it. Because then you are looking at how it worked, how everybody's relating to each other, and if there is some sort of objective identification going on.

I know there was no talk about like whether it'd be provocative and dramatic and bold - it was just what is there. I'm not worried about where it is on the screen, so I didn’t have to think about making it more modest. A lot of times my students include more straight forward nudity. But the genitalia would be more shocking maybe in China. It would be in a lot of other countries. It's shocking here. But it's an art movie, and so it also plays in places where there might be performances in the nude. I have this Thai student who's working on a film about the way that Thai women are stereotyped very sexualized and prostitutes. And in Bangkok, there are always shows you can go to where women can slip ping pong balls out of a vagina. And I can see how in another cultural context is not just shocking, and it might be associated somehow with sex for sale. I hadn't thought of it that way, and I don't know if that's true in China. But I'm just thinking of that comparison to my student. It's very dangerous for her to be sexual about anything because it so often is in misread - because she's Thai - of being oversexed. And so it's a really tricky world to navigate.

Katie: Thank you very much for sharing that! And then I'm also curious about what is Eye Witness means and why do you call it Eye witness?

Abigail: Yeah it's important that we're both witnesses. To me the witnessing is an even larger principle or action that's important to me in filmmaking because it reminds me so I don't need to construct much, I make a lot of the work that is both constructed and documentation.

The idea of the cinema itself is a form of witnessing, this moment just played whatever a specific moment of time we're talking about, and there's no question of a spectacle of cinema, the idea that a lot of films particularly narrative shows the mainstream Hollywood and mainstream to different cultural industry. I'm interested in the sense of observation and a sense of documentation, even when it's fiction. I think I'm trying to think of films as artifacts or evidence themselves: the whole idea of evidence and witnessing sort of carries over into this sort of weird legal term - that’s something. It's more these interests in pictures that are often overlooked which is another thing that makes my work more feminist. I am often dealing with queer female characters, or in this case, with Julie, a body that is mixed race and "aging" It's one of the things she was interested in the piece that the body is not as strong as it used to be.

Katie: Yeah. Other than that, I watched the other film Jenny Mi Amor”. What I understand is that Jenny is a fictional character, but through people's description or words, it kind of creates a portrait of Jenny in my head. Is that what you want the audience to have?

Abigail: Yeah good! Exactly. I mean the idea - it was an experiment to see if I could get people interested in a story where the central figure and maybe even the central event are not seen, and not seen fully . It's these other people's impressions. I'm really interested in bad memory or faulty memory. I just mean we're fully wishful thinking when we think of the past, and we often… I'm here with my family at Thanksgiving, and I was listening to my sister tell a story about my nephew who’s 20 now. Their two versions of the story were so different. She remembered the things that he did as always funny and cute, and he was like “you were so mad at me,” and that's all he remembered and how much trouble he got into.

There's this whole not really obviously conflicting accounts of Jenny, but just a little different. There are overlaps. The viewer can kind of construct something of her from these different people, and the viewer can also tell that Jenny is maybe a little shady or hard to pin down? (laugh).

Katie: I thought it's even more blurred than the Eye witness.

Abigail: More blurred, that's interesting, what do you mean? More open?

Katie: Yes, I actually do think that it's open. Because to me, it's more confusing to watch this film. Both of this two films gives me the feeling of struggle, and especially this one could have included my perspective of Jenny.

Abigail: You have a little bit of connection with Jenny. She doesn't look so great. I mean she's not attractive. I just mean that she doesn't have any energy. It's to link - to ask the audience to fill in the gaps. And I always imagined especially with fiction works - and that was all fiction, even the interview. And much of the interview was improvised dialogue by the actors. I always imagined with the fiction that there's a string in the theater, and the virtual screen to let each audience remember, so maybe a whole lots of string. The string is the thing that changes throughout the film, sometimes it's very tight, and it's pulling you closer to the screen, and other times it's loose, so you kind of sit back. To me the film watching experience is most interesting when that string is changing quite a bit, but then it's moved from being sort of like sitting up and being I'm drawing in, I'm really interested. And then I understand something, so I sit back a little bit and kind of relax, and then another question comes up, and I'm trying to figure out. I guess sometimes I fall back to the experience I'm trying to create for people. And to leave things out creates room for you, provokes room for you to investigate.

Katie: Yes. I watched Eye witness, Jenny Mi Amor, Siren, and Come nightfall. Do you consider these are experimental films?

Abigail: Well, "Come Nightfall" you wouldn't have seen the whole thing.

Katie: Oh Yeah! I think so. I watched a clip on Vimeo. I wouldn't be able to watch the whole film on the website. About 20 minutes.

Abigail: Yeah. I think it's the very ending. Oh - that word experimental. I'm not a huge fan of the word although I understand what it gets you. I mean it is something that we talk about a lot. So I avoid the term. That said, I think that I can understand why sometimes my films are labeled experimental because they don't take the dominant form .

Katie: Yes, exactly. The question I'm just going to ask is: what's your understanding or relationship to the term “experimental.”

Abigail: Yeah, I think that in some way people will use it nowadays to just mean works that they find difficult or confusing or work that doesn’t that fit in to either something doc or something familiar. I think a nonjudgmental approach is like, “this is unfamiliar to me, it must be experimental whereas a more judgmental or impatient one is "I don't understand this, so it's experimental.” I think of it more and as a particular style of storytelling. - it’s open ended. It's demanding a lot of the viewer. It also sort of embraces not knowing and embraces ambiguity. Because I don't think there are particularly experimental forms. I suppose Eye Witness [might be], but Jenny Mi Amor I mean if you look at Agnes Varda's Vagabonds, which I actually didn't see till after I made this film, it's actually very similar structurally. And actually Agnes Varda is a really amazing model for me with some great inspiration, and her work is so varied. She worked with different forms, and she is always interested in pushing cinema form to different places. From her first feature and I think in a lot of ways that's what I'm interested in too is the idea that this is a language, and this was a same way that music was so much more open minded about music having multiple forms. If you think jazz and pop and there's more traditional folk or roots music there's classical. And within, the composition can be reinterpreted in multiple ways through covers and addition of different instrumentation and arrangement.

So I'm interested in throwing out the word experimental because I think it's a ghetto. That makes us lose a lot of audiences. But I do want to acknowledge that it's not typical.

Katie: Yeah so I kind of mentioned this before, those films I felt a sense of struggles especially the sound or the unstable camera movement in Eye Witness and the mysterious feelings in Jenny Mi Amor. So do the other films like Siren - especially the way it looks. It's hard to describe it out loud, but would you tell me your feeling and your thoughts when you're making these films. Or when you start making the films.

Abigail: It's hard to keep up with my brain sometimes, because like I have six films right now in various states of being made, and some of them are short, and one is a really really complicated feature. It's been very hard to make.

So If one has ask me to distinguish. Like I've been working on this feature, kind of memoir essay film, for about five years and it's structurally very difficult to edit, to say everything I want to say without making it too dense. And In the process of working on that film, my brain get a little bit restless and want to make something quickly that's not going to be such a burden to make. And so there's all of these other projects. I would say that the inputs come from all different places. They May come from an image or something that theme of the world. Lately, as I've been making this feature I've been in this world of thinking a lot about history and thinking about the fictions of history and the mistakes of history. And so I tend to see that everywhere, and that generates other ideas. So maybe there is a thought or an opinion that I have in the world about something, and it kicks around for a long time until something specific collides with it - like an image. And I think 'oh that idea', that has been very abstract. Well that opinion or that feeling, now has a very concrete point of entry.

So for example actually I think it's a little bit easy to talk about "Jenny Mi Amor" because the spark for Jenni Mi Amor was that when I used to drive to work, the way that I drove on Pico Boulevard there was this old camping van, That was always parked in the same place every day and it had a sticker on the back that said "Jenny Mi Amor", and I would drive by it and I would always... It was sort of fun game to me to think "who's Jenny.?" Is Jenny the RV? like the camping van? Is Jenny the person who owns the truck? Is Jenny the mother of the person who owns the truck? Is Jenny the guy's grandmother? His dog? I don't know. Just that set of questions started to generate this idea - "oh what if you did try to know somebody only through fragments and figure out who they are". I was quite literally from like somebody weird sign on their car, and then the rest of it's invented around it. But, that film- and I know that it's not something that people get really directly - but it's in some ways that's very much about suicide. And it's about just the loss of a person whose disappearance is contingent to you and is painful to you. The suicide is staged metaphorically and very open ended.

I cannot remember I cannot tell you when this Jenny thing became a bird in my imagination. I don't know why she's a bird. Maybe she could be flying instead of falling off the cliff. I don't remember that part. So sometimes by the time that the film was finished I can't tell you the problem. They could have gone through all these different iterations. But I would say more often is there a general feeling that can linger for a long time and then it collides with something.

And there's usually something in the political air that has to do with it. For example, I made a short film on this summer that would probably drive you crazy because it's very open ended. It's about borders and it's about who does the labor of, with, you know with Trump talking about the wall the wall the wall, and I was like who is going to be build the wall and it's probably going to be Mexicans whether they're Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, or actual Mexican citizens, that's who we hired to do labor in Southern California. And how ironic that they will build their own wall to keep themselves out because that's what Trump want.What republicans want. So The film is about the people who are managing the border and so the border is there and it's present almost in every frame in a deeper sense, but they don't talk about it. It's more about what's happening between them.

Katie: So going to back to our topic: what do you think feminist means? What counts as equality for women? Because I've seen people who call themselves feminist but she seems to like is pursuing an absolutely equal for both men and women. But for me, I don't believe in absolute equal because we are born different. How do you think of that?

Abigail: Oh! You're asking me how I would define feminism?

Katie: Yeah absolutely I'm asking you how do you think a feminist (you as a feminist) should balance all these thoughts?

Abigail: Ok well. You were saying that you don't see feminism as equality.

Katie: Yeah I mean the absolute equality.

Abigail: It's so often misunderstood, and it makes me mad how many young women don't want to listen. I mean it's cliche, but there's that T-shirt that slogan that's like “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” But it's more than that. You know it's it's acknowledging feminism knowledge is a long history of both absence and trauma that women have experienced. They've been erased or they've been brutalized, and that's a broad term I don't mean it physically necessarily, but it could include that. And oppressed, that's an easiest word because it's very broad. So it acknowledges that history and tries to intervene and resist and change that history by claiming equality and space of joys of being among all people and not creating a hierarchy based on gender. So I do subscribe more to the that feminism is about equality. I don't see as something where it means that men are excluded or men are somehow incapable of change. In fact, I think that similar to A lot of the racism problems in the US need to be addressed by white people. We're the ones who carry the burden of the racist legacy even though we're not the victims of it. And I think similarly men have a lot of work to do to understand sexism and to reconcile it - fix it. On the other hand, I think it's very important that creates a lot of work for us to do - feminism does. All this absence, all of this being overlooked or silenced. We have a lot of work to do to change the way that we pay attention to women, the way that we record them, and how we value ourselves as well as the world. I think what's exciting about that is that it can happen in every direction. It can happen in storytelling, but it isn't hitting you over the head. The world is changing, and it can be subtle and it can be really loud. Everything in between - it does not have to be a smack in the face or an indictment. And if it scares people well, then they need to shape up and not be scared.

Katie: So, how do you connect feminism to your filmmaking career?

Abigail: It's pushing me back to where I started. It's who I am. It's necessary to a show my works in my field. And like I said in the beginning, too, that some makers have the option - which I don't think it's a requirement - but we have the option to think of our films as little actions in the world that help people think differently, experience differently, feel differently.

Katie: Well Thank you! That's all of my questions. Thank you very much for your time. You really gave me a lot of information today!

Abigail: Good! You're welcome! Say Hi to Julie.

Katie: Alright! Bye and Have a good day!