Alison Folland

Fliszar: I saw that you started your filmmaking career as an actor in commercial films, was that your introduction to filmmaking?

Folland: Yeah.

Fliszar: How was that transition of moving into more of an avant garde/experimental space from there?

Folland: To me, they were actually pretty separate endeavors. Being an actor introduced me to the apparatus and some of the conventional workflow of film, and when I started working as an actor people were still using film, HD hadn’t come around yet. So I didn’t know anything about it when I started acting, it was baptism by fire, but I learned about the repetition and the rigidity and the way all the roles were sort of stratified. I learned just by being around it. As a kid I was really interested in visual art, I was a painter and I drew and that is what I dreamed about doing with my life, I didn’t dream about being an actor, being an actor kind of was this weird opportunity that presented itself to me.

Fliszar: I’m sure some actors would hate to hear that.

Folland: I can’t even talk to most actors because they kind of want to kill me. But yeah, it was something I fell into literally, and when I left New York City around 2010 and moved to Boston because my partner had a job here, I was desperately trying to stop. I wanted to distance myself from acting completely. I really wanted to stop acting but it was difficult to do in New York because everyone I knew was doing it and I still had an agent and I still had the set up. It was like sitting in a bar and not drinking. 

So moving to Boston was helpful just to get change of environment and I got a kind J-O-B as a paraprofessional working with kids with special needs in public schools. I saw it as an opportunity to get back to my childhood love of visual art, and I decided to take a night class at MassArt which was a 16 mm filmmaking class. I knew nothing about 16mm film, really it was kinda random. I think maybe the day was right or something, I don’t remember. But I took the class and I went to my parents house for dinner one night and I told them I was taking this class and my dad was like, “Oh, then you can use the bolex thats been sitting in our basement.” It was my grandfather’s and he died before I was born and it was in pristine condition, it hadn’t been opened since 1968. I just saw that as this kind of gift and directive that this was something that I needed to do, was small gage personal filmmaking. 

When I moved to Boston, I became good friends with my teacher at MassArt and his wife Tara and they would take me along to a lot of these small backyard screenings. There used to be more of them in Boston. Saul Levine was still at MassArt and he had this weekly series called MassArt film society, where he’d bring in a filmmaker every week and they would show their work and there was always really engaging conversation, and then we would all go to this bar down the street and continue to talk. It was a really stimulating environment, kind of like going to film schol for me. I learned a lot about the history of experimental avant garde film just through MassArt film society and other local screenings that I went to. For me it was exciting because it was a language that I was sort of familiar with but I could do something completely different, I could say something very personal. 

I had thought about trying to become a commercial filmmaker, but this idea of “whats your story” and telling some kind of story that was universal was the expectation, something that appeals to a lot of people. That felt like a big responsibility for me and not only that, but as an actor had been privy to the whole raising money aspect. It just felt like after twenty years of being an actor, theres no way where I’m going into a situation where I have to wait for someone else to give me the greenlight to make what I want to do. And I just said I want to be able to make whatever I want to make with whatever I have, so for me personal filmmaking was the answer for that. I liked the immediacy of that, I liked the community. I liked that you could be kind of transgressive, kind of offensive, even shocking. It just appealed to my aesthetics and the way I saw the world. 

Fliszar: That makes a lot of sense. And at least in the films that I saw, I feel like you veered more personal as you continued to make films, that each film became more and more personal, and I was wondering if that is more coincidental or if you think that’s something you’ve developed over time, of connecting more of your personal life to your practice?

Folland: That’s a really good observation and I agree. I think both, I think that it’s something that I gave myself more permission to do as I went along. Although I’m really trying not to be so personal, it’s very hard. My life became a lot smaller as I had children and then my husband became disabled and then a series of things happened that really limited my ability to engage with the outside world. So I just made films about what was in front of me, like my family and my kids. I’m hoping to change that but it helps me process things about my life, making films about my life helps me process what’s going on, so its definitely a tool in that way. 

Fliszar: I think that comes through very clearly. Does that also connect to using 16 mm? Because most your films are in 16 mm, and then your most recent incorporated some kind of animation video?

Folland: The whole thing was captured in 16 mm but I was doing a video game with my daughter. I asked her to teach me how to play one of these sandbox animal simulator games that she likes and we did a screen capture of the video. Then I shot the video on a bolex off of a computer monitor and slowed it down and did single frames and stuff that you can do with the bolex.

Fliszar: How was that process for you, of incorporating that with hand processed footage of your daughter?

Folland: I was interested in the tension between the digital and the analog and I think that there is this romanticism that I see a lot when people shoot photochemical film. I feel like they’re make believing that we dont live in a digital world and we do. So I like to do that, I like to push against this romanticism about the film because the reason that I use film is very personal, its because A) I have the camera, like I said, I was gifted this camera by this dead grandfather I never met-

Fliszar: Partially its fate.

Folland: It’s fate! And it’s also, I have a hard time making decisions. I get kinda paralyzed when there’s too many options and I find digital media presents so many options that I get bogged down. I love the parameters of working with film and it helps me focus, I have to take a deep breath and, you know, dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s because there’s only one shot.

Fliszar: It’s very methodical. 

Folland: It is. 

Fliszar: So, part of conducting this interview is for my feminist film class, and I was wondering what you think about the term feminism, and how has that changed over the course of your career?

Folland: That’s a really good question. You know, to be totally honest, I never engaged with feminist thought or theory academically at all, I didn’t take any classes in college. I wasn’t particularly interested in feminism growing up, maybe because I was of a generation where there were certain battles that had been fought and won and we were reaping the benefits of our parents’ generation and the struggles that they had. I definitely was marginally involved in like Riot Grrrl and certain movements that were an offshoot of feminism, but to me as a younger person to most feminist liberated thing was to just do whatever I wanted. 

I didn’t see gender that much until later, particularly until I became a mother and found myself in a very gendered situation in my house. Also around the time that I got into experimental film, I found that the filmmakers that I was the most inspired by were people who engaged with feminist discourse, people like Peggy Ahwesh, Jennifer Montgomery. Leslie Thornton is a huge influence, although I’m not sure how much she engages with feminism, but I discovered I was compelled to learn more about feminism through my interest in other filmmakers. 

Fliszar: I feel like we’ve talked about a lot of the different kinds of feminism and how the term feminism has become warped because of certain groups being very exclusionary, and how feminist filmmakers have been a part of going against that culture. I was wondering how you’ve interacted with this and if you would consider yourself as a feminist filmmaker.

Folland: A part of me is like, well of course I’m a feminist! But to be honest, I guess it depends on how it’s defined. Chick Strand is a huge influence on me, when I saw Soft Fiction, that film really changed my life. Chick Strand in Soft Fiction is referencing, whether its direct or indirect, she’s referencing feminist consciousness raising groups. The film is a bunch of women giving testimony to the camera about personal life experiences they range from really traumatic to realy ridiculous and humorous, and there’s something about the juxtaposition of the stories, it’s really radical and sort of shocking. But Chick Strand never identified as a feminist. 

I’m deeply interested and invested in women and women’s stories and obviously I make personal stories and my position as a woman is integral to that. But I don’t identify with the group. It’s exclusionary, it has been historically. I know there are self identified feminists who I could be like, yeah I’m right there with you, but I feel like I have a lot of positions and beliefs that might run contrary to some feminist discourse. I’m very into transgression I’m very into play as a tactic and feeling like I’m fitting into a particular discourse tends to damp that down. 

It doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in feminism, I am, and I want to engage with it more. I actually am engaging right now, I’m working on a project with another filmmaker also about or referencing consciousness raising groups from the seventies. It’s a story telling project interviewing female identified/assigned female at birth people telling stories from their own biography about times when they weren’t believed. My collaborator strongly identifies as feminist, so it’s an interesting experiment for me to be engaging in a more direct way with feminism, we’ll see how it goes. I hope it doesn’t sound too horrible, given your class. I mean of course I’m a feminist but…

Fliszar: I think it’s also that the idea of feminism has changed so much, and has divided into different groups. There are certain groups that consider themselves feminist that I wouldn’t want to be associated with at all, and there are certain groups that are doing really great work, so I think balancing what the label of feminism means is a big part of it. 

Folland: Yeah definitely. 

Fliszar: And while we’re in the definitions area, we’ve talked about this a lot in class, but what would you consider experimental/avant garde film and would you consider yourself an experimental/avant garde filmmaker?

Folland: I use that term in certain settings because its probably the quickest shorthand for certain people with a certain knowledge background to understand what kind of films I make. I prefer the term personal films, I make films with available resources that foreground my own subjectivity and life circumstances. So I’d say that, but I could be something else tomorrow too, that’s just what I do right now.