Interview with Ariel Dougherty

By JingYi Xiao (Estelle)

I read Ariel Dougherty's biography on the internet before I watched her work. Ariel Dougherty is a teacher, artist, and mentor of youth, women and her community She started making feminist films in the late 1960s. This experience made me want to interview her. In Ariel Dougherty's work, I see every single person's value. And through her blog, I knew that Ariel Dougherty is a person who loves to teach people, to help young people learn how to make films.This ensuing conversation was conducted by phone from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico to Davis on November 1st, 2018.

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Estelle: I have total of 12 questions for you. So, my first question- what is your first job?

Ariel: What was my first job? Really the first job I was very lucky.

I got hired by Young Filmaker Foundation in the fall of 1969.

Estelle: Oh, so your first job is...filmmaking?

Ariel: Teaching filmmaking.

Estelle: Oh, that's really cool.

Ariel: In college I was a volunteer, teaching in an after-school program in the community where a student who graduated a few years earlier had started a project. Several of us in college put together a practical course of teaching program that the college hadn't had had before. So, many of us had already been doing some kind of teaching in various environments.

Estelle: Are you teaching theory or filmmaking?

Ariel: It's production, teaching people to make their own films. They create the story, and do the production, finish it and show it.

Estelle: That's cool. I'm surprised that your first job is related to film.

Ariel: There was a lot of social unrest and upheavel in this period. Numerous of us worked at attempts to reach into different communities. There were the civil rights and Anti-war movements – but there were some experiments with some financing to address these conditions. So, this was also at the same time that Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky started with Office of Economic Opportunity money. This was in a very poor community in Appalachia. And Roger Larsen in New York City started a workshop with young filmmakers. There was a lot going on and I just happened to luck into this job with Young Filmmakers. I served as their ancillary teacher that went out into different communities and taught filmmaking. My very first job, I had a contract to go out to John Bowne, the Agricultural High School in New York City, where two English teachers there had gotten together and wanted to teach film to their students in the fall of 1969. The kids were juniors and seniors in high school here, And they had home movie equipment -- like a regular 8 camera or Super 8 cameras. So that is what I did. I helped work with their scripts and their ideas. And then they went out and shot their films on their own, and then came back a couple of weeks later and we looked at the rushes they did. And one of the things that was just totally startling to me - there was the movie projector that could show regular and Super 8 by putting a film reel on the top. You pressed the button, and you thread the leader on to the bottom spool to take up the film. But the girls were totally intimidated by even this simple technology. I had to work hard to get the girls to sit with the projector and thread their films through the machine.

Estelle: Yeah, I think that's very meaningful.

Ariel: Yeah. But, so I did the program in the fall and then in the spring. I had a hundred and eighty students through the course of the day.

Estelle: That's a lot.

Ariel: Not everyone made a film, but there were a couple of students who stuck with it. Then I went on and did other projects with Young Filmmakers one year. Then, I taught in an English as a Second Language program in Chinatown in a public primary school working with recently immigrated Chinese kids in third, fourth, and fifth grade.

Estelle: Oh cool.

Ariel: So, I was kind of there on a fairly regular basis every day working with small groups of students. I’d pluck them out of their class and they'd work on their films in small groups.

Estelle: OK. So, the next question is how you support yourself making art?

Ariel: That's a good question. That's always a challenge. One of the really important advantages of working with Young Filmmakers’ Foundation was when we did things in the evenings and on the weekends or on off time from teaching, we had access to all the equipment. All things considered, the biggest expense in filmmaking is always the time and equipment for editing. And we had access to that. We didn't have to pay for that.

Ariel: And actually, in fact, it's really interesting. So, I don't know whether you're familiar at all with Young Filmmakers’ Foundation, but their initial project was running Film Club, a community workshop in a storefront on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan]. We were working with street kids essentially, Around the same time that we incorporated Women Make Movies in 1972, Young Filmmakers also started to make a shift, and they set up something called the Media Equipment Resource Center otherwise known as MERC. Which gave low-cost access to all the same equipment that we had access to as teachers at Young Filmmakers.

Estelle: I think it is very lucky that you guys have the access and were able to do your projects.

Ariel: Right. We also learned something about patience and the freshness of the ideas that the kids used in their movies. It was very stimulating to us. We were doing quite a different kind of filmmaking than a lot of the other independent filmmakers of the period. Anyway, being able to afford the film and its processing came directly from our pocket. That was a challenge. One of the ways in which we raised money, but it wasn't always wildly successful, was offering shares in the film as a for-profit kind of thing. If the film was going to cost 5000 dollars, we sold shares of 50 dollars or 500 dollars or whatever. So that people were investing in ownership in the film. The reality was that nobody ever saw their money back. I mean there was never any profit. There was never enough money that came back in. So, it was really, in effect, a kind of a donation. But that was one of the ways in which we went about trying to finance our films.

Estelle: So, I know that you made many feminist movies. So, what does feminism mean to you?

Ariel: I think in terms of film, that women are the center of the story. That the film reflects their hopes and wishes or problems and dilemmas. So that an accumulation of these stories over a period of 50 years one should sees a reflection of women's visions of society. But the reality is that has not happened. When it comes to fictional work, there still is not good access for funding for women's fiction.

Women-centered stories still have a harder time getting funding, even in the independent community. There are lots of resources for documentaries, but not for fiction. And so, in my view, just the fact that we haven't been able to see the accumulation of women's viewpoint and our different orientation in society, that's also why we're in this political larger pickle today with some very misogynist politicians. Multi-cultural viewpoints still have not emerged in the media world. It's there in a small component, but it's not large enough.

Ariel: There is a lot of excitement when a filmmaker's film goes all across the country. I look at where 'all across' the country is - and it's in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago and New York and Boston and Atlanta. But it's not in Omaha, Nebraska or El Paso, Texas or other rural states of the country. So that there's a delusion about the actual level of success. The problem is that these different viewpoints are not reaching about 75 percent of the public.

One of the things that we stressed within Women Makes Movies was that the filmmaker had to also be involved in the presentation of their work. So that they showed their films in the community and got feedback about what people thought. We tried to provide on some occasions the opportunity to show work in other communities and internationally as well.

Estelle: Is that also the reason that you to decided to start Women Make Movies?

Ariel: Yeah, in 1969 when I started to work with Young Filmmakers’ Foundation, Sheila Paige also worked there. She ran the youth project in the storefront downtown. We got together. We went to, what was still going on in New York, a weekly meeting of women active in the women's movement. Every Sunday evening women came together to share what they were doing throughout the city.

So, we went to one of those meetings and said we're going to start a film production arm of the women's movement, and asked whether anyone wanted to join us. That’s how Dolores Bargowski joined us in the project. The first project we decided to work on was about mothers and daughters. And we shot the film, and one of the sequences that Dolores directed had a lot of sound problems because of where we shot it. We edited the film, not in Young Filmmaker’s uptown facilities, but at Film Club downtown, so we could only edit at night.

A year of back and forth we finally came up with the name Woman Make Movies. I distinctly remember Sheila sitting upside down in an armchair. That’s when we came up with the name that reflected our vision. Just after shooting the Women's Happy Time Commune, in 1970, we formed the partnership between the three of us. Sheila finished Women’s Happy Time Commune and released it after we incorporated Women Make Movies and started the workshop. Earlier we had attempted the Women’s Silver Screen Roadshow, a project to show women's films around the country in a caravan. Great project in my opinion, but nobody wanted to fund it.

So, Sheila and I decided to put our teaching skills together by teaching women in community-based settings the same way we had been teaching kids. And that's really the genesis of incorporating Women Make Movies as a not for profit educational organization and establishing a community-based workshop.

Distributors at that time that we showed Mother America or the Women’s Happy Time Commune to kept telling us that women are not an audience. There was a complete lack of consciousness about women.The irony is that there are little steps forward, made by women, but not all women. Back then, we really had to build the whole institutional process.

For two reasons, we established distribution as we incorporated of the organization. One is that if women were an audience, we had to set to prove that women were an audience. And two, we knew at that time funding sources like New York State Council on the Arts were very favorable to what we and many other women were doing. Yet, that might not always be the case. So, we needed to have some kind of source of revenue, an earned income that wasn’t beholden to anybody else. That was really important. And so those were sort of the motivating factors. I don’t know in 2018, but in 2012, 90% of Women Make Movies’ s budget came from distribution. I mean that's huge! In my opinion, Women Make Movies is certainly amongst the most self-sustaining organization to have come out of the Second Wave.

Estelle: I think that's really great.And what does the term experimental mean to you?

Ariel: Oh, That's such a great question. I was invited to a film festival a few years ago in New Mexico in Albuquerque called ‘Experiments in Cinema’. And I got to show a lot of my work, and some workshop films. I have never really thought about the work per se as being experimental. But I had, back then, considered the early days of Women Make Movies projects as experiments that we only achieved success to a certain plateau. The experiment was we would teach women film script skills, and they would make their own films, and maybe some would be interested to continue. The continuing project became Healthcaring, and that film was the second level experiment incorporating the energy and perspective that community women could bring to a more educational topical subject. It would have different effects on audiences in comparison to so-called expert filmmakers.

Going back to experiment: I think that’s real important. I think to understand the actual work we were doing more in the experimental nature of filmmaking has for me been good, because just recently there has been huge number of 1970s women’s film festival going on, but none of the Women Make Movies early films were in any of them.There are two things, I think: one is that the work is not readily available at this point, which Sheila and I are working hard to solve. The other thing was that the work was not documentary, but fictional storytelling of personal stories. In my opinion, they have much more ramification than some long-drawn out documentary. When audiences spend an hour of a half viewing a film, very little time is left for discussing its issues. The audience is ready to go home, and not discuss it. So, the short fictional films from Women Make Movies were ripe and very provocative for audience discussion.

Estelle: So, my next question is I watched your film Sweet Bananas, and I think the title is very interesting. What does that mean and why did you choose this word as your film title?

Ariel: It's doesn't really have much significance except that I felt it was a term of endearment. I mean, “bananas” was kind of a term in that time period that I just used quite a bit, like “tough bananas”. Instead of staying negative cuss words. Then there's that funny little scene where the dog is eating the banana.

Estelle: That is awesome. And what inspired you to make the film Sweet Bananas?

Ariel: The core three women that I selected for the interviews at the beginning of the film were people that I knew were from very different circumstances in my life. I thought bringing them together was an interesting idea. As E. Ann Kaplan says, it's sort of a clash of classes and different backgrounds of people who can, even in odd circumstances, get along.

Looking back on that film, I think one really interesting part of the film is the level of cultural nuance that comes out in people's costumes and the dresses that people were wearing. That’s how people dress back then. And I think that's one of the real beauties about the film, is that it's authentic to those women in that period. And this result is now kind of an interesting cultural anthropological study of women back then.

Estelle: Yes, I feel like in this film, the three women have different backgrounds, but they all get along well. So, I just feel that was really powerful.

Ariel: I think so too, I create sort of a slight semblance of structure for how these people will interact but they really say their own words and put on their own costumes. The women take on a more internalized self where they can project that out, it's a combination of your fantasy of self actualizing your ultra self or the other self that you would like to be.

Estelle: Well, I saw that you recorded many protest films - like women's protest events. So, what is the most memorable thing or episode during the protests?

Ariel: So, Florence Kennedy is very important in the women’s movement, and she is the main organizer of that event – a Yellow Media Protest. So much of women's action in the women's movement just wasn't being documented. So I went out with my Bolex and followed the march.

Estelle: As a student just starting to learn filmmaking, I am surprised when I watch your film, how do you deal with your audio technology? How do you record the sounds? Would you mind sharing some tips for making high-quality audio?

Ariel: Film is a visual medium. And visual perception is human's most heightened sense. So telling the story visually, first, is critical. For our sync sound films we used Nagras and good mics. For the workshop films shot with a Bolex without sound, soundtracks were built up in effects during the editing. Today with many digital cameras you can not rely solely on the sound recording mechanisms in the camera. Good well placed microphones are critical. But you can not center the work only around dialogue or sound. The picture is central.

Estelle: So, what is the hardest thing for you when you just started feminist media production?

Ariel: Well, the problem would still go back to the money. Having an idea, in my opinion, is not necessarily about the actual film. Behind the concept of Women Make Movies was the central idea of all women crews, and that women's stories will be different than men’s stories. All of those things seem to be obvious. But I have to confess they're not necessarily obvious to everybody. A few years ago there was like a rush of different women who've been working for a while in film All of a sudden they got the idea to have an all woman crew. That was the whole point of what we did back in 1969. The problem is that history is forgotten. If we are just going to continue and reinvent the wheel, we are not going to make advances.

So, what is hard is the constant problem of getting the money. And maybe even more difficult - which is related to the money - you have to have people to have the perception that this is necessary, and therefore it should be funded.

So, the other part what is significant is policy. In New Mexico we have an incentive program for Hollywood films to come here and be produced. Well, I think the law in the state should be written that 50 percent of the projects should be women directed. So, until we get to the point where we make those demands and create that policy we're never going to see any change. There were more women in directing roles 20 years ago than today, what happened?

So tell me a little bit. Like how you know about me. I just am a little curious.

Estelle: Our professor made the database where I saw that your status was listed as “willing to be interviewed.” And I just felt very excited about it; I can learn many things. So, I did some research about you, I feel that you're making films for many years. So, you must be an awesome artist. Because you have many experiences and I can learn from that.

Ariel: I really appreciate it.

Ariel Dougherty's website: https://www.arieldougherty.com/