Brigid McCaffrey

Brigid McCaffrey is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose work is often rooted in the precarious landscape of the American West, as well as the individuals who traverse this landscape. She paints detailed portraits on 16mm film, documenting the movement and growth of these people and landscapes as they exist in states of constant flux. While McCaffrey doesn't set out with the intention of first and foremost creating "experimental" films, she does draw inspiration from an existing canon, as well as a supportive community of experimental filmmakers. McCaffrey received an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts and a BA in Photography and Film from Bard College, NY, and she was named a Guggenheim fellow in Film & Video in 2019.

Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Harvard Film Archive, the New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Chris Dunleavy

Was film always the goal for you? Like when along your path were you like: “Yes, that's what I'm gonna do, make film?”

Brigid McCaffrey

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and I did a lot of photography in high school. I had access to a darkroom and got into street photography. I then went to Bard College to study photography and would spend hours looking at photo books in the library. I started taking some film classes and seeing experimental work, documentary work, other cinema that I never imagined existed, watching hours of it with people in a dark theatre where you kind of lose yourself in the experience, and then you go out afterward, you talk about it, or you don't. I found myself being drawn to this experience of cinema much more so than the gallery exhibition context of photography.

Chris Dunleavy

Absolutely. I totally feel that whole immersion experience come through in your films, it feels like a portrait you're watching. Was your exposure to photography the inspiration for why you prefer mediums like 16 millimeter over digital?

Brigid McCaffrey

Yes, I loved the darkroom, analog processes, having a sense of limitations and surprise, and how emulsion translates layers of light. The limitations of working in film has taught me to slow down, think about the approach and work with the accidental. I'm more interested in looking over footage and thinking about how I can edit while shooting as opposed to amassing tons of footage and having to sit at a computer and process it all. I do work in digital a little bit too so I've gone back and forth but I definitely keep coming back to [celluloid] film.

Chris Dunleavy

I definitely have some questions about those (films shot on digital) when we get to the specific films. We've talked to other documentarians, and they’ll say that they end up with hours and hours of footage, but generally when you make films, you have an idea of what you want to shoot, and you don't end up with that kind of surplus?

Brigid McCaffrey

I don't necessarily have a complete idea at the beginning. I spend time in a place without shooting and then gradually, as I start to shoot, I see what interests me further and what the failings of my original ideas might be, so the footage instructs me to go in other directions.

Chris Dunleavy

When you think of terms like “experimental film”, or “feminist film”, what does that mean to you? And do you think it's an adequate description of your work? Or do you think it lacks in some areas?

Brigid McCaffrey

In terms of experimental film, I tend to think of myself as a moving image maker first. I'm interested in all different kinds of genres of filmmaking, in how to move between documentary and experimental forms, and play off of other types of genre, such as the Western. But I was also drawn to filmmaking through exposure to an array of experimental films, and that's definitely been a huge influence in how I've thought about image and sound and form. The community of artists making films and the people that appreciate this kind of cinema are such an important part of how the work lives in my mind and in the world.

Chris Dunleavy

I certainly can see the transcending genres through different films, the one that sticks out to me as “more experimental” would be Bad Mama, who cares. That one, the way that it’s structured and the different techniques definitely seem more experimental in the general sense. But then other films seem more in line with documentaries. But despite all that, when you step back you can still distinctly feel that all the films seem very intertwined with people in that they're very human stories, which is something that I think really drew them to me.The film I wanted to start with was Lay Down Tracks, since it focuses on five distinctly different people. What was it like getting so intimate with their lives and having to travel so much? Surely that must have been a giant challenge.

Brigid McCaffrey

That was the first film where I became interested in what an evolving portrait of someone could look like, and how to base the film around a relationship to a person along with the specific places and histories that accompany that person. We didn't actually end up traveling alongside them all that much. The trucker, for example, we just met her at two different truck stops, and it was basically two days of shooting with her. The carnie was my collaborator’s uncle, and he wasn't really working at carnivals anymore, so we just visited him at his home. We asked these itinerant people similar questions and focused on weaving their responses together. Travel came to be about the non-place of life on the road, though they each convey a sense of where they’re coming from .

Chris Dunleavy

I guess you could make the argument that the fact these people came to you through connections kinda plays into the whole weave of fate and how the world moves. Maybe not overt, but kind of dipping into some feminist concepts, there's a lot of like accepting of what the body is like, celebrating the human body. Was that a byproduct of talking to these people? Or are you actively trying to paint a picture that these people are happy how they are?

Brigid McCaffrey

In terms of thinking about feminist practices in my own filmmaking, it starts from the sense of the body and considering what other kinds of bodies move through spaces as compared to what is typically represented, especially when it comes to travel or landscape films. With Lay Down Tracks, we wanted to find a woman trucker and we had had a friend who had worked on a tugboats in New York and her stories always fascinated us, so we looked for a female tugboat worker and found Joy who was also part of a convent in New Orleans at the time. They both gave very candid and confident remarks about their bodies in relation to the worlds that they move through and that was really impressive to me.

Chris Dunleavy

you could totally see the candor even in just how they spoke. A lot of it was so matter of fact with no beating around the bush. Especially the sequences on the CB radio. That was a really interesting film, getting to experience what felt like five people's lives in such a short amount of time. In the same vein, Paradise Springs follows only one woman but again, it's she's very comfortable in her environment. How did you go about finding her? It seems like she was living out in the middle of the desert?

Brigid McCaffrey

That was a bit accidental. I had made AM/PM at this ghost town in the desert, and nearby was a place called the “Calico Early Man Site”, a contested archaeological site that I visited and became curious about. I tried to film with the caretaker/docent that worked there, a man who basically had every job you could have in the desert since he was 14. But filming with him didn’t pan out so well and he pointed me to his friend Ren who had been spending a lot of time there helping them with geology research while also living out of her vehicle nearby. We just kind of hit it off right away and spent a lot of time filming. I began to join her for periods of time on some of her desert travels and geologic research. I felt very fortunate to be guided into the desert through her experience and perception of that landscape. We formed a very close relationship, and the film was made over a long period of time, so it became important to show our relationship a bit, along with elements of her life situation and what she was contending with.

Chris Dunleavy

It's kind of symbolic in a way because in geology rocks are always clashing and fault lines are always rumbling. Was that symbolism intentional?

Brigid McCaffrey

Yeah, that was something that she was so amazingly capable of expressing verbally, her relationship and love for the rocks. She describes this fantasy of dying in the depths of the San Andreas Fault. It’s a romantic or cathartic translation of geology, but also keeps the scientific basis in perspective. Having that kind of personal identification with the geologic process and perception of the desert was fascinating to me.

Chris Dunleavy

When you were making Paradise Spring, it seemed a lot like she was taking you to places, so there wasn't a structure. You weren't necessarily planning out where the camera would go. Would you just set up the camera and she would start talking. It just seemed like you set up the camera and let her do her thing?

Brigid McCaffrey

Yes, that's basically how it started. While we would spend time together she would talk about other areas she had visited or was curious about. So gradually, I started to suggest we visit certain locations that she had mentioned and build some variants in the places you were experiencing in the desert that were, to me, very different from what you would see if you were just driving through on the highway.

Chris Dunleavy

It's a really beautiful landscape. I noticed this is one of the only films listed on your website that is shot on digital, was that a logistics decision? Or did you think it would maybe make the scenery come out better?

Brigid McCaffrey

I started making it when the DSLR cameras were getting a little more popular in use for filmmaking. I recognized that this camera has limitations: I can only shoot 10 minutes and movement looks terrible. So that gave me a way to translate some of the limitations I was using in film to digital. But I was also thinking about this hyper geologic awareness, and how the digital image can overwhelm with detail, that was what really connected it in terms of that being an aesthetic choice.

Chris Dunleavy

Her pointing out the metamorphic rock, maybe we would not be able to appreciate it as much if it was toned down, because you really get a sense of awe in the geological processes that went into making that specific rock. I liked the way the film ended too, in the dark and she's listening to the radio.

Brigid McCaffrey

Yeah, the radio kinda gives way to these other worlds, bringing in other senses of what her belief system or cosmology might include. They convey this other experience of place, these layers beyond the visually immediate, and the void that you can't necessarily render or you don’t want to try to render.

Chris Dunleavy

Again, it's another very intimate personal thing that we don't really get to see in other people unless we're on a certain level with them, you know?

Let’s move on to Castaic Lake, the fact that it was shot on film stock definitely pulls the film from feeling like a contemporary piece, despite the fact that it was shot between 2007-2009. It makes it feel like it's, um, like, almost one of those old 1970s vacation...

Brigid McCaffrey

...National Geographic,

Chris Dunleavy

Exactly! Did you intend to paint the lake in that type of light? As like this recreation spot from what feels like a bygone era?

Brigid McCaffrey

I was thinking about aspects of leisure and recreation and how these spaces were designed with a very specific idea of how the place would be used. There’s water, power, recreation, and so the design of the actual space really specifies that experience or inscribes it. That does reference an archive of imagery for me. I wasn't intentionally seeking to mimic that, but it emerged as I was shooting.

Chris Dunleavy

That's another film where you interact with a lot of people around the lake. I think the interaction that sticks out the most is when you're talking to the lifeguard, and then around all these images of people having fun, you interrupt that with this story about the lifeguard recounting a tale where he couldn't save somebody who drowned. For me, it felt like death interrupts anything. It's just the natural way of things. What inspired you to put that interview at that part of the film?

Brigid McCaffrey

I think it's symbolic and it's very real, especially with a dam and its construction and the destruction required to make that kind of architecture in nature. There were dwellings that were washed out in the flooding of the canyon. The physicality of a massive wall that holds this very deep, impossible watery space. The fact that it was a replacement of the San Francisquito dam which broke and flooded all the way out to Ventura, killing 600 people. The sense of physical precariousness of that space. That was a story the lifeguard shared with me as something he was proud of in his work, and as a way to understand his work. He describes it in such physical detail which somehow mirrored my impressions of that space.

Chris Dunleavy

Did you go into that interview knowing he was going to bring up that story? Or was that completely unprompted?

Brigid McCaffrey

It came up in an initial interview and I asked them to tell it again.

Chris Dunleavy

You were also with, was it the Water Department people? Or Fish and Game?

Brigid McCaffrey

Yes, the fish hatchery.

Chris Dunleavy

Yeah, it felt sorta like a balance to the scale of life following that story so centered on death. But during the production, was that a situation where you reached out to them in advance? Or did they just happen to release fish when you were when you were there filming?

Brigid McCaffrey

No, I definitely set that up in advance. I went to the hatchery and I learned about the whole process. It was a cycle I was interested in showing and the image of it is so hilarious.

Chris Dunleavy

All the times my dad and I went fishing up at that lake and never caught anything, it's almost mocking to see so many fish being released into the water at one time.

Brigid McCaffrey

Yeah, I hear there's really huge bass and a sort of unnatural food cycle.

Chris Dunleavy

I mean, that film really gave me a new respect for that lake. We had our spots we'd go to that we’d always fish, but seeing it through your lens, oh, man, I didn't even know some of these parts of the lake existed. I didn't know they dumped fish like that. It is such a cool thing to add context to a real life experience for me. So thank you for that.

Brigid McCaffrey

Well, I'm happy to hear that someone local to the area appreciates it.

Chris Dunleavy

We mentioned the film earlier, but I want to go back a couple paces. In Bad Mama, who cares there was a particular motif I kind of noticed when watching and it was like horizontal lines, like the shoots of bamboo, the shades and even the trains in the yard were very deliberately horizontal, I was wondering as to what that meant?

Brigid McCaffrey

Ren was then living in this town, Yermo, which is between the highway and one of the freight lines that runs across the desert, very close to Barstow where there's a big train depot. My family has worked in the business of trains and trucking for a few generations, so that's always been something that I've been curious about and questioned. I was reading different texts and thinking about Western expansionism and how that connects to the railroad in terms of the division of space and land ownership. Ren was living in housing that was originally built for railroad workers. I was thinking about that particular history and how it affected her position, trying to hold that up to this sensory geologic, tactile awareness of the things in her space, the fabrics and the plants and magnetism.

Each film that I make usually comes out of trying to shift away from a process in the previous film. I had made this digital piece with her that had these long soliloquies and static shots. For this film I really wanted to move away from narration and figure out how I could translate some of her stories and histories into other types of sound and image.

Chris Dunleavy

It's definitely a juxtaposition seeing Ren very static on digital and talking about the rocks and then seeing her with these visual effects, where her eyes are now up here on her head, or where they’re mirrored and move as if they were a fly’s eyes. Definitely a departure from the previous film you had her in. I have to ask, is the use of “bad mama” in the title inherently a negative descriptor? Because I mean, some of the things she has in her house seem pretty cool, like the magnetism bowl, and the apricots pit hung over the bottle like, I don't know, I wouldn't say she seems inherently bad.

Brigid McCaffrey

No, it's supposed to be sort of an open layered question, like what is bad and for who? We were having conversations about the earth and human presence and destruction of the earth and whether the earth cares about that or not. Like, what does it mean when we're gone, and the planet lives on? But at the same time we want to live with acts of care. And there were background, personal aspects of her life experience and questions of motherhood that were part of our conversations.

Chris Dunleavy

I also like how you connected the fault lines to her previously, the discussions of the active faults. Then in bad Mama, you have a computer screen of the fault lines listed out.

Brigid McCaffrey

I was amazed that these maps talk about fault lines as displacement, when you consider her life as living through a lot of displacement.

Chris Dunleavy

Yeah, it's like cosmic coincidence how those themes align. There was a part in the film that caught me by surprise, the part with the flashing lights because I was in my room and it was all dark and then suddenly violent lights.

Brigid McCaffrey

Haha, I need a strobe warning I guess.

Chris Dunleavy

Yeah, but it lends itself to the fault lines and the hostile environments. Going back to the thought, “does the earth care about our ravaging it,” maybe it does, and its response is the way it makes things inhospitable when we try too hard.

Brigid McCaffrey

This time is definitely showing us all the ways that nature moves beyond our control and understanding, even as much as we can try to alter things.

Chris Dunleavy

Control is actually a good segue for AM/PM, where Azad’s talking about his life and how he's not necessarily afraid of death, how that's out of his control. But little things are still completely scary to him. How did you come across the ghost town for AM/PM, you were saying that was where you were when you found out about Ren which led to Paradise Springs? What brought you to that specific location?

Brigid McCaffrey

I was camping in the desert by myself in the first few years that I lived in California. Then I saw this Joseph Losey film, The Prowler, in which the characters tumble down this slag heap in the Calico mine at the end. Something about that really stuck with me. I went there and I happened to meet Azad in town. He was working at a gas station there and I had a long conversation with him. I told him I was there to film the reenactors that worked in the ghost town, but then he showed up the next morning when I was shooting, and we walked around together. So then I came back and we made this recreation of the first meeting and had these conversations about how he got there and ideas about vigilante justice and him being sort of lost in this space.

Chris Dunleavy

I really like how you can get such an open book vibe from the people you film. They’re just such intimate conversations. I mean, you follow them around with the camera as they talk, and it feels so genuine. That's just such a cool effect that I think you're able to establish.

Brigid McCaffrey

I think it takes time and I try to have these interactions or experiences before shooting, because I am asking others to help inform me about an experience of a place or their way of moving through the world. Those are big, big themes, but I’m trying to intersect with a person's very specific individual experience of a place.

Chris Dunleavy

Would you say that your films are ethnographies in a way? I mean Wet Season was obviously an ethnography of that individual group, but maybe in a more general sense, would you say that all your other films are ethnographies on individual peoples or individual niches of life?

Brigid McCaffrey

I've definitely been influenced by thinking about approaches to ethnography and about ways to subvert or trouble some of its colonial legacies, and I also come with a desire to have the process of filmmaking affect me. I want to be in a certain place or become familiar with the way someone is living and filmmaking brings me closer to that, but there's an acknowledgement that my life is separate. I am separate and there are power dynamics inherent in filmmaking. So I try to let some of those things come through as well.

Chris Dunleavy

It reminds me a lot of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ethnography Reassemblage. I felt a lot of that in Wet Season. Some traditional methods of documentary filmmaking are very meddle-y with how they approach things, there’s a narrator explaining to you what you're seeing on screen. And I think that kind of makes a big misstep, because you can't really inform somebody of another person or another group of people's way of life that way. The best we can hope to do is just kind of show, and you take it in, and whatever you make from that is what it is. In Wet Season I saw a lot of that, because the long shots linger looking at a boat parked at the end of the river, or this prolonged shot of the villagers on the boat going down the river. It informs you on their way of life, but it doesn't attempt to explain it for you, I think that's kind of like the best way we can engage in ethnography, right?

Brigid McCaffrey

Yes, that structure was very much meant to make one aware of all the things that are outside of the frame, that are outside of duration, that are outside of some sense of immersion in a culture or community, along with the lack of translation. All of these structural things point to what we don't know.

Chris Dunleavy

Is that why throughout the film the parts that are translated are intentionally put over a black screen. And then once that black screen is removed, if anybody talks in the view of the camera, it's not translated and it's left in the native tongue?

Brigid McCaffrey

Exactly. And that raises the question of who is the film ultimately for. The film that you or I might see is very different from how the participants might see it.

Chris Dunleavy

We might be seeing it as informing us about a topic we didn’t know about, but they might see it more as a kind of archive. It was mentioned in the subtitles that the film would be like an archive for their practices and way of life at that particular moment in time where they can see certain things and look back and have a record of it.

Brigid McCaffrey

I find it helpful to think about what I’m making as a record or form of archive. Maybe that brings it back to ideas in photography, the indexical, slowly accumulating body of work, observations made at a specific place and time.

Chris Dunleavy

Absolutely. Well, at the moment, are you working on any other projects? I know COVID kind of ground things to a halt. But do you have anything on the back burner?

Brigid McCaffrey

I've got two films on the main burner. I've been through a lot of changes in my life over the past four or five years. I now have two small children, and I started making a film in Northern California right before they arrived that’s still ongoing. I've also been making a film that processes my experience of becoming a mother. I’m having to alter the way I work.

Chris Dunleavy

How is the pandemic kind of, has it changed how you go about your, your filmmaking process? Or is it mostly the same?

Brigid McCaffrey

The pandemic has been very in line with my experience of becoming a parent, which can already be very isolating, or it doesn't have to be isolating, but it's a very internalizing experience. But it has cut off experiences of community that I miss a lot. Becoming a parent made the approach to my work become more fragmentary, but in some ways, having these concentrations of time is also helpful. Limitations of time and different kinds of stakes.

Chris Dunleavy

It kind of motivates you in a weird way to get stuff done when you have long, prolonged periods of nothing.

Brigid McCaffrey

Yeah. And somehow, it lowers the bar at the same time. I'm productive.

Chris Dunleavy

It's hard to categorize your own films because you don't want to put them in a box. If it's my vision, you know, it still can be described in one way, like maybe this is an experimental film, and maybe this is a feminist film, but I don't want it to be like solely defined by that. I guess I don't want to put something in a box, because then it becomes isolated and cut off from certain ways it can be interpreted I guess. I hope that makes sense.

Brigid McCaffrey

Yeah, if you're thinking about who your audience is, and who you're making your films for, and are you making films that are meant to be specifically in conversation with a feminist dialogue or an experimental film history dialogue? Certainly I do see a lot of work that is deeply engaged in the aesthetics and conversation within these lineages. I'm interested in those conversations, but I don't think that's the place that I orient myself to in my work.

Chris Dunleavy

That's a good way to word it.

Well, thank you for taking the time to answer all these questions. It;s crazy how much of a chord I struck with your work all because I saw the title of one and went “hey, I live where that one was filmed.” Then suddenly, I'm like, “Whoa, this is really cool!”

Brigid McCaffrey

The benefit sometimes of giving a really straightforward name to your film.

Well, I'm glad you found your way to the work and I appreciate your attention to all of it. I know how much time it takes.

Chris Dunleavy

Thank you for making them, and thank you again, for taking the time to come out to this interview. I really appreciate it.

This interview was conducted over Zoom on February 16, 2021 from Davis, CA to Los Angeles, CA

About the Interviewer

At the time of upload, Chris Dunleavy is a second year film student studying at UC Davis. Chris has been an active actor in the film industry since 2015, and is typically based out of Los Angeles. However while studying, Chris is located in Davis, California, where he seeks to learn more about the technical aspects of filmmaking. Serving as a boom mic operator and general sound technician for his peers' projects, Chris is continuing on his journey to one day be an established member of the filmmaking industry, whether it be as an actor, or in production. Chris' IMDb page can be found here.