Cecilia Dougherty

Daniel Trowbridge: What drew you to filmmaking and video art and when did you first start to make films?

Cecilia Dougherty: Let's see, I was drawn to film when I was in my first year in college in the 70s; the class was Women and Film. One of our assignments was to make a film with theme about women. And so I worked with two other students and we made a film – I don't know where it is now – but it was actually really pretty good. It was about the women who cleaned the bathrooms in the dorm. I kind of forgot about filmmaking for a while. I was drawn to art anyway and became an artist.

[Side note- one of the reasons I decided to be an artist was that I would then be able to wear whatever I wanted - this is a response, I think, to the realities of women in the workplace where we were subjected to dress codes (dresses) and to being sexualized as a default mode for being female in the workplace, a situation I needed to get out of if I was going to have any measure of self-direction in my life.]

In the 80s I was in school at UC Berkeley as an art major and in my last semester I took a video and performance class. And it was like, “Ohhh!” I don't know, it was a great revelation. I had been a painting major, and I just spent all of my time painting, but I took this one video class. One assignment was to go to the museum at UC Berkeley (now the Berkeley Art Museum) to see a video installation by Doug Hall. This was a key moment for me, and the exhibit was very specific – Doug’s piece basically sealed the deal for me in terms of changing my focus from painting to video. It was like, this is it, this is what I want to do. And so I went to grad school with just one video to my name – the video I made in my one video class at Berkeley - and wanted to get into video and performance. I just took a deep dive into something I knew almost nothing about, but I really liked it. It was fun. Driving impulse: “This is really fun”.

How do you view feminism in film and in art at this moment? Would you consider yourself a feminist filmmaker?

Yeah. Let's just say in general, I think feminism is not really an ideology. I think feminism is a way of looking at society in terms of not “as a feminist,” but in terms of “is feminism operating here?” Or maybe, in other ways, “is misogyny operating here?” And so, I would say, I have always been a feminist. I can't remember when not, but as I said, it's more a way to keep checking in with yourself against what's going on around you. At the time I did operate on an ideological basis until I found out that ideologies don't work. I was young, trying to figure things out.

But then, there was a period in the 90s where perfectly feminist women were saying, “I'm not a feminist, I'm just doing what I want to do,” or whatever. I think people were distancing themselves from feminism because feminism was getting a bad rap. It was being seen as an ideology, and in some sense as a sort of a schtick – a performance. It was also being seen as confrontational and, since it had to do with sexuality, it was confrontational. What seemed like a fairly straightforward perspective became a very tricky topic. People moved away from it. Nobody wanted to be defined. Nobody wanted to be categorized. And so it became seen as a way to categorize or limit yourself.

I would always say “Well, I am a feminist, of course I am.” You know, it would be suicide to not be a feminist. The world's not a friendly place for women. When I really look at it, it's not something that I would be or not be. In other words, feminism is not a belief system. There's no belief system involved in the observation of women’s oppression. In all of my observations, then and now, I need to remain feminist and to be on my toes.

Many of your pieces seem to be artistic experimentation, some of them out of your own curiosity. And so, I'd like to ask, Do you consider yourself an experimental filmmaker? And if so, how does experimentation in your art compliment your feminism?

Let's see. Okay, well, yeah, so I'm an experimental artist, experimental filmmaker, and the work was always an experiment in something. And I don't mean, it's like an experiment. I mean, literally, a lot of my work is the result of specific experimentation.

For example, in the video Grapefruit (1989), part of the experiment was to direct people playing roles that were already very widely known in popular culture. If you didn't know who The Beatles and Yoko Ono were, you were really not the person for my video, since those were the subjects of the video. I like to give people in my work a complete option to make up a character. At the time, I wanted to see how these very well-known figures got absorbed and re-played by people who were actually not mainstream themselves. How are celebrities absorbed and then expressed by their audiences?

In directing the actors, I would first say to them, “this is what the scene is about” and then let them improvise action and dialogue to create that scene. I had a lot of control, however, because I was behind the camera. And so I could get a shot, or say, “Can you say that again and just be right here, in front of the camera.” I wanted to see how these major pop icons were interpreted by mostly queer artists. And I was satisfied with the experiment. People think of it as comedy, I hope, but it was really an experiment in directing and in seeing how pop culture is interpreted and performed by outsiders.

One of your experiments, I would say, is Claudia (1987) and in the description you mentioned it came from a desire to try and portray sex without eroticism and in a non pornographic context, getting rid of expressive camerawork. In your description, you said that the results were inconclusive. Is what you meant by “actual experiments”. And have you ever revisited this topic since?

Okay, well, I'll start with the first thing you were asking. When you get ahold of a video camera, you can have really quick results. Even in the olden days, when everything was analog and you had to rewind the tape and look at it, it was just immediately there (unlike film or painting). I think eroticism, sexuality and video were always linked. Video containing sex came out as pornography, because that was one of the main associations with the medium. Video was a very handy tool for that gigantic industry.

But I felt that there must be some other way to look at sex. I actually always wondered about the way women's sexuality is presented in pornography as well as in love stories and romantic fiction or on screen. I guess I wanted to see what it really is. I wondered “Is that possible to present sex differently – not as pornography or erotic fiction?” I was trying to figure out what it is that takes sex and creates either pornography or eroticism out of it. Maybe it's the camera. And so let's just set the camera up. (Of course, that's how pornography is created, ironically.) But let's get rid of having a special focus and eliminate the cameraperson and see if we can then create something that is sex without the expression of romance or without the expression of eroticism itself, which is what camera movement contributes to the situation.

And so, did the experiment work? Well, in a way it did, but I haven't continued that experiment. I tried it and it’s not for me. I realized that this isn’t exactly a very interesting way to make work about women’s sexuality. In editing, I wanted to put my participants – myself and my girlfriend- in a little bit of the context of the everyday. This was a little heavy handed, where I took shots from outside my apartment and put them in the video. This is so we have location shots. Yeah, no… I don't know if it worked or not. What can I tell you? It’s my piece and I have no idea whether or not it works. And I’m completely okay with that.

I'm curious about experimentations, practically, with new mediums. So like in the pieces, the In-Between Theories, or “The Apartment” (2015) you work with animation. So how do you begin to explore these new mediums? And what sort of learning curves do you experience with these new mediums?

Well, I often like to use media that's very accessible, that's not too hard for me to get a hold of or very expensive to work with. Yeah, I like to use what’s available, and find media formats that I don't have to go anywhere special to use. I don't have to access a video studio, I don't have to rent equipment. And also, the other side of that is: the more I was working in video, the more I felt like the equipment was really kind of cumbersome. Like the camera...!

This is another instance where I don't know if this experiment works or not, but I wondered if I could get rid of everything (the apparatus), and just get into software and coding and see how that works as artmaking? And so that is kind of where I'm at now. And while I still have a video installation planned in the back of my mind that I hope to do someday, right now I'm enjoying software and coding.

And the learning curve? Like the little Apartment piece. Pieces like that take forever to make, and they're really incredibly tedious, but they're really also fun. I used interior and exterior architecture design software – not top level software by any means. So I just had to build the walls and the doors, windows, floors, furniture - and stuff. And that software is very accessible – it’s a free download. The learning curve for that particular piece is not great but the process takes a lot of patience. You can figure it out pretty quickly and then go through it, look at it, and build your environment.

The structure of the interactive fiction piece “Time Before Memory” seems very different to most of your other artworks, and the topic it explores also seems rather unique among your works. How did “Time Before Memory” come to be and what drew you to this project?

The learning curve for Time Before Memory and for the two HTML/CSS essays was also not very steep. I've been doing web development for a long time and I already know HTML and CSS. A student of mine told me about Twine, which was the software I used for Time Before Memory. The student was supposed to write a treatment for a script in my screenwriting class but instead he finished his assignment in Twine as an interactive document. I thought “You're not doing it right, but this is very interesting.” He showed me what was behind it, which is HTML and explained how I can find it online. Easy for me. And free.

I wanted to use Twine and thought “I need a story.” So I set my story 40,000 years in the past, where I have Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons playing out a choice of story lines. Why this subject? The truth is, I have been researching human evolution for at least 20 years. It's like my hobby. I just love it. I'm always reading about it and I'm very interested in Paleolithic art. It's my favorite kind of art. And I realized I already have so much information in my head, and I love this topic, so I just made up a story based in years of research and a lot of fantasy. Since it is speculative fiction, I don't have to worry too much about scientific accuracy although some of it is accurate, based on current archeological findings. But there are some things that are not inaccurate in a sense because they're just total unknowns, and therefore I don't have to worry about them. I created a story out of a subject that I know really well, just for my personal entertainment and enjoyment.

I used photographs of ancient caves that I shot in Spain and France. It was so much fun. I went to Spain and France with a friend and we toured some of the caves and they were incredible. We walked all around the area taking pictures and so I was able to use those images - not of the art because you're not allowed to take pictures inside the caves- but all around outside, all around any of the area of the caves.

I'm now thinking of the second part to that story, also using Twine. But this time I'm thinking of drawing, making drawings rather than using photographs because I can’t travel right now. So that should be fun. Another experiment.

I have to ask a question about the GIF animations. I was curious. They're named In-Between Theories (2017-present), and they have like a wide range of topics, it seems like from, you know, you have imagery of like Edward Snowden, you have topics of human development, and undocumented immigration. So, I was sort of curious to know, what makes these visuals to you “in-between theories”? And what about this medium do you think lends itself to explore such a wide range of topics?

Well first, I was working with a friend, David Kalal with the idea that queer work is by default experimental. We wanted to do a project together and were talking and ended up with a project called In-Between Theories. In-Between Theories is basically me and David creating work and curating work about the space of experience that is not essentially open to theorizing. Our site, our project, In-Between Theories, started out with a series of GIF animations as a conversation between us. We curated work by other artists as well in terms of it being “in between theories.” The idea was to talk about experience and to show experience in ways that preceded interpretation. “In-between theories” is kind of a pun. The project is about theorizing the space of the in-between, interstitial space, and about what happens in between experience and theorizing the experience. It also refers to the idea of academia in stasis – academia at a point where it is in between theories. For me, it was the idea that theories come too late. Once we have a theory about something, about things that need attention now, it’s already too late. And so this project is about the nature of experience. And the nature of experience is not theory. The nature of experience is immediate.

The other part about the “in-between” thing is that I was very interested in “n-between spaces in terms of looking at space and place – the idea of interstitial space, the idea of how a space becomes a place. Well, humans inhabit a space, that's how. Or someone puts something there – a mark or a marker. It's all very physical, so In-Between Theories came to encompass things that defied explanation but were understood better in terms of realized action – physical action itself.

When we put In-Between Theories together, I was at a point where I wanted to have work that could only exist online, which is what that site is, because that’s the experiment I was doing then. I’m still doing it. I'm no longer setting the camera on a tripod. I’m seeing what happens if everything is in the online space. It's not like I think the online space is a great place, or the best space, it’s just that it is available. And it's like, you know, when I first started video, I thought “I'm going to enter into a field that's more obscure than painting.” And then …performance – I can't get more obscure than that. And now I'm doing this work that originates online and once again I feel it’s obscure, not on many people’s radar. It's almost a goal of mine!

Many of your films you describe as portraits. Films, such as Joe (2018), Kevin and Cedar (2004), and Laurie (1998), feature an artist showcasing or retelling their writings. What fascinates or interests you about this portrait format?

Yeah, those are portraits. I just know a lot of writers. And I just started out one day. This was ages ago, with Laurie Weeks, who was a good friend of mine. And I'm not sure what the initial... I don't remember. I went to her apartment with a camera and said, “Let's do this thing where we'll make a video today. I'll shoot it all in one day.” And we had been working on a longer piece. And I wanted to do some short, immediate things. We were working on Gone (2001). And it was taking, a year and more to make. And it was like “Let's do something that we just do today.”

And so I shot and then I edited very quickly. For all those tapes, I wanted to portray the writer somehow in the style of their writing. It's not to visualize what they're saying. Just to see if I can somehow interpret their writing visually. And so each one is an interpretation. And then I kept going. Well, then I did a piece about Leslie Singer and tried to do it in the style of her writing. And then I moved on Kevin and Cedar about Kevin Killian and Cedar Cyto. And then, Joe Westmoreland, Eileen Myles. And each one in the style of the writing, I like writers and I know a lot of writers and so I just really get into their work and decided I would try this out. They're simple.The only experiment there is to see if I can make something that's like their work.

Gay Tape: Butch and Femm (1985) opens with your reasons for making the film, most notably to represent and express sexual identity in a heteronormative culture. The film was released in 1985, and while a lot has changed for LGBTQ people poltically, what strikes me is the timelessness of the film. The discussions and topics of the film still seem applicable today. How much do you think has or hasn’t changed in the LGBTQ community?

Yeah, those are portraits. I know a lot of writers. And I just started out one day – this was ages ago – with Laurie Weeks, who was a good friend of mine. I'm not sure what the initial… I went to her apartment with a camera and said, “Let's do this thing where we'll make a video today. I'll shoot it all in one day.” At the time we had been working on a longer piece. And I wanted to do some short, immediate things. We were working on Gone (2001) and it was taking a year or more to make. And it was like “Let's do something that we just do in one day.”

And so I shot it and then edited it very quickly. For all those tapes about writers, I wanted to portray the writer somehow in the style of their writing. It's not about visualizing what they're saying – representing the content of the writing. It was simply to see if I can somehow interpret their writing style visually. And so each one is an interpretation of their writing style. After Laurie (1998), I kept going. I did a piece about Leslie Scalapino (Leslie, 1998) in the style of her writing. And then I moved on to a portrait of Eileen Myles (Eileen, 2000), and one of Kevin Killian and Cedar Sigo (Kevin and Cedar, 2004). The most recent portrait is of Joe Westmoreland (Joe, 2018). Each one is done in the style of their writing and each was shot in one session. I like writers and I know a lot of writers and so I really get into their work. These videos are relatively simple pieces. The experiment there is to see if I can make something in video that's like their work in writing.

Are your more recent films based in a similar curiosity that drove you to make Gay Tape: Butch and Femme?

“Curiosity” is a really good way to put it for that one. I think the work that follows that… I was always very interested in two things for example, popular culture, and then everyday life. And when you mix those two things you get like some really fun stuff. You get characters who are in not in either place – neither the realism of everyday life nor the fantasy or kitsch of pop culture. You get characters like the two Joes in Joe-Joe (1993). This piece is based on the Stephen Frears film Prick Up Your Ears (1987), for one thing. The other thing, Leslie Singer (co-creator) and I were reading a lot of Joe Orton at the time and we said, let's be Joe Orton and see what happens. This is where everyday life meets celebrity and popular imagination. And what can you do with that? You can do some really, actually strange and fun things with it. And so that is more the direction I went in for a few years. Something like Gone (2001), which was a re-imagining of the second episode of An American Family, came out of pretty much the same impetus.

To talk about more of your newer works, the photo essay Ride (2020) explores how a public space changes throughout the day. The piece also takes place in a particular moment of time: the counting of the 2020 election. Why did you choose to firmly place this piece into that moment of time, or perhaps what about that moment of time compelled you to make the piece?

I was already making Ride by the time the election happened. I had recently made the web-based piece Drift (2020) and I wanted to make another HTML photo essay because I liked the way it worked out. This work was made at a time when I wasn't taking public transportation because of the pandemic. I always took public transportation because I don't have a car and I like to people-watch. There's really excellent people-watching on public transit. Everyone is being themselves, like really a lot. So, I always took pictures on public transit. I took pictures of what people are wearing, too. Like this one guy who had so much knitwear on, it was incredible. He had a big shawl with fringe on it, a knitted shawl, and then he had some knitted stuff that fell down around his legs. I was on the subway and he was standing right there next to me, so I snapped a picture. I have a collection of images from public transit. I also like taking pictures of people from the back. Maybe I'm not so interested in the photographic portrait because we have many of those. But there is something in seeing a person from behind that is so telling and to me, very moving. And you're not really invading their space very much – the camera’s not in their face.

I live in Staten Island and my only way to get to the city is to take the ferry. By the time I started Ride, I already had a lot of photography of people on buses and subways, on the ferry, and I wanted to do something with those images about public transit during the pandemic. Ride came together when I realized that the politics of the election were so close to our daily realities – life or death for many people. People in transit came to symbolize the basic reality of the pandemic – immobility – and also of the election – the politicization of the virus. I understood this during the process of making the piece and I finished it just before the election results were announced.

So to wrap up the conversation, I'll ask: Are there any mediums or art forms that you have yet to explore that you've always been curious about that you want to explore? Or are there any that you want to revisit as well?

Yeah, I would like to learn VR and AR. I did like a couple of AR pieces that were really very crude and terrible. But there is a possibility there. Of course, no one cares about AR but it is fun. For example, you use your phone’s camera to access an AR object. The object is not in physical space but your phone geo-locates it so that you can see it by holding up your phone. You can take pictures of it, too. I did one project ages ago that was an AR gem for an art auction. This thing that didn't exist was auctioned and someone bought it. It became a very popular item. It was a lucky gem.

VR? I like the idea of creating the whole environment. But I think – speaking of learning curves – that it’s a pretty steep one. So I might get to that, but I don't think I'm going to get to it this year.

About Me

I (Daniel Trowbridge) live in the Bay Area and study film in the Cinema and Digital Media department of UC Davis. I wish to study film and develop my filmmaking and art in order to further social justice causes or subvert dominant forms of filmmaking.

This interview was conducted over Zoom from Davis to New York on February 6th, 2021.