Courtney Stephens

RP: In what ways does archival footage allow you to speak to feminist issues in a way that non-archival footage cannot?

CS: Sometimes I use archival footage to highlight different types of knowledge. For example, in Labial Quintet, I’m just shifting through the internet, looking for the kinds of crazy stuff that reflect our bodies back to us through this public/private sphere. In Mixed Signals, I’m looking into a language archive. All of the phrases in the film are lifted from a maritime phrasebook that was used by sailors to communicate vessel to vessel. They would put up flags that represented a code and then the other vessel was able to decode its meaning, regardless of spoken language, using a glossary book. To me, it’s an attempt at a universal language but interestingly antiquated. So I think that, for me, it’s often archival video that we talk about in terms of archival material, but I’m also interested in repurposing language systems, knowledge systems, and nonfiction documents— all of which were created for alternate purposes. When working with these sorts of documents, I tend to try and wedge them into a female vernacular of some kind, reappropriating them in ways that the work’s original form did not intend for. These sailor phrases were created for a mode of work that would have never included women. Boat work, but also the idea of “exploration,” which we can of course think about critically,was an off limits territory for women. When you put these phrases of “discovery” and “mobility” into a female register—what happens to them? What I found is that they immediately register as discussions about sex and permeability! And consent. This is an example of using the archive to talk about its limitations, absent characters, and also to create new spheres or forms of language. It’s a sort of reclamation process.

RP: This sort of leads me to my next question: in Mixed Signals, as you briefly mentioned, you juxtapose archival footage of a woman having her motor skills tested with footage of a sunken ship— creating a striking parallel between these two physical structures. What inspired this juxtaposition?

CS: I think most women have an ongoing dialogue between their body and their minds that can be pretty complicated. The medical content was related to a traumatic diagnosis that I received. However, I also wanted to think about this immobilized object and dreams of escaping the body. Maybe I think of it as a thwarted travelogue. You know, you’re supposed to be exploring the romance of the sea but what we’re really doing is exploring cavities of the vessel and the traveler— instead of taking the journey. I had worked on other projects about traveling and mobility, so it was a topic I had thought a lot about and I think my initial interest in it has always been about physical limitations. For me, it was a pretty personal film.

RP: Another question I have for Mixed Signals is: how did you begin to organize your use of archival footage for it?

CS: I guess I threw a lot of stuff at the wall. I played around with stuff for months. Here was this boat footage (shot by my friend Jason Byrne), then I collected a lot of educational films about neurological disorders, others about boat repair, some on engines and electrical system repair, just lots of stuff. Clips from video games about boats. It was basically a free association process of: “okay, I’m thinking about these things because I’m interested in thinking of a boat as a vessel that can’t move.” And then I started asking myself: “what are all the places I could go with that?” I could think about paralysis of the boat, paralysis of persons, I could think of this boat as something in need of direct maintenance, or purely as a metaphor. I worked with lots of stuff and most of it isn’t there in the final film, some residues, but the real work was stripping stuff out. Collecting is easier! I also got interested in the more literal stuff of how maritime traffic works, so looking at maritime flags, flags of convenience, which then lead me to think about language and referents. I got turned on to a book of poetry by Hannah Weiner who had used this flag glossary to compose dialogues. It was through working with that original phrasebook that I began to organize the film into chapters. But it was also just a process of so much odd collaging. There’s this work to bring something into balance and then you’re too afraid to touch it. I still think I should have kept this one thing in but anyway. I’m probably a maximalist by nature, so it’s productive for me to work in a subtractive mode.

RP: Before watching your film Labial Quintet, I had no idea that labiaplasty was a thing. How did you first learn about this? Was it really how you state in the film?

CS: I remember I showed the film to my mom when I finished and she was so horrified, but the story is that I was in Los Angeles at a dinner with some women, and they were talking about someone’s young niece who had gotten a Brazilian wax. And when she saw her own genitalia, she was so horrified by what she saw that she started to cry. The people at the table laughed, and I said “I don’t know, I think that’s pretty common, women experiencing their sexual organs as falling short of some norm.” And every single woman at the table was like “yeah, me too.” It was kind of funny, also sad. After that, I met an aesthetician who had been waxing women for about twenty years or something, and so I told this story to her and she said, “Oh yeah, that’s really common. I wish they could see what I see.” And, what I thought she was going to say was: “women come in all shapes and sizes”— something like that. But, what she said was: “you realize doing this for years that there are only five basic types.” Years after this I was hosting an event on 1970s cunt art, and thought it might be interesting to film an interview with this woman. I kept writing emails to this place where she worked, but she was away and the screening was coming up. So, I thought: “Oh, I’ll just go figure out what they are myself. How hard can it be?” And that’s what lead me to make the film.

RP: Your use of the anecdote throughout the course of Labial Quintet provides a sharp but comforting contrast to the “cold” surgical information that could otherwise take over the film. Was this anecdotal approach meant to provide not just a sense of comfort or intimacy but maybe also a sense of the personal or the intersubjective? Another way of phrasing this is a sense of connection or community?

CP: Yeah, I did want to position it as a personal project, because I think to make attempt any kind of comprehensive survey on the subject would require engaging quite seriously with pornography, plastic surgery, and lots of looming issue around gender identity. I wanted to keep it limited to this cursory search. All of the scraps and "evidence" and research in the film is sourced from online forums (porn, Second Life, youtube surgical videos). My hope is that the casual tone of the voiceover registers as email vernacular (rather than a more formal, epistolary form). The scenario and emails tell more or less how it happened.

RP: I noticed that in both Mixed Signals as well as Labial Quintet you draw attention to the ways in which bodies move or are moved. You also seem to be interested in the ways bodies touch or are touched. Where does this interest come from? What compels you to incorporate these themes into your work?

CS: I'm definitely interested in bodies and being touched, and the utter strangeness of occupying a particular form - not only in terms of gender, but certainly also in gendered terms. I think the process of coming into alignment with one's physical form is something I'm interested in, and I don't see it as a given at all, in fact I may even distrust a seamlessness of body and spirit in people! And touch, well I suppose touch can be something that places us in our bodies, it can even force us back into them, and it can also send us dissociating from them. In my own experience I have struggled with unforeseen medical conditions, and at a young age, so I think that experience led me to see my own body as maybe provisional in a way. Experiencing illness young is a gift in that it gives you your body back and also release you a little from it.

RP: What inspired the title of your film Ida Western Exile?

CS: When I did research on Georgia O'Keeffe I read an interesting article about her less-famous sister, Ida, also a painter, very much in the shadow of Georgia. When I was conceiving of this character making the customer support calls, I originally envisioned the character to be a cipher for this sister. I approached the actress Paula Prentiss to see if she would be up for doing the calls and she suggested that her daughter Prentiss, a stage actress, would be great for it, so that is who ended up doing them. The film changed having a younger character, but the title has that original idea in it.

RP: It seems that the woman making all of the customer support inquiries in Ida Western Exile takes some “cues” from the lifestyle Georgia O’Keeffe presents at the beginning of the film. What do you think of O’Keeffe’s lifestyle and what about it attracts the woman making all of the customer service inquiries?

CS: When I visited Ghost Ranch, the area where O'Keeffe lived in her remote cabin (it was actually on the premises of a dude ranch, which later became a National Park, and is incidentally the setting of many Westerns) I enjoyed learning from the Park's historian that a large proportion of the visitors who make the pilgrimage to visit O'Keeffe's house out there are newly-divorced women. This moved me. It's interesting that Georgia isn't only a heroic figure as an artist, but as a persona who other women take strength from, I suppose. I wanted the feeling that the character we hear making these calls is deep in internet research about O'Keeffe's biography, and modeling her own fantasy future after some of these images. Of course, many of the images we see in the film of O'Keeffe's in exile were very much staged, photographed by Ansel Adams, but we get something out of the images even if we know they are performances. It's very show biz in a way. And then I think we are much more forgiving to self-performance from other eras.

RP: Lastly, how do you define the terms “experimental” and “feminist”? What do they mean to you? Do you identify with them? Why or why not?

CS: I definitely identify with feminism, with all of the conversations it has raised, struggled with, over time. I think of myself as a foul-weather feminist. Experimental is a nice word, in that it suggests the outcome is unknown, and allowed to take shape by its own nature. As far as experimental film - I'm not always sure that my work is in an that direct tradition, but I'm happy to be in that company.

Rachel Perez conducted this interview via Google Hangouts on Friday, November 12th. She is in her final year of her undergraduate career at the University of California, Davis. She is double majoring in English as well as Cinema & Digital Media and is looking forward to obtaining her degree in the Spring of 2019. Rachel thoroughly enjoyed viewing Stephens' work as well as having the opportunity to interview her. Rachel feels that she has a learned a great deal from this interview and wishes Stephens nothing but the best in her future endeavors!