Irene Lusztig
an interview by Mowen Guo
Portrait of Irene Lusztig
Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker engaged in feminist and experimental film for many years. Her works are usually related to the history of feminism and archival research. She was born in England, grew up in Boston and has lived in many countries such as Romania, France and China. She graduated from Harvard and completed her BA in filmmaking and Chinese studies and she received her MFA in film and video at Bard College. Her first major work Reconstruction (2001) won the best documentary at the New England Film Festival and screened in many other venues in all over the world such as MoMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, etc. Now, she is a professor of film production at UC Santa Cruz. This is an interview I did with Professor Lusztig to discuss her works, feminism, film making and other relevant topics.
------
MG= Mowen Guo IL= Irene Lusztig
MG: The first question I want to ask: How you define the terms “experimental” and “feminist”? what do these terms mean to you?
IL: So, I think I identified as an experimental filmmaker (or experimental documentary maker) before I necessarily would have used the word feminist to talk about my work. But nowadays I would definitely use both words to describe my work!
When I use the word experimental, among other things I think literally about making creative work as a space where I am experimenting–not unlike how a scientist works. I start with questions–sometimes a lot of questions–that may or may not feel related, that feel complicated, and that I am trying to think through. And then I think of some processes, forms, tests, or trials that I think might help me think about these questions in complicated ways
So, some of my thinking about experimentation maybe has to do with not having a fixed idea about the form or content of a project until I'm finished making it. I'm a big believer in process–I learn through trying things and throwing things away and trying more things–that's what keeps me engaged as a maker. I don't think I would enjoy making work that is scripted in advance. And that process of experimentation keeps my work open to lots of different tools, forms, and methods. So, I do think of my work as experimental.
MG: You are right, sometimes when I make a film, the ideas just come out during the period of production.
IL: In terms of feminist film, I think I've always been drawn to making work about women's voices, bodies, and stories, and–as well–I've always been interested in looking at big political and historical questions on an intimate and personal scale (an approach I would now call feminist historiography–I probably didn't have that vocabulary when I first started making work).
Now I completely embrace a feminist filmmaker identity–in my filmmaking life and in my teaching / mentoring life. Helping students, especially students who represent kinds of voices that might not have a lot of visibility or space to be heard in the film industry right now–feels like a big part of being a feminist filmmaker for me. And I have continued to make work about women, feminist histories, histories of women's bodies across most of my work.
MG: That is great to help students to make their voice matter, and give them knowledge about feminism. Can you talk a little bit more about how you arrived at the term” feminist historiography”? Because you said you didn't have this vocabulary when you started.
IL: I guess it's a kind of academic word to describe something I've been doing for a long time. My first film after I finished college was about my grandmother. I wanted to make a film portrait of this woman I hadn't really had a chance to get to know, but at the same time I also wanted to think about really big questions about communist and post-communist histories, the utopian impulses of my grandmother's generation in Romania, questions of state control and propaganda, historical images and archives... I think it felt very natural to me to think about both these very personal things (my grandmother, my mom's relationship with her mom) and these very big questions at the same time.
I think looking at history with a kind of intimacy, thinking about the personal and political at the same time–these approaches to thinking about history and archives feel specifically feminist to me. And also, the idea of finding forgotten, buried, or neglected stories from history–especially histories of women that might have been forgotten–is a kind of feminist approach to telling stories about history.
MG: Sure, I think the historical background and the environment of a specific age creates the people of a generation, like how they act, the way they think, etc. There have been many histories about women that need to be researched. I think through historical research, we can get clearer about our position nowadays.
IL: Yes, I think history is never fixed or static. It's a conversation between the past and the present that is always changing / looking different based on where you are in the present.
MG: Yes, of course! I watched your other works Motherhood Archives, Maternity Test and Yours in Sisterhood. So, how do think your recent works relate to your first major film Reconstruction?
IL: The Motherhood Archives definitely relates to Reconstruction in terms of my work with archives and my interest in bringing forgotten histories back into view.
I discovered my interest in archives by accident while I was making Reconstruction–I knew that a feature length propaganda film starring my grandmother had been made by the Romanian government and I got really obsessed with finding it–and through that process I learned that my favorite thing to do as a filmmaker is to spend time in archives.
A lot of my work uses archival materials (including my current project-in-progress, Yours in Sisterhood). Spending time exploring materials in an archive has become a natural way to think about many different things for me. So, when I got pregnant, one of my first impulses was to find out more about histories of pregnancy, labor, and maternal bodies by investigating what kind of archival images were floating around in the world–either abandoned on eBay or buried in archives and libraries. That's a way of thinking about history that I definitely learned through the process of making Reconstruction. Now I often begin a new project by trying to find an archival collection that can be a starting point.
Reconstruction (2001) / Irene Lusztig
MG: That is truly exciting to find our roots. When I watched Reconstruction I was thinking about how I should go discover my family history too. I only know a little history about my grandparents and their stories in that age of China.
IL: Yes, there are lots of interesting (and not talked about) histories in China! I was a Chinese double major in college... maybe you figured that out on my website. I lived in China in '94-'95. Making my only project so far about men!
Maternity Test was kind of an outtake from Motherhood Archives. Maybe that's a good example of what I meant earlier about making work through experiments, trying things and throwing them away. The actresses reading in Maternity Test was an experiment I wanted to try out for Motherhood Archives–I thought it might be interesting for that film to include something about contemporary childbirth experiences and how they are mediated by anonymous message boards online. So, I did that shoot with a bunch of women reading a single text composited from mothering.com message board stories. I liked it, but it didn't feel like it had a place in The Motherhood Archives, so I set it aside. Then later I had the idea to cut it as its own short piece.
But also, that short video is one of my early experiments with using a teleprompter setup where people can read a text in real time while looking at the camera. So that experiment–which at first seemed like a failed test and didn't find a place in Motherhood Archives–also became a really important step in developing the method I've been using in Yours in Sisterhood.
MG: Yeah, I see. About China, Can I ask you to talk a little bit about your very first film (I think?) For Beijing with Love and Squalor. Because I come from Beijing but I don't know that much about early underground rock’n roll music in Beijing.
IL: I can send it to you if you'd like! It's an old film... my student senior thesis... so not a film I show very much anymore!
I spent a year living in China, first in Hebei for six months, then in Beijing. I had wanted to go to China since 1989, when I was a high school freshman and followed the Tiananmen Square events
MG: Sure, thank you! I will watch it later and that is too cool to see Beijing from your perspective.
IL: The film I made was really a portrait of my friends (who for some reason were all men!). They were artists and musicians trying to create space for alternative culture and lifestyles in Beijing. At the time, they were doing something pretty unusual. I was interested in the idea that the 90s was this moment after Tiananmen Square (so no one was really comfortable speaking directly about politics) and before the internet had become common. My friends there were very hungry to learn about Western music and culture but had very little access before the internet. They had pirated cassette tapes, foreign magazines passed from friend to friend. Actually, a lot of that moment reminded me of my mom's stories about being a college student in Romania. In a lot of ways going to China for me was a way of accessing certain kinds of cultural spaces that had been part of my parents' experiences in Eastern Europe too. Of course, China is very different from Eastern Europe... but some things were not so different
That's a funny project to think about in the context of feminist filmmaking. I spent a lot of time in China as the only woman in very masculine cultural and social spaces.
MG: Ok, it is really interesting to hear you talking about that, but I think we can come back to the Motherhood Archives. I really like music and I write rap songs; now I'm trying to make music for films. So, for the film Motherhood Archives, I noticed you used music to control the emotions and atmosphere of this film: like the background music created a sci-fi and thriller type of feeling. Why did you choose music and sounds like that?
IL: Yes, sound is a very important part of that film!
That film and all the sound came out of a very long and involved collaboration with Maile Colbert, who is a sound artist. Usually filmmakers think about sound design / composed music close to the end of the film, when the film is almost picture locked. I knew I wanted sound to be a very big part of that project, so I invited Maile to work with me very early in the project. We probably spent 2-3 years working together, and her sounds were part of the project at a very early point. Sound does so much work in that film.
We talked a lot about science fiction. I think science fiction can be a space that negotiates our anxieties about technology and progress–which was definitely one of the big ideas that gets unpacked in the film. But also, science fiction can create a kind of distance, a way of looking at something that feels ordinary in a new or heightened way. That kind of viewing space felt very important. I think people are often very dismissive about childbirth or the project of thinking about childbirth in a critical, historical, or intellectual framework. I think the sound helps defamiliarize the looking that happens in the film, which maybe makes viewers more open or able to enter into an unfamiliar space of thinking critically about something that might seem ordinary or banal.
MG: The idea about creating distance is so cool.
IL: And also, the experience of pregnancy–growing a whole human inside your body is a pretty sci fi one! Maile and I have a piece we wrote together where we talk a lot about our collaboration if you're interested to learn more: https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/03/17/sound-designing-motherhood/
MG: Yeah, sure like we are in a spaceship to explore a new planet in outer space!
IL: It was really amazing to work so closely for so long on the sound. I had always wanted to have that kind of relationship with a sound artist on my older films, but this was the first time I was really able to make that happen.
MG: I like sci-fi so much. I read a lot of European sci-fi comics like Moebius' works.
IL: Sci fi is totally interesting and a really important genre–it feels especially relevant right now in this moment of natural disasters and climate change and new technologies that deeply structure our everyday lives. There's also a lot of great feminist science fiction!
I recommend Octavia Butler's writing... also Marge Piercy's book Woman on the Edge of Time. There's actually a long history of feminist sci fi. Because feminism itself is a kind of science fiction project–reimagining how the world might be remade in a more equal way–it's a genre that lots of feminist writers have been drawn to.
MG: I didn't know anything about feminist sci-fi and history before you told me! I will check out these works you recommend. Thank you for letting me know about this part of history.
IL: It's a long history! One of the earliest works of proto-sci fi is written by a woman in 1666! It's called The Blazing World.
MG: So, did you tell her what kind of music you want or did you and her just work together during the filmmaking?
IL: No, we worked much more collaboratively. We talked a lot about ideas and feelings and sounds that we were interested in (sci fi, water sounds, archival sounds, what anesthesia feels / sounds like) She also opened up her whole sound library with years of field recordings for me to use and play with... which was incredibly generous! So, this was also an experimental process of playing with lots of different sounds and sending things back and forth and talking about what we liked and didn't like and why
MG: In The Motherhood Archives, why did you decide to approach this topic by looking mainly at archival films? Why was it important to insert your own interviews and how did you decide whom to interview and how to integrate the two types of footage?
IL: I was interested in the history of disciplining the pregnant body. I saw through my own pregnancy that this definitely still happens today. There are hundreds of books and films and websites that are supposed to teach you how to do a good job giving birth, or being a mother that all have theories about correct and incorrect ways of doing things–what pregnant and nursing mothers should eat, how they should move, what they should do, how they should give birth. During my pregnancy I got curious about this world of excessive and judgmental information that I was encountering. I was curious to trace its history–when did society start making all these rules and theories for women becoming mothers? So, more or less, that's why I started looking at archival materials.
But it also felt important somewhere in the film to let women speak for themselves. So many of those archival films actually silence women. Even though the subjects of the archival / educational films are always women, the narrators are usually men, and the women very rarely speak on screen at all. The old films that I use in my film are very much not about women's actual experiences.
So, the interviews were a way to make a bit of space for that. I filmed about 12 women–each for 11 minutes / the length of one 400-foot roll of 16mm film. I invited each woman to speak about whatever she wanted related to her experience with motherhood. People talked about lots of different stuff–one woman spoke about postpartum depression, another about raising sons with developmental and health problems. The three I ended up using for the film were the three that spoke about childbirth. Those were the ones that felt most relevant to the bigger film.
MG: There were some books mentioned in The Motherhood Archives about birth philosophy. Can you talk more about birth philosophy?
IL: I guess I think of most of the historical theories discussed in the film as men’s theories about women’s bodies. I’m not really that interested in the specifics of each theory or philosophy described in the film (at least not in the practical sense that these philosophies will make childbirth better or easier), but more in the way that each of these theories come out of historical moments and overlap with nationalist (and sometimes religious) agendas–whether it’s a theory that mothers need to be trained and educated that comes out of a Progressive-era panic about immigrant populations in the US or a theory that women won’t feel pain if they hypnotize themselves that comes out of Stalinist-era Soviet investment in promoting new forms of science that are home-grown. I think the philosophies and theories feel very separate to me from thinking about what women actually experience in childbirth.
The Motherhood Archives (2013) / Irene Lusztig
MG: What is the most difficult part of film production in this film or in general?
IL: I work alone a lot–from coming up with an idea, to research, to shooting, editing, grant writing, fundraising, and sending work out to try to get it screened. So I guess I would say the hardest part is maintaining a strong enough sense of belief in your work when you spend a lot of time being the only person invested in the outcome of a project. The emotional work of keeping a project going for years with very little help is definitely challenging.
MG: After The Motherhood Archives, you made Maternity Test. Can you tell more about what you want the audience to get or learn from these two films about motherhood?
IL: I think the two films go together in many ways. They are both attempts to ask viewers to think critically about childbirth and about the social production of successful and unsuccessful childbirth (and, by extension, successful motherhood)–one in a historical framework and one in a more contemporary Internet space. I think––more broadly–there are so many ways that women are told that they are failing at achieving some kind of normative ideal (in how they look or behave or both) and childbirth / motherhood feels like an extreme example of this kind of space that doesn’t get talked about enough. I wanted to make both films because I hadn’t seen any other films that did this kind of critical and historical work around childbirth. In a way they are the films I wish I could have seen when I was pregnant myself.
One aspiration I’ve had for The Motherhood Archives is for it to be a kind of prenatal education film for the thoughtful woman (I think it definitely has worked that way for a lot of viewers). But also, I think it’s important to say that I don’t think these are just films for women or for mothers. All of us have some kind of relationship to birth and all of us have mothers, so I hope it’s a universal topic that anyone can think seriously about–I hope the work makes more space for all kinds of people to think about these questions.
MG: I noticed you interviewed Kristy Guevara-Flanagan in The Motherhood Archives.
IL: Yes! That was actually the first time I met Kristy. She was just a few days away from having her daughter, and I invited her to do this 11-minute talking thing in front of the camera, and she was really amazing! I knew right away that she would be the end of the film–I felt like she precisely captured this hard-to-pin-down moment where you are about to become a mother for the first time, about to walk through a door where anything can happen and you don't know what to expect. Actually, Kristy and I are working on curating a screening program about motherhood together now.
MG: Wow, amazing story behind the scenes!
For me, I think I know and understand more about the pain of childbirth. And how big a challenge birthing is for women. What do you think about the pain of birthing? Mothers are the greatest for sure.
IL: I don't have a simple short thing to say about pain... that's why I made a whole film about it! I think pain is incredibly complicated–culturally, physiologically, historically. Many or most of us will experience pain at some point in our lives, and our culture is pretty bad at thinking or talking about it. So that was something else I wanted to think through in the film.
MG:, I respect the connections and relationships between you and the other female filmmakers and Professor Wyman; that is a discourse community. A union can make feminism better and bigger in this industry and in the whole world.
IL: Yes, for sure! Feminist work is definitely still marginalized in the film world, so it's important to collaborate and make spaces with other people where you can have the kinds of conversations that feel important–also a big piece of being a feminist filmmaker.
MG: About your film Yours in Sisterhood. There are many issues and points you covered in this film like how women don’t trust each other, women of color, self-expression etc. So, what do you think about “interdependence” in feminism? What is the feminist issue you care about more than the others?
IL: This seems like a complicated question–I’m not sure I understand it. It seems like you are asking about race in the US? There is definitely a complicated and tense history between feminists of different races, generations, class backgrounds, etc that comes out in the project, and maybe also you are asking about moments in the film where people contradict or disagree with each other? I made the film trying to think about conversation and making space for new kinds of feminist conversation. It feels important to me that a feminist conversation space should be big and generous enough to contain multiple perspectives, multiple feminisms, and even disagreement and conflict. I don’t think the goal of a film like “Yours in Sisterhood” should be to make everyone feel like they agree with everyone in the film and leave the screening feeling great. I hope the film (when it’s finished) will do something a little bit more complicated. A white factory worker in West Virginia–who might define her feminism around her work in a labor union or her access to certain kinds of factory jobs–might have something very different to say about feminism than a young black woman in New York City who thinks about intersecting marginalized identities. I like the idea of a conversation that can hold both of these perspectives and many more.
I think the issue I care about most–in this project–is the act of listening.
Yours in Sisterhood (In progress) / Irene Lusztig
MG: For the last question, can I ask you what you did when you were 24 years old? Because I’m 24 years old now. When or how were you sure you wanted to be a feminist filmmaker? Or a filmmaker? What kinds of qualities should a good film director have? Can you give some advice to people who want to be film directors?
IL: When I was 24 I had recently graduated from college and had just come back from almost a year living in Romania where I did most of the shooting for Reconstruction I was really excited to make my first big film but also really nervous I wouldn’t know how to make such a big, complicated project on my own. I was just getting started on an editing process that ended up taking three years. I was living in my hometown, Boston, and had a part time teaching assistant job in my old film program. I was lucky that my rent was really cheap, I could work part time, and I still had time to edit. I definitely tell my students to move somewhere cheap after college! A lot of my students want to move to L.A. or the Bay Area, or New York, and I think it’s very hard to become a filmmaker or artist when your rent is so expensive that you need to spend all your time working to pay rent. I think the most important things for people who want to become filmmakers are to keep making work, to take yourself seriously even if the rest of the world doesn’t take you seriously yet, to find an affordable place to live, and to find a community of peers who are also ambitious about making work and make your ambitions feel less imaginary.
MG: Thank you so much, Irene, for this interview! Glad to talk with you! and your works are meaningful and great! Thanks again for your valuable time! Yeah!