Jen Proctor

This interview was conducted on Monday, March 9th 2020 over Skype.

Jen Proctor is a Michigan based experimental filmmaker, media artist, and dedicated educator. Currently, she’s a professor of Screen Studies at University of Michigan-Dearborn. Jen is also the co-founder of EDIT Media, a faculty-driven initiative committed to practicing and teaching inclusive teaching in college-level media production. While her style and subject matter vary, there are constant themes of gender representation, cinematic deconstruction, and the history of experimental and narrative film throughout her work. For more of work: visit https://cargo.jenniferproctor.com

To you, what does it mean to make experimental media?

I think for me, what I'm interested in is sort of subverting the cinematic machine, like breaking the machine and taking it apart and understanding how it works, and then kind of putting it back together in a way that it wasn't intended. To see what the possibilities of this medium are that haven't yet been explored by just using that machine in the way it was designed. It's like, what could this tool be used for that it wasn't intended for that might open things up? For me, that means literally working with the materials of cinema, like what Hollywood has made, and cutting it down and putting it back together to reveal something about how it works that might not necessarily be visible on the surface at first blush.

Do you identify with the term “feminism” and would you consider your work to be feminist?

I think as a younger person, I struggled with that term a little bit because I wasn't as well educated about it, and so many groups have been successful at making it kind of a controversial or problematic term. I've since come to really embrace it. I do identify with that term and I do consider my work to be feminist. My work is trying to advance a discourse or dialogue about what it means to have equitable gender and other representations in cinema. I also very much believe in feminism as a project that's not just about equity for women, but equity for all kinds of different marginalized people. Patriarchy is harmful for all kinds of people, including men, and we could imagine a different kind of world through embracing the intersectional elements of feminism

How did you first get started with filmmaking?

I started at a pretty young age— I've loved movies since I was a little kid. Part of the reason I like deconstructing Hollywood movies is because I like watching Hollywood movies. I borrowed a Betamax video camera from my neighbor during the summer after eighth grade, and just started making little movies on Beta. Like Nightmare on Coleman Drive and Raiders of the Lost Park. Just making little movies like that.

I actually focused more on the critical studies of film in college and later got back to making films after graduating, when I was involved in a super 8 film collective. Eventually it was like, okay, I need to actually go study this and really add some rigor to my work. So then I went to grad school for filmmaking.

What advice would you give your younger self when you were first starting out, knowing where you are now?

It's just all about exploring and being free to take risks. I didn't really discover experimental film until probably really late in college or possibly even after college, and when I did there was this part of me that was like, ‘You can make movies like this?’ There's no reason that I couldn't have been doing that earlier, but I believed that there was a certain way of making movies, and that's what you saw at the Cineplex. And so that's what I was imitating. I think it's literally about taking risks and experimenting and recognizing that there are ways of approaching cinema as art that doesn’t necessarily need to be connected to narrative.

Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix (2017) features footage from almost 100 films. Were you surprised about how many films featured these tropes? What was the process for gathering all that footage?

I was actually looking for footage for a different project that didn't quite pan out. But I kept seeing all these images of women in bathtubs as I was looking for footage for that project and just kept noticing that this shot looks really similar to that shot, which looks really similar to that shot. I really started to think about the very specific patterns about how women are framed in this domestic space and what that domestic space of the bathroom connotes. So I started with a sort of a hypothesis that I was going to find more of this. Once I did start turning up more and more, I really started to see this progression of films that deal with women grieving in the bathroom and all kind of look a certain way and have these similar deaths. As I started to gather more footage of women in bathtubs, pleasuring themselves or even just washing, that’s when it became a little bit more surprising, and I knew that my original hypothesis had some merit to it that was worth diving into. I started gathering footage by memory, trying to think of all the movies I knew of that had women in bathtubs in them. Then asking everybody I knew, like sort of crowdsourcing, and then kind of jumping on social media and searching IMDB keywords and going on Reddit, which is kind of a dangerous place to ask people to tell me about movies that feature women in bathtubs… I got some interesting responses to that… The process was then checking out those films on DVDs and blu-rays from the library and watching those scenes and seeing how they would work together with all the other scenes that I was gathering. That was the funnest part of the process, seeing what’s out there and seeing how it all fit together. Some of the unfun parts were organizing and cataloging everything. Like I have all this stuff, now what am I going to do with it? And then editing it, that’s an unfun, but also fun part of the process.

Why did you decide to remake Bruce Conner's original 1958 film A Movie as A Movie by Jen Proctor (2010-2012)? What drew you to that specific film?

That was a film that, like a lot of my work, came out of my teaching with students. Seeing how students are responding to films and the responses from students who are seeing films that I've seen over and over for the first time help to give me fresh eyes on the work. I was showing Bruce Conner's film in classes in the mid 2000s, and I’m noticing students didn't always laugh at the original film, even though I think it's really funny, or that I had to let them know in advance that it was funny and that sort of gave them permission to laugh. I was also really interested in the internet, and those were the early days of YouTube, when YouTube was still more interesting, and I was thinking about how that film [Conner’s A Movie] was a precursor to what you’d find on YouTube, but done fifty years earlier. So I was interested in what would happen if I remade this in a contemporary era, but just used all sorts of footage from YouTube? What would that look like? What would be the same and what would change? What would be the analog for particular images in that film? And then, part of it was also driven by the humor of the film. I love Bruce Conner's giant titles, the way “Bruce Conner” filled up the whole frame, and I thought, what if I did that and put my name up there—like, I'm a nobody.

How do you create your “voodles” (video-doodles)? How much of a process or expected outcome is involved?

You know, I haven't made any voodles in a long time and I really miss that. Those were made in a really cool time of my life. And now that you mentioned, it's like I should get back to doing that. A lot of the voodles really came out of a time, again before YouTube is what it is now, where there was much more of a community of video artists playing with video on the web and sharing work with one another. A lot of us would just make work every week just trying to get something up and posted online that we could share and comment on and watch one another's work. It was always just like, what's going on this week that's interesting? If there’s a storm outside, then I just want to turn my camera on and film the storm. Or I want to develop some skills in animation so I'm going to try some little animation this week. Or sometimes I’d download somebody else's project and mess around. It was just kind of like making sure I was making some kind of video every week, whatever that might be, just to continue having a practice. It was just about experimenting at really low stakes.

Your work ranges all over from media like handmade film to found footage and interactive documentary. What’s your favorite media or style to work with?

Right now I’m really interested in what I’m calling “Narrative Supercut,” which would be like Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix (2017) or Groundless (2006). I'm interested in exploring this idea of how I can construct some kind of a narrative sequence out of disparate parts from other films, while also containing a critique that reveals something critical about the way cinematic language functions. On the one hand, it serves an intellectual or scholarly purpose in commenting on how cinema functions, but on the other it serves an effective purpose where it draws us in the way a movie normally would. It's putting together a puzzle in certain ways that’s intellectually challenging.

Can you talk a little bit about EDIT Media (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teaching Media) and your role as an educator?

I think EDIT Media really dovetails with all the other interests in my work, which is all about promoting equity and inclusion and critiquing the ways in which those things are not always embraced in other parts of our societies or communities. EDIT Media really grew out of conversations that I had with, and continue to have with, other faculty all around the country who have noticed ways in which our film schools and programs aren’t always doing as much as they could to ensure that all the students in the classroom are included. I was also looking at Hollywood, and media industries as a whole, and the ways in which they haven't been doing as much as they could to embrace all kinds of people, and in some ways have even been hostile to certain groups of people. So EDIT Media ia about trying to change that in our classrooms, particularly looking at the ways in which cinema and other forms of media can create challenges to inclusion in the classroom that we need to address. For instance, if we’re showing these films in class, and films are about characters and stories and people, and the only ones we're showing are about straight white men, what kind of message does that send to the majority of students who don't fit into that particular identity category? How can we be doing better in film schools to diversify the people who are telling stories through cinema and to support them as they move into the industry so that our media better reflects our population as a whole in this country? That's where EDIT media fits in. A lot of the work I'm doing is also addressing those kinds of issues, and I try to create those kinds of classrooms where everybody's going to have their hands on equipment. Everybody has a voice, everybody gets to serve as a leader, but everybody's also going to be a support person. It’s about transforming the classroom as well as challenging the kind of myth of the auteur, the director, and making sure that collaboration is the key.

How does teaching influence your filmmaking?

It's really driven my filmmaking over the past several years. So for the interactive documentary that I did, it took me deep into how to use the software conceptually and how to create an experience. And then I'll get excited about that and bring it into the classroom. Or things that come up in the classroom that I find interesting end me down a creative path. I feel like they're really carefully linked. That's the great thing about teaching— my students are always teaching me as well, bringing in some kind of new perspective that I hadn't seen before. And that always opens things up for me in a creative sense.

In your website bio, you say you enjoy studying abnormal feline behavior in your spare time. What abnormal feline behaviors have your studies found thus far?

The most recent one is, one of my cats is obsessed with popcorn! I love popcorn. And so every time I have popcorn out, she's over my shoulder or she's trying to pull at it. There've been several other cases, but that's the one I'm kind of studying closely at the moment. My same cat used to like to play fetch and now she's kind of over it. I think she's really particular about the kind of little mouse toy that she fetches with, and we've lost that one.

About the interviewer:

Aubrey Knittel is an undergraduate film and digital media major and literature minor at UC Santa Cruz. Some of her interests include pop culture (both watching and analyzing), art, and poetic words that make her nostalgic for people and places she doesn’t know. Like Jen, she once had a cat who enjoyed eating popcorn and playing fetch.