Jennifer Reeder

Written by Kishore Samujh

Since the 1990s, Jennifer Reeder, a professor and single mother of three boys, has been a leading figure of feminist experimental and narrative cinema. Her films and videos, which mainly deal with issues of relationships, trauma and coping, encompass many aspects of feminism and diversity in America.

She first garnered national attention for her MFA project White Trash Girl (1995), a comedic and critical exploration of lower income white culture. She most recently directed the feature film Signature Move, a coming-of-age Muslim drama written by Fawzia Mirza, which premiered worldwide at SXSW in 2017 and received “Best Direction” at the Film Out San Diego Film Festival.

This interview was recorded on November 2017 via Skype from a library room at UCSC to Jennifer’s home in Chicago.

Kishore Samujh: In the cases of Tears Cannot Restore Her; Therefore I Weep (2011), Crystal Lake (2015), and Signature Move (2017), you directed and wrote films in which you don’t directly share the identities, at least on the surface level, of an audibly impaired and Muslim woman respectively. How you do navigate creating stories about identities that are not your own? What is your process in creating accurate representations?

Jennifer Reeder: I'll start with the most recent one, which is Signature Move, which is a feature length film—I didn’t write it, I directed it. It was written by Fawzia Mirza, who is Pakistani, and lesbian, which is amazing. She didn’t want to direct herself, but I was saying “shouldn't a woman of color direct this movie?” And she said, “no I think you can do it.” Because [Signature Move] was so much about [Mirza’s] story and her culture I just listened to what she said to me. In terms of art direction, she even gave us pictures of her mother’s own house.

When we were shooting along Demont Avenue in Rogers Park, Chicago, which has a huge South Asian population, but it’s also heavily divided into Hindu and Muslim, there were amazing saree shops on the Hindu side I thought were beautiful to shoot at, and [Mirza] was like “Nope, this is a Muslim film.” There were mistakes I made; it would've taken me a moment to walk in the store and recognize, oh that’s Ganesh, that’s not Muslim. I listened to her and it was her story and her script; I was dealing with her performances.

JR: But for Crystal Lakes, I was inspired by these images that were coming from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan of these young girls in these packs at skate clubs who could skate with no boys around by themselves. In countries that don’t allow women to ride bikes or drive cars. Obviously, I was inspired by something that clearly isn’t American, so I wanted to try to deal with American teen Muslim culture. The university where I teach, which is the University of Illinois, Chicago, has a huge Muslim population, and all these radical young feminists who wear hijabs. So two of my film students, who are hijabi Muslim–one was an assistant director on that film and one was a production student–went over the script many, many times. They were on set. The two actresses are not Muslim actresses. I asked questions every step of the way and if someone said that this is not accurate I was like, “okay let’s fix it.” I never said, “yeah, but it looks better this way” or something ridiculous like that.

And even in the case with Tears, the women who we cast as the primary sign language interpreter, who is pregnant, is a deaf actress. We had another sign language interpreter on set even though the woman who plays the deaf actress can read lips. But it was the same thing. Going over the script with her, multiple times, it felt like there was nothing more authentic we could do. I mean actually we cast a deaf woman for a hearing woman. The sign language interpreter is supposed to be hearing, but when we found this amazing deaf actress who was like, “this script is so funny and I get it and I really appreciate it” we went with it.

KS: I found it interesting that while you did feature two identities we don’t typically see on screen, the stories you’ve written are so narratively tight that they could completely function regardless of the ethnicity or physicality of the protagonist. In the case of Crystal Lakes, I found the ethnicity to play a political role, more so than an actual narrative role. So my question to you is including these diverse women identities more politically driven for you or narratively? Is it for the sake of being feminist or for creating more interesting stories or both?

JR: It’s all of that stuff. I like that you said that those stories could belong to anybody, because I don’t want anyone to look up Crystal Lake and think that this was exoctizing these hijabi girls or tokenizing a deaf women.

I also like presenting language in different ways. I like these complicated ideas I’ve used in other films you’ve seen–subtleties of girls whispering or texting. For instance, in Tears, the reminder that there are many people who do not communicate verbally who have complicated love lives, who hold grudges, who have desire, and who can be assholes; those different ways of how we communicate, from sign language, through unspoken looks across the room, to texting, to whispering, to even like Blood Below the Skin (2015) [where] those two girls are sort of having a telepathy or mind melding. I think films should be magical. Films should also be about what we can’t see.

JR: I consider the films that I do to be a form of social justice. I mean, I feel like an activist in others parts of my life for sure. I have three small sons, so I have a lot to deal with in my life. I’m a university professor, I'm a mom. So my activism isn’t always me with a sign in downtown Chicago. I try to channel my activism and my personal mandate for social justice into my films, which I think and I hope are entertaining.

KS: Actually, yesterday in my class, we had an Audre Lorde reading about using the erotic as power. In part of that reading, she talks about not trying to find what the world needs, but try to find what you need and then offer that to the world. So you don’t have to be a Harry Belafonte activist or an athlete like Colin Kaepernick or a director like yourself.

JR: Very coincidentally, in Crystal Lake, Ladone (the lead actress), she’s taking off her hijab and she’s looking in the mirror and she says, “Self preservation is not a selfish act; it's an act of self preservation.” Which is actually an Audre Lorde quote. So there are these way I try to inject the film with genuine feminist references.

KS: In an interview you did for Desistfilm about a Million Miles Away in 2014, you talked about your casting process for the women's chorus. You mentioned some of the intricacies of obtaining a diverse cast of teenage girls and trying to stray away from an all white-blonde cast. During the casting process have you ever found yourself slightly altering your story to fit within an identity?

JR: Normally, because I’ve had so many surprising people come to the casting process, I absolutely do not, unless it’s very much a part of the narrative. I normally don’t assign race in my scripts. And so I get this whole pool of people, let’s say young girls, teenage girls. I just start going through them and thinking “what if that what was our main character?” and I know that if we cast her, we have to cast parents who would seemingly fit as their biological parent. So I go for the primary character: whoever the story is about, I leave that totally open racially, and then I just open to whoever is coming.

The script that I’m revising right now, that I will shoot next summer, is a feature length film. There is a racial dynamic. There is one girl in particular who is African American, who is also a kind of gothy afro punky girl in a band. It's not just a white blonde suburban girl who turns to punk music to, you know, piss off her parents, it’s this girl who is this African American girl, who wears leather jackets and listens to crazy punk music. I think that right now there is a really great wave and fashion of music that have merged in this really beautiful way with Afropunk. That girl in particular has to be African American because she is in a band and there is a whole plotline that involves her being in a band. So in that case I will look specifically for a young women of color, but all the other roles are totally up in the air.

KS: In your films, you appear to use magical realism as a bridge to connect the emotions of characters and create a mutual understanding between them. In Blood Below the Skin (2015) the two girls admit their feelings towards one another through mind reading, in And I Will Rise If Only To Hold You Down (2011) the arguments between soon-to-be-divorcees are quelled through the transfer of a glowing horse shirt, and in Tears the digital outline of a bandage is passed between a student and the professional sign interpreter. How did you intend for these instances of magical realism to be read? Why do you choose to include them? Will we see these in your new work?

JR: Well, on the one hand it comes from my background as more of an experimental filmmaker. I went to an art school. I didn’t go to film school in a commercial school. I might have had a lot of influence from friends who were painters and artists and animators, but I’ve always really loved films that took some liberties with the artificial nature of the film. There is a moment in The Piano (1993), a Jane Campion film, where there is a little girl telling a story about how her father died and all of a sudden she says something like “he caught on fire” and there is this little animation of the guy catching on fire. [The animation] is probably like half a second long. There is no other animation in the entire film. Nothing like that ever came up again. There is just this insane little moment that disrupts the narrative, but it feels like this gift from the filmmaker to the audience. The same sort of things happens in Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (1999). It's about these garbage strikes in Scotland in the 70s. There is this little rat, who sort of gets lifted up into the sky with a little balloon—it’s completely magical realism but it’s a really beautiful moment where the audience gets to recognize that cinema is magic.

You know, cinema is make believe. Whether it’s the glowing cat’s eyes of the sweater in A Million Miles Away or any of the other things you mentioned, it’s a reminder to the audience that there is a potential, even in the real world, of a parallel universe that is much more metaphysical. Even our emotions have emotions, or that the human internal has a presence in the space and how do you represent that? People always say you could cut the tension with a knife, or something, right? What if you visualize that? What is the tension in the room? What does that look like in a film? Visually, I like what happens when you have an image of a sad, misdirected mom and she’s got this both magical and awesome but totally stupid shirt with the glowing horses on it. There is something about the magical moments that also offer some kind of forgiveness for the mistakes the humans are making. So many of my characters are totally flawed. They just keep fucking up. And so there is something about the magicalness that provides a sense that there is hope or that there can be synchronicity. This idea that your favorite sweatshirt is your favorite sweatshirt because it somehow protects you.

And it's about the internal, the emotions. I hate films where the characters tells you how they feel verbally. Like, here’s how I feel and here’s how I’m feeling it. That's not how people communicate at all. People ask you “how are you doing” and you say “fine,” but really you are a disaster on the inside. Which is also why I tend to use bandages; a lot of people notice that. A lot of people have bleeding things, wounds that won’t heal. It’s the same thing with if you see someone whose head is all wrapped up and you ask “are you okay?” and they say “yeah, no, everything is good.” But clearly that’s not the case... so I like to be in between the little magical floaty things and the bandages. It’s a way of pointing out the flaws in the characters and also offering them the idea that in the parallel world there is magic and beauty and synchronicities. I wish in real life humans would get in tune with that more. That’s why I think a lot of people have religion. I’m not personally religious but I do like talk to understand that kind of vibe around me.

KS: At first I thought Shuvit (2017) was a huge narrative and visual shift. But really, besides the blueish tint and fact that it was about a dad and his son, it still featured a parent-child disconnect, a suggested trauma, and skateboarding. Why do you choose to focus heavily on adult and kid relationships?

JR: First of all, the little boy in Shuvit with the bloody nose is my middle son, Levi. He did a great job. I say a lot of times in interviews or when writing about my own work that I believe that coming of age is a lifelong process. However, I think we as humans don’t give each other or ourselves time to come of age at any time of our lives. My mother is 87 and she is constantly evolving in a profoundly beautiful way. She’s always learning new things. She’s educating herself. She’s always fired up about something new. I don’t think that she is surrounded by friends who do the same thing. They sort of feel like they learned what they needed to learn when they were 17, and I’m done now for the next 70 years.

For me making films where there is a child who is in transition–because childhood and adolescence are a time of natural transition–that’s a really great kind of path to then talking about the parents’ transition you know? Going through something in their lives. Of course we talk about midlife crises, but I think we talk about it in a very pejorative way. It feels very dismissive of adults going through a crisis or a change in their lives. Whether it’s brought on by trauma, or whether it’s brought on by being a human and evolving. So I find that I want to tell stories about evolving adults. I like to tell it through an evolving adolescent. I also like to flip the power relationship so that it’s the child who has more agency, or more authority, or a better intellectual view of the parent’s crisis than the parent does. I think we still live in a culture that doesn’t give young people agency. It doesn’t. We value youth, but we don’t give young people any intellectual authority. So I like pairing up the kids and the adults that way. I have no interest in making films about people who are in their 20s or 30s: it’s like under 20 or over 40.

KS: You are a busy individual. Associate Professor in the School of Art and Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000, head of the art department, single mother with three 3 children, experimental and narrative director/writer going to festivals, screenings and tours. How do you balance it all? Where do you apply the principles of self care? What does down time look for you?

JR: I am now a full professor. This year I’m also an acting director of the School of Art and Art history. I came from a very big family so I always had this idea that I wanted to have children. It never occurred to me that I would have to choose between my career—whether that was academic or filmmaking—or being a mom. Which I still think some women contemplate. I think it was when I was pregnant with my first son that I was determined to not be a mother who had a kid and never made a film again.

I was a much more lazy filmmaker before I had my oldest son because I had all the time in the world. Even though I was still teaching I had a lot of time in my hands. When my oldest son was born, my time management went into overdrive and since then I have had two more children—three total. I have been more productive since my children were born. It’s partially out of vanity. I still feel like we live in a world that’s not necessarily all that nice to mothers or very forgiving of mothers. I think that we don’t do enough to make it easier for mothers and dads. If you are a mom that is pregnant and nursing then it can be hard. It’s a physical thing. I mean [my son] was sixth months years old and my mom would bring him to set and I would nurse him. When I look back on it I think it's ridiculous that I did, but I didn't even think about that. I just did.

So time management is important to me but yeah self care is paramount. The perception that I am busy beyond belief is not totally true. I definitely prioritize my time. I don’t go out socially very often. I don’t need to do that anymore. I did that a lot before I had kids. I networked and did all that kind of stuff. So right now, what is part of self care is spending time with my children, doing homework with them, getting up early to pack their lunches to take them to school. My oldest son had a middle school basketball game last night. There are things I wanted to be present for. I want to be an engaged present parent. Also, it’s really rewarding for me.

It’s not hard. I think it’s harder to be lazy. To kind of just sit around and just think about all the stuff you should be doing and spin yourself into a kind of paralyzed state. I see it happen with my students. This is a very stressful world we live in. It’s a very chaotic, fucked up world we live in right now. I’m not presuming that you are feeling that but I’m presuming that you and your peers feel a sense of “what is happening in this world? What’s going to happen in this world in the next 24 hours?” I feel the pressure on my own students, and so I think it would be very easy, if I wasn’t managing my time and paying attention to being good to myself through being good to my family, that the chaos of the world could be paralyzing. But I spend a fair amount of time talking about self care to my students. I’m not sure they listen to me because I sort of sound like a nagging mother when I’m like “ Hey you guys have a good weekend and remember to get enough sleep and remember to eat your vegetables” and they’re kind of like, “uhh are you done? Can we go? Is class dismissed?” Do you talk about that? To be young and creative in this world in a time when so much is still sort of unknown?

KS: I definitely feel it myself and I’ve gone through those phases of being so overwhelmed you are paralyzed. Dealing with mental illness and health, and also noticing that when I am doing a lot, when I have a lot on my plate, I make priorities and time manage, I do end up having more time because I am using time more wisely. So I totally get that and definitely in the class I am in right now we talk about these issues a lot. In the larger classes I have, we don’t discuss this.

JR: You just have to schedule it. Monday is a writing day. So that’s what you do all that Monday. And then you aren't stressed out about it on Tuesday because you know you did it, and Wednesday is a writing day too, and that’s it. It sounds so unsexy when you talk to students or people about time management but if you really carve out times during your day or during the week to pay bills, or go to the grocery store, or deal with this class or whatever, then you did, and you don’t think about it during the other times,

KS: Now that you’re working on more narrative films that will probably reach more audiences than previous more experimental on-the-nose feminist work, how important do you think each is? How has the experimental work you’ve created in the last twenty years set a foundation for your newer work? Do your values differ for one or the other?

JR: I like to say that I came to narrative, or more conventional filmmaking, through the window in the basement, or through the side door. Going back to where I studied filmmaking, [it was] in an art school, at Ohio State, which had a film program.

KS: What about Grad school?

JR: Yes I studied film and women's studies—The School of the Art Institute; that’s when I moved to Chicago. I’ve been there ever since. I never became interested in commercially driven film projects. I was always interested in making experiments, changing the form as much as I could, taking some risks with how I told the stories and who I told the story about. It always seemed like the best thing for me to do was to just make shorts. If I had 5 dollars, I could make a short with 5 dollars. But I’ve stayed still with my vision at the end of the day, which is super important. Even with Signature Move, which has a bunch of crew and producers, a ton a money, and a want from the producers to have a commercially successful film there were still many times where I felt compelled to really put my foot down and say “I’m not going to do it like this” or “it should be this way” And I think, because it wasn’t the first film I made—it was like the 50th film I’ve made—trust me. I have this idea for a scene. This is how I want to do it. They were like, “okay.”

KS: How do your values differ for experimental and narrative? What is their intrinsic value?

JR: I love short films. We live in a country that does not care about short films at all. I have had so much success in Latin America, Europe, Asia, with short films because they are cultures that just recognize that short films are a legitimate form of filmmaking. So I made Shuvit after we were finished making Signature Move... and I loved making Signature Move and I also feel super proud of that five minute film that is totally different. I still put everything into both of those films. I have this feeling that I’m only as interesting as the last film that I made. And whether that last film I made was a three minute experimental or a feature length conventional narrative, I really put everything into it. They are all really the same to me. A Million Miles Away, Crystal Lake, and [Blood Beneath the Skin] premiered at Berlinale film festival, but I love the others film that only went to two tiny regional festivals just as much. So it’s not about the length, the budget, the scope or even how they existed in the world. I consistently feel in myself and in my work ethic that I put as much effort into every single film.

KS: The first film that I could find on the internet was White Trash Girl (1995) which was made while you were at grad school. Before you got to that point, how did you develop your style? What were your earlier projects like?

JR: I’ll tell you something, White Trash Girl is still so popular. I still get a request to screen WTG once a week and that thing is like 21 years old and it's so degraded and ridiculous and people still like it. I had come out of 3rd wave riot grrrl feminism that was all about DIY. There were lots of bands made of girls who didn’t necessarily didn’t know how to play their instruments but were like, “we just need to like be on stage.” It was coming out of zine culture and activists and intellectuals who had ideas who didn't want to go and get an essay published in a magazine or a newspaper, so they made their own zines. So it was a real DIY culture that my filmmaking came out of. Which I think is super clear in White Trash Girl. WTG feels like you dug that film out of the garbage, honestly. But I also wanted to have a conversation about race, class, and gender and about the construction of whiteness in non-racist terms. That was really dealing with aspects of white culture that weren't about white supremacy. I feel like the the way this country deals [with] and thinks about whiteness is so often through class. So white trash is really a racist and classist slur; it’s not a nice thing to call somebody, but it is a way to deal with this idea that in a capitalist country, where our president can say everybody has the same opportunities, [and that] why all these poor young men of color are being shot in Chicago is because they messed up. When in fact if you look at the history of classism in this country, that has never dealt with race in an appropriate way, the capitalists can’t deal with white poverty, or poverty in general. So anyway, but I’m not somebody in my films who is able to make a serious documentary... so instead I had to come up with this girl superhero who was this girl Robin Hood where she sort of was this champion for social justice in her weird little socio-economic world, pointing at aspects of race class and gender.

KS: So what did your projects look like before that?

JR: I feel like if YouTube existed during my undergrad, I might have been a super star. My projects were so performative. I’d put on wigs I’d perform in front of the camera as different characters. And often times I’d be all the characters. I’d make these projects where I’d have footage of myself having dinner with myself wearing different wigs. Then I’d edit it all together to make it seem seamless. I was influenced by Maya Daren, an experimental filmmaker and a dancer who made films during the 40s. She made these amazing, beautiful films, very elegant. I was also influenced by George Kuchar, who passed away many years ago, who used to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute–he was a very prolific and also very odd and DIY filmmaker. I was very influenced by these ideas that you could be a filmmaker and you didn’t need a crew, actors, a producer, a editor, it could be just me.

When I came to the Art Institute, I started working at Video Data Bank. They have this collection of artist made videos, and so many of them are by women who were making videos in the 70s and 80s that were doing the exact same thing. It would be a woman in her studio or in her kitchen playing in front of the camera doing interesting things. A lot of those women were not filmmakers: they were performance artists, sculptors, photographers. So I felt like I was influenced by that, but also me doing everything myself came out of being the only girl in my class of filmmakers at undergrad. I was qualified to direct, write, produce, run the camera, edit and all that kind of stuff, but they would say, “why don’t you run the clapper,” and I was like, “this is bullshit. I don’t want to run the clapper. I want to do something else.” So I made it through this one film in undergrad and then I never stepped onto anyone else's set in my entire life. I bought my own video camera as an undergrad, I scraped together my babysitting money or whatever, and spent 500 bucks on this Nikon 8mm camera and just did it myself I totally bypassed the entire system and it felt great. Now 20 years later, I look back on all the films I made and they’re mine. They’re mine and I was never mistreated onset.

KS: When did you have that moment that you thought you could be a filmmaker?

JR: I was an undergrad at Ohio state and I took a sculpture class as a freshman. I did terrible in that class. I mean, I nearly failed that class. And my instructor said “Well, what else are you interested in?” and I said “Well I’m taking some dance classes. I’m a dancer. “ And he said, “Oh that’s interesting, this woman is coming to teach next semester and she’s an interesting artist; she is a performance artist.” I had never even heard of performance art.

So I signed up for the class, a class taught by Linda Montano who is an extraordinary performance artist and video artist. She is still alive and working, but at that time she was really at the top of her game. So it was performance class, but we had to make videos. And it liked when I picked up the camera... this was before I had even taken a film class. I picked the camera to make my first video. I really felt like I had recovered a phantom limb. I just thought, “wow this is cool, this is exactly what I should be doing.” Then I hurried over and signed up for filmmaking classes. That’s when it was more conventional and I was put on a set and I was like, “fuck this. I’m going to go back to me and the video camera.” It felt really intuitive.

KS: Can you tell us about a time you ever felt like quitting? What did you do to get out of those ruts? What advice do you give do artists struggling to insecurity or self doubt?

JR: Gosh, I have never ever ever felt like quitting. I mean I literally wake up and I have dreams about different films to make, and I have a whole list of ideas to make news films, and I’m always thinking about that and it's the most satisfying thing in my life. And I say that even as a parent. I mean, my children are satisfying to me, but they are not mine. My children are humans. They are their own things. Right now I’m responsible for feeding them and buying their schoolbooks and teaching them things to be better humans. But they are not mine. My films are mine. My films are these things that go into the world and can speak for me in a way that I can't always speak for myself. So I’ve never thought about quitting

Unfortunately, we live in a time where we quantify things based on did it go to Sundance, or is Showtime going to buy it, or is so and so going to finance, and I just think we just have to stop for a moment and quantify the creative projects that we take on as a form of self care and understanding. And understand that at some point for instance [when] the very first consumer video camera was available to the public in 1996, students would videotape protests, sit ins. They were videotaping lots of interesting local, regional activist activities. Then they were exchanging those videos tapes. Somebody from New York would send something to LA or SF or Chicago or Boston. So it was like consciousness raising, community building, and that was enough. It wasn’t about winning grants or it wasn’t about a different kind of visibility that there is a pressure to find now. It was really about connections across communities, making a difference. So I think the advice for anyone who wants to quit is maybe you are doing the wrong thing. If you want to quit, then quit. If you’re a chocolate maker, some people think that that might be the most bomb job on the planet, but some people fucking hate making chocolate, and they need to get out of that job, and if you’re doing anything that doesn’t bring you joy, leave it behind and find the thing that brings you joy and fulfillment . I don’t want that to sound naive or simple, because some people I know—a lot of people—don’t have the option in this country to pursue that kind of job. They are just working their asses off to pay for a house, pay for food on the table for their children. But I think there are a lot of those choices, that there is a room for growth and joy, and if you want to quit, quit and figure out what else you are good at. And you’ll find it. Everyone should find their phantom limb. Find the thing that you feel like is your soulmate, but not in a person. Find you phantom limb in a something that is not another human. Because at the end of the day, it’s just you, your brain, your heart, and your soul and you have to feel satisfied with that little trifecta.

You can find full length versions of projects, press, and awards on Jennifer Reeder's website http://www.thejenniferreeder.com/. Keep up to date with her on Instagram @thejenniferreeder and on Twitter @jenniferreeder.