Jessica Bardsley

Cami: What first interested you about filmmaking, and specifically about feminist films?

Jessica: I’ve always been some kind of artist. I started with drawing and painting, but I got to this point where I didn’t really understand what to do with those media anymore. I was making things, but I didn’t feel like the ideas that I was having really translated. And then at some point in college I had this feeling that I would like video art. So I found a video class at another college and it was all really intuitive to me once I started.

The way I was introduced to filmmaking really wasn’t through “cinema.” It was more through video art and documentary making, with an experimental bent. It wasn’t documentary 101. It was more like artists trying to use the tools of nonfiction in different ways. And now that’s more normal, there’s more of a conversation about experimental non-fiction filmmaking, but even ten years ago, that was not really the case.

C: It wasn’t a genre yet.

J: Now I feel like everyone makes essay films, but that was not the case then. I guess that’s how I started-- I was interested in a lot of feminist video art and performance, and experimental nonfiction. I thought Sadie Benning’s video diaries were really cool when I first saw them. I also really liked punk music and poetry. I spent a lot of college studying mostly poetry and philosophy, and somehow the ideas that I found in poetry seemed to translate for me into filmmaking. I remember this Anne Carson poem called “Longing: A Documentary.” And I thought ‘Hmm, she made this poem about going out into a river at night and making a photograph, but she calls it a “documentary” and something about that, I thought, ‘well maybe there’s a ways to treat a film in this way.’

C: That totally makes sense. Thinking back to the films that you sent me, they felt more poetic, which makes a lot more sense now. It felt less like a narrative and more like a poem, which now, thinking back, makes a lot of sense for where those stories were coming from.

J: I feel that sometimes it’s not that interesting for me to just tell a straight story. I’ve never really thought in terms of a straight, progressive line, even when I write a script, it’s more about connections and accumulations: there’s this thing and this other thing, and all these other things are maybe connected, too. I think there’s something ambient and multiple about how I like to put images and ideas together.

C: How do you define feminist filmmaking?

J: I’m a feminist and I make films, but I’m not sure what feminist filmmaking is right now or whether it needs to be something specific. In the context of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, so many people and so many aspects of experience have been demeaned--not just women, people of color, poor people, but also things like emotion and vulnerability and generosity. I think feminism allows me to make my work, since feminism allows me to insist that my experience has value and that it’s okay to represent it intimately and honestly--even if it’s ugly or complicated. I know for some people, feminist filmmaking can be defined by having female leads and telling stories about women or by telling intersectional stories, and having diverse casts and crews. I think this is all necessary, and should be the status quo in the landscape of filmmaking and culture more broadly. But I think feminist filmmaking can’t mean one certain thing or a set of quotas. I think it can also be a spirit, a method, a way of rendering the world that feels true and complicated and alive.

C: How did you decide that filmmaking was something that you wanted to do, as opposed to poetry or other things.

J: That’s a really great question...You know at some point it’s a little bit inarticulate for me, in the sense that it’s something that I just feel compelled to do. Every once in a while I think ‘oh wow making films is so hard, it’s such a production, there are all these elements. I like to shoot film, that costs money’. And whenever I get to this place I wonder - “should I keep doing it?” But the idea of not doing it seems awful.

So I feel compelled to create moving images, and I actually think there is some way that it combines all of these things. I can’t really imagine not being an artist, and I actually still draw and make other kinds of art, but there’s some way that with film you can combine image, and text, or sound, and all of these media are wrapped up in filmmaking. And there is something special to filmmaking, in that there’s something elusive about it. The images kind of disappear. It’s not like an object that you can just have and meditate on it and own it. So there’s something about the way that after you watch a film or a video, it can still come back to you but it has more of an elusive quality. It’s a memory. Even when you watch a film there’s something about it slipping away...

C: That makes sense. It’s mysterious, in a different way than physical art.

J: Yes, mysterious. And some of my favorite filmmakers are able to really enhance that mystery.

C: Who would those people be? Who do you draw inspiration from? Your favorite filmmakers?

J: This is a great question because recently my inclinations are actually towards more conventional narrative cinema, which doesn't exactly resonate with what I do. But there are people like Chantal Akerman. When I first started making film, she was a really important filmmaker for me. I remember when I first saw News from Home--that movie, I loved that it was personal, but it was also kind of a landscape, or city-space, film. It had this kind of slow, patient quality. I also really liked the earlier films of Su Friedrich. I liked that her films were personal but trying to be about other things too. So using the first person is way to explore other ideas.

C: Do you find yourself taking any inspiration from those filmmakers, in the things that you do?

J: With Su Friedrich, I appreciated how she used text as a way to tell a story. I liked the intimacy of it. As I mentioned, I also thought about Chantal Akerman a lot when I started out. This way of inscribing different environments with a personal way of looking, that is something that many, if not most, of my films do. I remember when I first saw Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil I was really taken by it--it was fictional, but there was a first person narrative. And that’s something that I’ve learned: that you can use the first person, but there can still be fiction, and it can be a constructed narrative device. I have an impulse towards work that feels more personal, but people sometimes forget that you also made it. I think a lot about strategies that writers use, like filmmaker-turned-writer Chris Kraus or, more recently, Sheila Heti, who writes something that basically feels like a personal essay, and then says that it’s a novel. I think Elena Ferrante does something similar, except she took it a step further and used a pseudonym. So I’m trying to emphasize the ways that any story you tell is something constructed. This has more recently led me to use the term “autofiction” to describe my films.

C: How do you define experimental filmmaking?

J: I use the term “experimental filmmaking” to signal to people that the experience they are about to have is probably not the kind of experience they’re used to having when watching films. In everyday life, we become so habituated to the world. And then we become habituated to cinematic conventions. That has always seemed absurd to me. My real feeling is that you as a maker, and the idea you’re dealing with, should dictate how a film works and what it looks like. If experimental film means something, maybe it’s being open to using any and all tools that would help to register an idea uniquely, rather than resorting to conventions.

C: Where do you think you find motivation for making films?

J: You mean like what’s my purpose as a filmmaker?

C: It could be your purpose, or how do you find the inspiration, I guess? Is there any specific sort of media you find, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

J: I’d say more often than not, it’s a pretty internal origin story, in the sense that usually there’s some kind of experience I’ve had, or something I’ve been talking to close friends about. I’m really interested in what happens inside of people, their emotional lives, how that branches out into the world. So for making a film, some of it is just trying to make sense of, or talk about, things that people don't really talk about or make connections between. My films are just more about being alive, and seeing what’s happening in my life or with the people around me. I’m also specifically interested in the psychological or emotional aspects of being alive, especially those aspects that are difficult or confusing.

C: Is there some sort of genre that you try to encapsulate? How would you define what you do?

J: I don’t really think about it much. Every film is different. I sometimes use the term “essay film” to describe my films because the term is so open it can mean a lot of different things. When I make something I’m not thinking about fulfilling a certain pre-imagined form, but instead try to think, “how do I re-enter these ideas in a way that makes sense over time?” So I focus more on making something that is in time. I want people to have something different in the end than they do in the beginning, but I don't really have any conviction about how a film should fulfill a genre expectation. There are some films that are more like fiction, or like a poem, or have a narrative arc, but overall, I see what happens. I’m partial to want to bring things together. I guess I have two different ways of working, and I go back and forth between them. One way of working is to combine different types of materials, be it something I've found or something I’ve shot, and weave those things together to tell a story. Another way of working is to sort of be in one place, and those films tend to be less personal.

C: So you go about it and see what happens rather than planning it out from the beginning?

J: Yes. Because people can make more traditional kinds of films, and there are clearer expectations about how it’s supposed to look, how it’s supposed to go, what the structure should be like, how the process of making it should be like. But I’m a one-woman show. And when doing things on your own, you get to do whatever you want, invent your own logic, or remake something.

C: Is there a sort of freedom in that? Making your own work instead of having a crew? Have you ever worked with a crew?

J: The biggest crew I’ve ever worked with was one friend. I’ve had people help me, like a friend or someone I’m exchanging artistic favors with, and they would help me out and I would help them, or sometimes I want someone to be in a film. Usually, I have no crew, though. And it is kind of freeing, but it’s also a little bit constraining. I think up to now it’s been fine, and even preferable, because up to now the films I have made have been perfectly served by one person. But increasingly, I have other ideas for work that would require a bigger crew. It’s a different way of working, a different way of thinking. When you do work with other people, you have to figure out a way to communicate what’s in your head.

C: So you do your own editing? Post and everything?

J: I do everything except for the sound mix at the end. That’s pretty important. I tend to work with the same person who does the sound mixes. I think it’s in the last couple of years that we've fine-tuned our process. I see him as a collaborator, but I edit the films and shoot them and pretty much everything else besides the sound design I do alone. So basically, I will get everything to as close to done as possible, and then we’ll work together on the sound mix. And sometimes, things will change, edits will change in that process. It’s still a pretty creative process. It has become increasingly integral. Because I don’t know how to work with Protools. Sometimes I think “I should just learn that” and figure out how to do these things, but I really appreciate having this period after having figured out what the film is to work with someone else on perfecting it.

C: Do you think you have a favorite piece so far, or something that you’re really attached to more than others?

J: Well, I get attached to whatever I just finished.

C: You sent me A Past of Plank and Nail, The Blazing World, The Making and Unmaking of the Earth, Into the Canyon, and Goodbye, Thelma.

J: Right, I like those films. I just finished Goodbye, Thelma, and right now that’s maybe my favorite. It’s hard because you change as a maker and now I’d do the older films differently. Now, five or six years later I probably wouldn't even make those films. But you have to really care about a film to spend all that time watching and rewatching and rewatching and rewatching. But Goodbye, Thelma--there's a certain combination of elements to it. I feel like there’s something about how it’s put together that gave me the feeling that it did what I wanted it to do.

C: Is there anything in particular you want people to get out of it? Specifically Goodbye, Thelma, but also most of your other works?

J: Goodbye, Thelma was a lot about fear and trying to figure out what’s a projection and what’s real.

C: Because that, to me, felt like the most narratively driven, of the things that I saw, instead of that poetic pacing. It felt like it had a definitive structure and a definitive message that’s less interpretive and more given.

J: In some ways, I think it’s more accessible. But I also hope that it’s more open in other ways. There’s this one moment when this woman is warning me-- or the character-- to be careful. There are things like that, and the way we create fear for each other. And there’s the yearning to have the experience you’re having and not be frightened away. So my hope for that movie is that there’s complexity, and that it can open up some more conversation about fear. I’m wanting to use my experience to bring some complexity, specificity, and even ambivalence to the conversation. It’s always going to be limited by who I am, my identity, the privileges that I do or don’t have. Being a personal filmmaker lets me use my experience to open up things that people don’t share or talk about. But I’m also setting up a specific person, and that has all of those things that a specific person has. And that’s something that’s important to me. My experience isn’t generalizable. It’s not representative. I’m hoping that it’s taken as an offering to talk or think about some things--an opportunity for people to think about those things for themselves in their own lives.

C: How did you come to find Thelma & Louise as something you wanted to manipulate? What attracts you to certain works that you know you want to take them and make something out of them?

J: It was a film I’d heard about so many times but I’d never actually seen it. But when I finally watched it, maybe 6 years ago, I really appreciated it. But I also had other kinds of feelings... But it was interesting to me, because a couple of years ago I was doing a lot of traveling, and I continually had people referencing this film. People were connecting me to this film, and I was really confused as to what people were conjuring in their minds. Because it seemed kind of ominous to me, kind of scary, because you know that Thelma is raped, that Louise shoots this man, that they commit suicide at the end. It has a spirit of fearlessness at the end, and kind of moving beyond fear, and that’s what I appreciated about it, the way they decide to have the experience they want to have, no matter what. That’s why I appreciate the movie, but it was kind of disturbing to me that this movie was conjured for so many different people in relation to my own journeys.

I’m interested in how cinema exists in our minds and in our lives. Part of the narrative clearly stayed with a lot of people, but they also erased a lot of negative parts of the narrative. It actually was a film that I was thinking about as I was having my own experiences. It was a movie that I was already thinking about, and there were other things I was reading and watching, but for some reason Thelma & Louise seemed like a movie to revisit. And I wanted them to not die at the end, and I was thinking about the fear that I experienced, it feels like I can’t even say it, that nothing bad happened to me. But that’s not the case for everyone.

For Blazing World, I was thinking about Winona Ryder and Girl, Interrupted. I don’t think it was actually my favorite movie in high school, I say in the film that it was, but it was really a way to get at these ideas. That’s why I hold onto things that other people might not like, or might be a little dismissive of. I don’t think Girl, Interrupted is a great film, but I still appreciated it and found that it was rich for my purposes.

C: It’s tragic.

J: Yeah, it is, but what interested me about it was this sort of collapsing of fiction and reality for Winona Ryder as a person and as a character. When I was thinking about myself as a very depressed adolescent, there were things that I watched or read that I identified with, even if they weren’t teaching me about them, I could see that there was someone else. That’s where Blazing World came from, for me.

With The Making and Unmaking of the Earth, it was more about the idea. It’s definitely more of an abstract movie. Some people just go “what is this?” But for me it was about how we project onto things, and how our bodies calcify experiences or even these mysterious things that happen to us that are buried, and their reasons are buried inside of us. And we have these weird symptoms. I was interested in these psychosomatic experiences, and that’s how I found earth science footage, thinking about what’s buried and how feelings materialize. Ultimately it’s whatever lets me get at the idea. There’s always a process of figuring out what materials will let me approach an idea.

C: What was your support system starting out? Did you have one, or were you mostly on your own?

J: What I find more and more is that it’s really just my close friends who I share work with while I’m making it, or who are sometimes along for the ride, helping out. I don’t know if I can say it’s the best way, but for the most part, I’m on my own. I do have friends with valued opinions who are always encouraging, and sometimes critical but in a way that’s encouraging. But I’ve become more private and protective of my process.

Really, it becomes clearer to me as I get older, whether I make something or don’t make something, it’s my own choice. So there’s a real act of will on my own part and feeling like it's important to me, and that’s something that no one else can help you with. It’s something that you have to clarify for yourself, if it's important to you, whether people are going to pay attention or not. There are some movies I’ve made where people are really interested and into it, and other movies I’ve made where nobody really notices. But when I’m making something, everything is equally interesting, so I don’t have great perspective on what’s gonna be super successful at a film festival or something. I’ve made it so that I’ve had to do it for myself, and I’ve decided that this is important for me. I’ve had to be my own advocate, and treat it all very seriously. Otherwise it doesn’t happen.

It’s better when people talk about how hard it is to get stuff going. There’s so much I love about filmmaking, but there are also parts that are really hard and unfair for women and people of color, and really for anyone without money. A few years ago I read this NYT article about this filmmaker who I’ve always admired, a narrative fiction filmmaker named Kelly Reichardt. It was when her film Certain Women came out. It was really crazy to me because she was talking about how she didn’t have money, and how she slept on her friends couches, and how it was hard to get funding for her films. And this is one of the best filmmakers, in my opinion, making films today.

So it blew my mind that that’s where Kelly Reichardt is, and she makes these amazing movies. It puts things into perspective. It made me really sad, but it also gave me this confirmation that there are a lot of systems that are really broken, or that never really worked. And it’s not necessarily people who are making really great work who are getting the support that they need. This is not a meritocracy. But there’s something about calling a spade a spade, which makes it so people who aren’t getting the support they need don’t have to personalize it as much. It’s not Kelly Reichardt’s fault that it’s a difficult process to get her work made. It’s a lot of other factors. But ultimately, if it’s a thing you want to do, you figure out how to keep doing it.

C: That’s totally fair. If it’s passion, you have to figure out a way to follow it.

J: I think it’s a personal act, and there’s a hope that the thing you made will resonate beyond yourself.