Jodie Mack

Jodie Mack is an experimental animator and educator who works with cameraless technique as well as stop motion in 16 mm films. She has made a vast body of short and feature-length works and the materials dealt with in her films are often handmade, crafty, recycled, reconfigured to explore the reproduction and accessibility of art. Sound and music are integral parts of her filmmaking. She does most of her sound designs, writes and performs songs as well as collaborating with other musicians.

Jodie Mack is Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. Her works have been screened in festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. Her works have also been featured in publications like Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema.

EW:

You have 10 plus years of experience in teaching. Have you always known that you want to go into education?

JM:

I think that, early on, it was one of the first and only mechanisms that I could see as a model for my professors’ life: to be able to make films, inspire students, and create a community. I was really into this idea of lineage. I'm into plants a lot, so I feel like there's a relationship there...and schmaltzy metaphors about spreading seeds. In the beginning, I felt like there was more honor in being involved in education. I think a lot about Walter Benjamin’s “Artists as Cultural Worker” and a lot of the thoughts around that—thinking that art or filmmaking has a more vital role in society than just perpetuating modes of authorship and celebrity, essentially. In many ways, I feel like I can make more impact on society through teaching than I can by just making films. Or at least that's what I thought when I started teaching.

But then when I got there, it's very complicated. The academic institution is one that exists by its very nature in a class division of those who can receive education and those who can't. And there's also echoes of celebrity by the very way the classroom is set up with the idea of one person as a dispenser of knowledge. So I've come to struggle with that later on in my academic career, as I've moved through the ranks. For a long time, I felt like academia was a great place for me because it is a microcosm of society in some ways. You see how resources are allocated and how the power structure works, and it does kind of mirror that of the larger network. But there are lots of complicated things around working in academia. The bottom line is that there are tons of students needing guidance and needing inspiration, so I'm still there.

EW:

You're a filmmaker, an educator, and a curator as well. I think there's an interesting cycle there. Can you talk more about all these diverse roles you have?

JM:

Sure. From the very moment of realizing that experimental film or experimental animation might even be a potential path, there was an immediate understanding: if you want to be an artist and cultural worker, one has to work within the field to push boundaries through their filmmaking, but also try their best to perpetuate a sense of community through contextualizing other films together, or by gathering people together in screenings, or putting audiences in contact with individual artists that they can speak to. I think one of the most powerful things of experimental film is that a lot of times, audiences can interact with the filmmaker and have direct portals into the process of decision making.

I learned about experimental films in Florida. The only place that you could access this type of information there was with one professor working in rural Gainesville, Florida. And I was part of a group of students who got excited about films. We started making our stuff and then almost immediately we banded together with the professor to create a film festival— The Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival. It was so energizing to all of us, and we got to invite all of these people from different places to Gainesville and have them present this work and create an amazing audience that wouldn't know anything about experimental film otherwise. As I learned more and more about experimental animation, I realized what an underrepresented genre this was. Experimental filmmaking alone is a kind of niche. And experimental animation is the niche of the niche, and it’s so obscure. Partially because it's trapped within the ivory tower mode of exchanging information. Even though the modes of experimental animation do interact with popular entertainment, it's not something that a regular citizen would consider. So these events in Florida felt vital.

When I moved to Chicago for graduate school, I was still very much invested in creating that same sort of community and started running the screening series called the Eye and Ear Clinic. I picked up another screening series that had existed historically and started working with the graduate students to put on exhibits and screenings of stuff that the school had in their collections. They have amazing collections like the Video Data Bank and the Flaxman Library collection. But as soon as I started doing that in Chicago, I realized how different that was. It sets up a problem that I still very much feel now that I live in rural Vermont, which is that there is an oversaturation of culture in a lot of cities and cultural deserts everywhere else. I'm thinking of America here— about the perimeter of the country, the coasts, and how culture is so saturated there. We also have a lot of culture in Chicago and some other pockets, but we don't have the vehicles to promote culture in other places. When I started doing things in Chicago, it felt almost like do I need to do this? There's so much stuff going on already. And then, five years later, [I] moved to rural Vermont, where, again, there was nothing happening and putting on these sorts of events was so important for the community.

For me, I feel like I'm just moving through different sets of ideas. Cycling through ideas, sharing things through a screening, talking to an audience or working with students, or making my films are all symbiotic.

EW:

A lot of the materials you used are handmade and are very crafty. What does that mean to you and what's the role of those materials in your work?

JM:

I think my initial attraction to a lot of these materials was governed by the fact that I started working in cameraless modes of 16 millimeter films when I first learned about filmmaking, which is a process that's more related to plastic and fine art than it is to filmmaking. You needed to work with different tools and materials to be able to create images, and with the type of material that you're using, plastic, you need to find translucent things. I've found a lot of tools within craft stores, and one of my first jobs was at a paper crafting store called Paper Zone, where they sold a bunch of paper and different types of knives, scissors, punches and things like that. And all of a sudden, when you're walking through stores like this, you see many different uses for the materials: a piece of tissue paper is no longer something that you're going to put in a gift bag to give to your friend. You realize that light can pass through it, and it has a really interesting texture. And you can begin to imagine what that might look like when activated in motion, through the mechanism of the 16 mm projector. And I also needed to find very small cutting tools. So a lot of paper crafting, specifically scrapbooking materials, are very useful for cameraless filmmaking, as are materials for making jewelry, because everything is so small.

And another necessity when I was very young was financing. I didn't even buy new films. I would have old vinegar syndrome pink film and bleach it in the bathtub to make it clear. And then I worked with things that I could find. Someone had put a covering on the window in the 60s or 70s that had a stained glass pattern on it. And I chiseled it off the window and then used it as material to put on the film. One of my first films is made with stuff like that.

As I mentioned before, a lot of this is happening in Florida, where, again, it's a place with little culture, and it's very new. In comparison to other places in America, taste is very homogenous and lives are very similar. I noticed that outlets for creativity for women were very similar. You see that women, like young mothers, their expression of creativity happens through things like scrapbooking or decorating the home, or going to those social bars where you drink wine and you paint a still life.

But I also noticed that a lot of the same patterns and different decorative motifs that were present within a lot of crafting materials— specifically like wrapping paper, gift bags, things like that— they shared an aesthetic palette with a lot of contemporary painting. So that illuminated [for] me the impossibility of classifying or attributing value to things in the age of contemporary art... since the very moment of bringing a urinal into the gallery or sticking a piece of newspaper on to your fine art collage have presented this lack of boundary and this inability to define something, especially when we're talking about ascribing financial value.

So I like to subvert the use of a lot of craft-based materials. And I've done that in many different forms, be it with a lot of the camera stuff I was talking to you about or a lot of my fabric films. Or this installation side project I have, No Kill Shelter, which découpages an obsolete computer monitor in wrapping paper, which is, again, such an interesting product: a thing that was made to be used once and thrown away.

EW:

I am glad that you mentioned how women have creative outlets to express themselves, and I want to ask you how would you define the terms feminist filmmaking and also experimental. Do you consider yourself and your work feminist? What do these terms mean to you? Do you identify with them? Why or why not?

JM:

I feel like whenever I approach these sorts of ideas, I'm immediately thinking about something like Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” and thinking about this relationship that she poses between a feminist art and a feminine art, where there's art that can be quite brazen and tautological in its feminist agenda, and then other types of art that are inherently feminine, but in a more subtle way. And I actually happen to believe that animation is one of the ultimate feminine art forms, by virtue of its definition: to animate is to give life to something, to produce life, which I think is an inherently feminine trait.

And then animation is also highly misunderstood in the same way that women are, in the sense that it's supposed to be for kids. It's not given the power that it deserves. And it's considered a subset of cinema, where historically and ontologically, live action cinema is actually a subset of animation. Because animation created the whole apparatus. Or we could think of it as two absolutely different things, because a live action goal is to capture reality, and animation is to create a new reality, create a new life.

So I do feel like there's something inherently feminine about my work, specifically in relation to the motion and illusion that's created by virtue of speed, and the new lives or energies that are created by the succession of images, which I think of in two different ways: continuous discontinuity and discontinuous continuity, where you're forcing motion upon things that might not otherwise have a relationship sequentially.

But then I also do think that there are a lot of questions about the reflective and reciprocal relationship to a contemporary woman's definition of her own femininity, by virtue of the materials with which she interacts. You could learn a lot about a woman through her closet and learn a lot about the conception of gender through the patterns within something like fabric, or decorative materials, bedsheets, something like that. These things are at one decorative fluff throwaway objects, but they also reveal a lot about how we codify gender.

EW:

How would you define the term experimental?

JM:

I feel like the whole idea of creating a genre of experimental film, or historicizing in any way, ultimately prevents new forms from emerging. It's funny, because you say “experimental film,” and I think of so many pre-existing genres within that, like a diary film or docufiction or an abstract film and all the different weight that these different traditions carry.

But I would define experimental film as something that teaches me what experimental is in the first place, something that really surprises me— to bring us back to the idea of curating. I did a screening over the summer to a community of senior citizens around the stars and space exploration, and they were all watching a bunch of silent studies of the sky. And we were able to make this beautiful comparison between a scientist and an experimental filmmaker and the idea of observation...and the experimental filmmaker being a sort of collector of observations. A collector and a representer to come to some new experience in some way. And, as I go on in my filmmaking, the goal of my cinema is to try and really push this idea of a purely cinematic possibility that's non-lingual.

EW:

What interests you in animation, especially in experimental animation specifically?

JM:

It was a long trajectory of finding the cameraless method of filmmaking that I mentioned earlier, and then realizing, wow, there's this whole other world around there with film that you can expose and chemicals that you can use to develop them. Lenses, and optical printing, and there are so many options here. But I do think one of my first draws to the medium was the fact that it was non-lingual or pre-lingual or post-lingual. A lot of experimental animation gets lumped together with choreography and dance or painting. It didn't have the same narrative weight that live action filmmaking carried, and that was exciting. I was passionate about the idea of abstract filmmaking because I believed in this notion of purity, and that was at the same time as thinking that getting into academia would be the ethical way to go. But later on, as I moved along in the field of experimental animation, I also became critical of it, because I grew up within a time where techniques of experimental animation had already been sucked up and represented through mainstream media like music videos, rave culture backdrops for musical performances, all types of motion graphics.

So I always wondered if there was a way to push the medium beyond being purely decorative, which is why I started working with other craft materials as well, because I feel like those carry a lot of different conceptual weights. Later, from working through textiles and a lot of the patterns that are carried within textiles, I was taken to a place that redefined abstraction altogether for me. Seeing it not as a pure form, but one that is heavily loaded with a long history of reflective appropriation, especially as a lot of the textiles carry motifs that mean nothing to someone and a series of different things to others depending on which context they come from. Thinking about the relationship between contemporary painting and patterns that show up on a suitcase at TJ Maxx or something like that. There's a very complex relationship there that I think experimental animation is a great place to explore. But as I move on, I do see the loaded history— that it's a very white male medium. That it is for the most part, in America, taught in private schools. It's very hard to access. Even with the internet now, it's like, how do you know to search for it? It's a learned language that is not as in communication with society as I would like it.

EW:

I'm going back to the feminist filmmaking topic and I want to talk about your film Lilly. Because in the whole feminist filmmaking process, one big part is about how you treat your documentary subjects. And for this film, I feel like it's a documentary. So I want to ask if the interviewees or documentary participants have something to say over how you present videos and images, visually.

JM:

Lilly is a film about my grandmother, who just died. RIP and her funeral is tomorrow in London.

This is the film that I made as soon as I realized that abstract animation had limits of being regarded as decorative, or like screensaver, or trippy. And I wondered, is it not the medium is the message? Is it the material is the message? What would happen if I took these photo negatives and started to create abstract images with them because they're already not abstract, because they're carrying representation within them? This started with the suggestion of my mom: “why don't you make a documentary about your grandmother's experience, losing her whole family in a bomb during World War Two?” And this is the way I approached it. My family doesn't have the language for experimental films, so I think they liked this film, but they probably imagined that it would be very different than it was.

For me, the process of making the film illuminated some of the possibilities and problems of animated documentaries, going back to the whole question of capturing reality versus creating reality. I created a scene of the house getting bombed with photo negatives, fire, explosion, and the graves popping up. I was able to condense a lot of what my grandmother was talking about in the interview, a lyrical representation of what had happened to her. Already at that point, this idea of representing a story is difficult. There's so much more to say than what she's saying, and what is the fine line between paying tribute to her and exploiting.

Taking into consideration what happened, I feel like making that film was a healing experience for a lot of the people in our family. Because it's not something my grandmother talks about. I think a lot of the people in Eastern London are carrying cyclical and generational trauma. Everyone goes back to losing the war, certain parts of the city being a war zone, and learning how to deal with your emotions when society doesn't believe that therapy is a thing for regular people. I think that British people considering what happened is a healing process.

EW:

Your earlier work such as Untitled (for R.), Two-Hundred Feet, Ebullition, A Joy, and All Stars, feature patterns that are more “traceable” as the patterns evolve from previous images, and there are more repetitions such as similar color and shape-changing of their position in the film. Compare that to your more recent works like Undertone Overture, Razzle Dazzle, Wasteland No. 1: Ardent Verdant. The patterns are, for lack of a better word, less predictable, compared to the previous ones. Like Undertone Overture is focusing on tie-dye but the patterns are somewhat more elusive. Can you talk more about your pattern evolution?

JM:

The earlier films you mentioned, except for Untitled (for R.), were made in the cameraless technique that I told you about. I was just starting, and didn't even realize the perceptual possibility of alternating something with color, something from frame to frame. I was understanding and feeling out animation as a sequential art form at its building blocks. You want to make the sunset, so you have a circle and then you put it a little bit lower the next frame and a little bit lower; you're focusing on that kind of sequence.

But the projection realities of 16 mm cameraless filmmaking are that you're making an image on this small piece of plastic. You can't put one frame on top of the next because they're all connected. So you're never perfectly registered. 16 mm has this beautiful metabolism and energy that is constantly shaking when you're working in the cameraless technique. Because you’re never putting the thing in the same place. The texture and the texture of the background didn't mark onto the frame in the same way. There could be a tape over your piece of plastic that you stuck on to the film that's creating this beautiful effervescence. That's why that film was called Ebullition, because it's boiling with effervescent energy.

And then when I moved to a new technique, stop motion, I would still use the same logic. Take the circle and move it down. I want to make someone move their hand so I will take the hand, move it a little and move it a little bit using the same piece each time in the sequence. I think this is the preferred way to go if your goal is to create super realistic, almost rotoscoping portraits. But then I became interested in the films of people like Paul Sharits and Robert Breer, who were working with the idea of animation sequence at a different level. So now it's no longer like, what happens when I move the sun down a little bit using the same piece, it's like, what happens when I start to exploit the strobing mechanism of the projector to force animation upon the eye, because it's going to move. It's moving so fast that it's gonna move, no matter what. And that's what I was getting at when I was talking about this difference between continuous discontinuity and discontinuous continuity. You mentioned the film Razzle Dazzle, and I would say that, in this film, working with all kinds of beaded shiny fabrics is working within a discontinuous continuity mode, because it's a different fabric each time. There isn't continuity from frame to frame, but there's continuity within the material.

Then with a film like Wasteland No. 1: Ardent Verdant, working with two very different things in stroboscopic sequence: images of flowers and images of computer chips. A lot of my work has started to ask what happens when you sequence very different things. What are the illusions that you can produce through experiments with that?

EW:

Comparing three of your longer works, Yard Work is Hard Work, Dusty Stacks of Mom, and The Grand Bizarre, I want to ask you about the sound and music in these films. How did Yard Work is Hard Work come together? Did you write the songs first and make the visuals fit into the song? For Dusty Stacks of Mom, there’s the Pink Floyd album and also live performance when you show the film. For The Grand Bizarre, did you compose the music and add the sound to the film after? How do you approach sound and music in these longer works of yours? How do you see that shape your visuals as well?

JM:

Sound kind of evolved in different ways throughout those films. Looking back on them, I come to the conclusion that each one builds upon the one that comes before. With Yard Work is Hard Work, the songs were written, and the movie was shot in order, and the magazine cutouts that were there were 95% recycled. I was getting magazines from Craigslist and sending out emails to my professors, fellow students, and digging in the trash and whatever. I would just have these big sessions where I would just go through all the magazines and start ripping things out before they would be cut. So a lot of the stuff within the plot is governed by magazine cutouts that I found. Finding a bunch of wedding rings serves to shoot this song about marriage, and the plot of the Blue House that they live in, and the contest that they enter. All that stuff grew out of the cutouts that I found. I would write a song and then time it out. I'd never shot any animation before and I'd never taken an animation class. I didn't really understand time or music. Just recorded these little demos and timed out the animation to the demos and shot the animation. There's very little extra film. I didn't have a very big shooting ratio at all for that movie. I think I might have shot like five more minutes than it actually is. Because everything was just meticulously timed out to a pre-existing soundtrack.

Then, in Dusty Stacks of Mom: the visuals for that movie were inspired by Yard Work is Hard Work in some ways, because I was working with all this printed recycled material. It was a no brainer that if my mom's poster warehouse was going out of business that I needed to animate that, because of all that printed material. Obviously, there was a relationship there as to why I would even be attracted to printed material in the first place. My parents were printers as I was growing up, and I shot a little bit of footage for that and I didn't really know what to do with it. I was thinking, how do I make a documentary about this that's not a documentary as we would think about it? Then, at a certain point, I had the idea to turn it into Dark Side of the Moon and then delegated the production of the music. So I made a couple of the songs in that movie, and then sent out songs to people and did these mini commissions, asking, “can you please do the first song, make it whatever style you want, but please adhere to the timing of the original album?” Once I knew I was going to go along with the album, I used the timing of the original album to be able to shoot the animation while people were in other places making the actual music. I didn't want to shoot more than I needed, especially with my mom. So all those scenes were meticulously timed out in advance.

Then, in The Grand Bizarre, I compose probably like 85, 90% of the music. The approach to sound was a lot more complex and nuanced. In Yard Work is Hard Work, we rely on language to convey information. Whereas by the time I got to The Grand Bizarre, the idea of the definition of language, or the function of language, or the idea of how language transmits itself through the global economy, and how the textiles were once textiles, but also language and musical scores became part of both my formal and conceptual journey. So for the most part that film doesn't have any words, yet does use parts of speech, along with other diegetic sounds as musical elements within the film. So there are songs with birds and sewing machines and wind. There's also a bunch of songs with this thing called the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is all the phonemes that are possible with the human voice that linguists work with to map out where these things coexist in different languages. So the approach to The Grand Bizarre was kind of schematic, and I wanted to make this movie that was about the relationships between these different things. So the sound within that movie is definitely related to a lot of my questions around our conceptions of music. What is music and what is sound? How does the different organization of different components reveal new wholes? Which is a similar analogy that you could use between language, rhythm and music, or the patterns in the textiles themselves by virtue of phoneme word syntax, thread motif pattern, beat bar song, etc. These three entities were all a product of this relationship between components and systems and how reorganizing them impacts the way that we define them, or our capacity to even be able to define them.

EW:

Some of your films are collaborations. Some of them you basically did everything yourself. Like The Grand Bizarre, which is really impressive. Some of my favorites are collaboration music videos like Goody Goody and Curses. I wanted to ask what’s the process for you? Do you prefer collaboration or working on your own?

JM:

I think that there are benefits for working alone and working with other people.

When I have the energy and I can make really big things happen with other people's help, it's really exciting. I think animation in general is a very isolating process, because it demands so much time. So I've really enjoyed moments of collaboration. And working with music, making music videos for musicians, can be really fun, because you can work out visual ideas without being responsible for the soundtrack. It's fun to make a visual of someone else's vision. And I might work with people more if I could have more support.

But right now, I basically make my films with an apprenticeship mode, and the most help I get is from people that are working for me as students, which I think is also a good process for them. I think they learn a lot. I think students that work with me and then come into my classes are some of the best because they've just learned that hustle, about cultivating the hustle. I think sometimes students don't realize that the only thing separating them from them and what they want to do is doing it.

EW:

Most of your works are under 10 minutes. And I want to ask you why, and about the process of you making shorter forms of films.

JM:

I think a lot of my shorts are short because I have been invested within this tradition of visual music. I think a lot about the standards of durations that we have for things like the standard time of a song and the standard time of a film...the standard time of a feature versus a short. I was also for a long time very invested in the constraint of the materials in which I was working. So I have films that are made with one roll of film— two minutes and 45 seconds. Or films that are made with two rolls of film— five minutes and 15 seconds, and three rolls of film, etc. Nothing more and nothing less. This is the material that you're working with.

But it's also important to note that you mentioned Yard Work is Hard Work, Dusty Stacks of Mom, and The Grand Bizarre, and the work time for all those films totals 10 years. And all of the other shorts were made at the same time as the production for those films. So, have I made 26 films or have I actually only made three films? I think that all three of the longer films are more accessible. Yet I think that their quest for accessibility or their funneling through these ideas relates to a lot of the questions that are present within the shorter films.

EW:

I’ve noticed that the economy is a topic that you’ve explored throughout many of your films, for example, Yard Work is Hard Work, Dusty Stacks of Mom, New Fancy Foils, Something Between Us, Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant. What are the goals of these films? Do they serve as a warning, a consciousness, or anything at all? Do you think films should be bluntly connected to activism?

JM:

I think the question of whether or not film should be connected to activism is one of the most important questions of our time. I don't think that the impulses of social justice are compatible with modes of authorship that we currently have in place. Being an artist, being a filmmaker is related to being an author, being a voice, and essentially, in our contemporary time, Instagram Facebook— branding yourself. I think a lot about what it means that well-meaning liberals might be posting about climate change on their social media feeds, while not really thinking about how the social media feeds and the machines that we're using to use them are the biggest reasons behind climate change. And our refusal to not really handle the planned obsolescence thing. I think planned obsolescence or obsolescence in general is a big part of my filmmaking, because I'm fascinated by death, and cyclical structures of technology, and what this means for the transmission of culture and knowledge.

So this is all to say that I'm not sure what kinds of social impacts my films can make. But I know that they can. I know that they represent my experience of living in these times, around the issues that they skirt. And in doing so can bring other people to think about these things. But I think it's just something that we're all kind of struggling with right now: we have a lot of complaints, and no strategy.

And that's why experimental film is this really fraught thing for me, because I would like to think that it's cool, punk, and underground. But the very fact that, for the most part, it's only taught within private school is a huge indicator that it's an elite entity, and film in general is a colonial tool. So I don't know how we decolonize this thing that was made for colonialism. It's very complicated.

This interview was conducted on January 30th, 2020 through online calls from Santa Cruz to rural Vermont.

Emily Wang is a film student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has explored various roles in filmmaking and made a fair amount of work as a student filmmaker. Her ultimate goal is to establish a film academy and promote film education in her home country Taiwan.