Kara Herold

AW: How did you get involved in filmmaking?

KH: I went to UCLA as an undergraduate and I took the women's studies class women studies 101 and in that class we saw a lot of films, one of them being Rosie the Riveter. It's really great but it’s the style of filmmaking that I adopted from the filmmaker, Connie Fields. She uses interviews and collage-type material as well - not to the same extent that I do but I think that was a huge influence on me. I was like, “Oh I can do social justice/activism through filmmaking!” Because I'm a terrible public speaker so I didn’t want to run for president. But it just seemed like filmmaking was something that was within my reach a little bit.

Then I went to a film class at UCLA, and I had no technical background. We were looking at sixteen millimeter cameras and I was the only woman in the class and I had no technical background. I’m just like, “Nope, not doing this,” which is terrible, but that was my reaction to it. So I sort of dropped the idea of filmmaking at that point because of feeling overwhelmed with the technology. But then I took a lot of film studies classes at UCLA - and there were a lot of them, like the history of the horror film, and the musical, and German propaganda films, and I was like, “Oh that's what I want to do: film studies!”

I got a job as a production assistant working on Hollywood films as just a summer job. So my job was basically to pour M&Ms for people. You know, just like the lowest of the totem pole! I just remember very clearly a day when all I did was refill the M&M bowl. But I did other things. Like I was a runner and I delivered VHS tapes to actors, which was kind of fun because it was before the internet, so everything was physical. And so my job was just to drive dailies to the actor’s houses. And then I worked on a lot of music videos. And again I was kind of overwhelmed. I knew I wanted to get involved in production but I was overwhelmed by the technology. So I decided at that point that I was just going to go to grad school in film production so that I could learn the technology. I applied to schools all over the place but I picked San Francisco just because of the city and because of San Francisco State.

I always loved San Francisco and I had no idea that it was, at the time, a film school that focused on experimental and documentary filmmaking. I didn't take one screenwriting class and there was no cinematography class. So a lot of the films that we watched were by women because a lot of experimental filmmakers and a lot of documentary filmmakers are women. Also experimental filmmaking was a practice that you could do with a small crew, or you could do it by yourself. Actually in my film program, my grad program was all women which was really random: it never happened any other year but my particular year. We were thirteen women and there were a lot of older women in the program. I was like 23 but there were people who were in their 30s which to me was an older woman then! There were people in their thirties and forties in the program and they were already identified as feminist filmmakers and they'd picked San Francisco State very consciously as a place where they could refine their craft as feminist filmmakers.

So it was actually a stroke of luck for me that I picked that film school. That for all the wrong reasons, I just liked San Francisco. But I got a really great education at San Francisco State, actually more because of my classmates than anyone else. And it was the early nineties in San Francisco when it was cheap, and there was a lot of punk rock that was still thriving. There was a punk rock music scene, and also an independent media, with the idea that you don't have to have the resources, you don't have to have the skill even. The whole thing was just like your voice is important and you should get it out there!

Out of the punk rock movement there were riot grrrls. They were just kind of like, “F*** the boys, they're excluding us from playing music.” So it was this whole underground feminist punk rock movement, where the woman produced their own magazines and they created their own zines and they produce their own films. It was kind of like another lucky thing that happened: that I lived in San Francisco at the time when this was happening. And so I decided to make a movie about riot grrrls because they were inspirational to me, but then I ended up just making a film about zines because riot grrrls was just too big for a student project.

So those riot grrrls were also sort of my teachers, along with all the women in my film program. I got sort of the confidence from the punk rock riot grrrls. Like - it doesn't matter how great you are at cinematography, it doesn't matter of how great of a writer you are, you just need to do it. Don't question your validity. That was a really strong message coming to me from other people my own age. They weren't teachers, but they were my peers.

So then I just continued on, because like with every film I make, I make so many mistakes that I want to fix them in the next film. Or I want to get better in the next film. So that's kind of like the motivation to keep me going is just to learn something new. Also my livelihood is now wrapped up into filmmaking because I'm a professor, so I have to continue making films whether I want to or not! Definitely once I left Hollywood in my early twenties, I never went back. I never felt that strong pull of “I want to join the mainstream cinema” because there's so many more interesting things happening on the fringes, that I just thought the fringes were a good place for me to make films.

AW: Did you always identify yourself as a feminist filmmaker or, like as you said, did that develop through meeting the other women in your graduate program?

KH: Well I always identified as a feminist from a young age just because my mom identified as a feminist. Although that may be hard for you to believe after seeing my mom! My mom and my dad were both feminists. They were very conscious of gender neutral toys for Christmas, even if I wanted the Barbie, I didn't get the Barbie. Or they read us feminist fairy tales where the princess would leave the prince and teach literacy to the castle workers, that was one that I remember..

I was also very aware of being treated like a girl on the Hollywood film sets, and I was aware of a lot of the prejudice. Like the way that I made a living when I went to grad school in San Francisco is I worked for the River Motion Picture Union so I developed my technical skills while working for IARSE, which is the motion picture union in San Francisco. Even now I go back in the summer and I work for them sometimes, and I just worked on a crew last summer where it was forty men and me. So it's not like things have shifted so drastically on bigger films. Now that I'm older I get a different kind of sexism. It always pissed me off - the way that I was treated, and so I think trying to make films that sort of focus on female voice and issues, especially like Grrlyshow, has always been an interest to me just because I feel like our voices are undermined a lot.

AW: How then would you define the term “feminism” and what does that term mean to you?

KH: I think for me that it’s the belief of the general definition that is simple: that women are equal and should have equal opportunities, both institutionally and also socially and culturally. I think we have a long way to go because there is not equal representation of women in advertising, and the film industry, and politics. Things are still very gendered and so I guess for me it’s just having that innate sort of belief that these gender roles and perceptions of difference and abilities should be challenged and questioned.

AW: Back to your films, what is your process for acquiring the animations, drawings, and found footage that appear in your earlier works like Grrlyshow? And do you have a team that helps you with any of that?

KH: Oh no it’s all me! In San Francisco there's a very strong tradition for people who use found footage. Actually, it’s part of the post philosophy of reusing materials that are at your fingertips as opposed to spending tons of money. There are a lot of people that make found footage films who I really like, one of them is Su Friedrich. She's made a lot of found footage films and there is this one that I really like called, Sink or Swim. Then there's some other San Francisco filmmakers like Jay Rosenblatt and in his films he uses found footage almost all the time. He's super prolific. And there's another found footage filmmaker named Martin Arnold. So there's a lot of male filmmakers that use found footage that are inspirational to me, but there are also some women too.

One of the things that I thought was interesting that a lot of these filmmakers did was they would take the found footage and, through editing, would alter and reappropriate the original footage’s meaning to mean something else. For Grrlyshow, all that found footage was mostly from grooming films geared towards young girls for a proper grooming, how to wear sanitary napkins, or how to have perfect posture. All these films were targeted towards girls in the 60s and 70s, some of which grew up watching. So then I got my hands on the footage of the proper grooming films to re appropriate them to tell a story of girl power. To me it was kind of subversive to do that. Jay Rosenblatt used to teach at De Anza College, which is a community college and when De Anza was throwing out all of their sixteen millimeter films he snagged them and put them in his office. So I asked him if I could look at all of the films that he had on grooming, young girls, and proper etiquette.

Then later, for Bachelorette, 34, all that found footage in that film was marriage and dating films mostly. Like how to have a good relationship or getting married and all these instructional videos for young men on how to date. So he let me borrow all of his films and cut out scenes and then I transferred them to video and gave the films back to him. By the time Bachelorette, 34 came around, there was the Prelinger Archives. Rick Prelinger teaches at UC Santa Cruz, and has been collecting found footage forever and he has an archive called the Prelinger Archives which he's put online. So now it's super easy to just download the found footage and use it. A lot of the stuff and Bachelorette, 34 is from there too. So I was inspired by other filmmakers who were doing that kind of work of re appropriating. And then Craig Baldwin has an archive in the Mission a few blocks from me in San Francisco and he makes found footage films too. It's kind of like there's a group of filmmakers who make found footage films, and then I just loved that practice so then I just decided to do that.

The illustrations, unfortunately, I do not draw. I wish I did. But the women who did the illustrations [in Grrlyshow] is the author of Bitch magazine and then we just continued to sort of collaborate. She doesn't illustrate for a living or anything like that. She just does it for my films and sometimes for Bitch magazine, but mostly she's busy editing that magazine which is a full time job. The animations I do myself too. Although with 39 ½ I hope to hire a woman who did the animations for my friend who made this film about Wonder Woman, Kristy Guevara Flanagan. So I kind of want that woman to clean up my animations and make them even better but we'll see if I am able to get the funding for that!

AW: In Bachelorette, 34 and your upcoming feature [39 ½] you utilize your relationship with your mother as a sort of catalyst to critique bigger social and cultural expectations for women. You were kind of getting at this earlier but I was curious whether or not your mother was ever involved in feminist movements, like in the sixties and seventies? And how that really impacts her viewing of your current feminist agenda and work?

KH: Well my mother is from southeast Kansas, where all of my relatives in that area are Fundamentalist Baptists. So you can imagine feminism never really reached that region of the country. But my mom and dad, in their early 20s, moved to California for that reason. Not to find feminism, but just to get out of that sort of oppressive fundamentalist culture. My mom had my sister and me when she was like twenty, she was really young. She said when she read Ms. magazine, it totally changed her life and she was a subscriber ever since the very first issue. But she never participated in any movements because she didn't really have time. She had two very small children and was working full time so she just said she appreciated it. She also lived in a small town where there were no black marches happening and a lot of the big feminist movements happened in New York City or San Francisco or LA or other big cities but she was always in a small town. So I think she identified as a feminist, and thought what they were doing was great but she didn't participate or march or anything like that. Now she's like constantly calling senators. Every day she calls like five senators because she's totally pissed off at was going on right now.

I think with Bachlorette, 34 she was a little embarrassed because I showed one side of her and to rectify that a little bit I did this performance piece that was a multimedia performance. I only performed it twice: I looked at my mother, and I compared the 1970s feminism to my own feminism and how that relates to labor and perceptions of labor. Right now I'm a professor and that's her biggest dream for me: to be a professor. She just thinks that it’s the most amazing thing. For me I'm thinking being a professor takes up all my time! I just want to sit in the projection booth and project films and make my movies on the side, something that maybe isn't as valued. As a woman in the workplace, I've broken the glass ceiling according to her, because that’s super important to her. But I don't have that same agenda for myself. Even though, here I am, but I don't place the same sort of value on it that she does. When she was young there were no options for her really, except to be an elementary school teacher or a nurse or a secretary. Those were her three options. That was what the performance piece is about. She kind of comes off as very intelligent and articulate about feminism and everything in that piece. I might have to revisit it one day and make it a film someday so she doesn’t look so one dimensional as she does in my movies!

AW: So what are your main goals with these two films, Bachelorette, 34 and 39 ½? And what do you hope an audience takes away from it?

KH: Well in the same way that I was inspired by found footage films, I really was inspired by autobiographical people who made autobiographical films. And some of them are those same people, like Jay Rosenblatt and Su Friedrich. I mentioned before they told their autobiographical films through found footage and the idea was that the found footage would sort of universalize the themes, as opposed to putting yourself in it. There's another autobiographical filmmaker who I love. His name is Caveh Zahedi and I just think that he uses humor in a great way and he’s really honest about some of his flaws. His idea of autobiographical thinking was that he doesn't see himself represented in the mainstream media so he feels he just needs to tell his own story so then that voice is out there. It's kind of like what the riot grrrls were saying.

It's interesting that I've chosen, as a feminist filmmaker, to make films about marriage and kids because I'm not married and I don't have kids. I think it's a way of dealing with these super huge cultural institutions that, somehow, if you are not part of the club, you are made to feel like a failure. I internalized that so I think by making these films it was a way for me to challenge what I felt like was kind of oppressing me. And the same thing with Grrlyshow: that's what I've done with all my films. All these sort of broad mainstream ideas of how women should live their lives: I make films to kind of crack away at that. Mostly just to make myself feel better!

One of the things with Bachelorette, 34, and also with 39 ½, is that fifty percent of the country is single. Or there's tons of women in their 30s and 40s who are unable to have kids because they waited too long. And there’s tons of women in their 30s and 40s that decided they don't ever want kids! So I guess it's kind of a documentary in that respect. This is what's happening to me and it's also happening with a bunch of other people too. It's like this is just one slice of life, of a current moment in history where the traditional framework for women isn't the same as it has been for like two thousand years or however long. Things are changing. In that way I kind of see 39 ½ as a documentary too cause it's a document and it's of true traditional filmmaking that it actually happened. Part of me is kind of embarrassed too. Like, “Oh my god this whole film was just about a woman wanting to have a kid!” I should have picked something more urgent and political and this is fluffy. But it was also something that I was dealing with emotionally and I think I felt pretty isolated. My character goes through sperm banks and this whole journey of trying to have a kid on your own and it’s kind of isolating. Yet there's a quite a few people doing that, so maybe it's a way of not feeling so alone and also making other people not feel so embarrassed or ashamed by living an alternative trajectory through life. That's what I'm hoping people will take from it as opposed to, “Oh this is just like fluffy film.” I go back and forth on hating the film and other times I’ll say, “Well maybe it's not so bad.”

AW: On that note, what made you decide to make 39 ½ into a narrative film while most of your other work is collage work? Was this to appeal to a bigger audience or was it more of an artistic choice?

KH: I started doing it as more of a hybrid film, where it was documentary and narrative so I shot tons of documentary footage of the casting process, inviting my real family members to come to New York City to cast themselves. I think that's still going to be a film, and maybe even a better one because it's funny. My mom, she's just funnier than my fictional representation of my mom. I kind of want to go back to my real mom because she's just better. But you know that was also just kind of like an interesting process of storytelling and who was telling the story. Because as the actors were reading the scripted narrative that I gave them, my mom was like, “No, it didn't happen that way!” So there's a challenge of life memories and storytelling. I think I wanted to try something with the actors because I had never done it. My mom was just getting tired too. She's like, “I don't want to keep doing interviews, I want to go to travel!” So she kind of quit on me, like, “I'm living to Europe this summer, forget it.”

Here at Syracuse University all I do is teach fictional filmmaking. I teach screenwriting, I teach fictional storytelling, cinematic storytelling, so I thought maybe I should make one too. Then one of my colleagues who I'm really close with at Syracuse University is a cinematographer. I produced his film and he shot mine. So I’ve taken advantage of the collaborators that are around me. He really wanted to shoot something too so it kind of worked out!

AW: Although 39 ½ is still in production, I feel that you named it that because you feel fear surrounding the year forty and what that will bring. Do you believe that the idea of success through marriage that keeps getting brought up in your work is more of a generational desire and do you think it's beginning to phase itself out? Do you ever even find yourself seeking fulfillment through marriage or children?

KH: When I showed 39 ½ I showed the film in different places. When I showed it in San Francisco a lot of people were like, “I can't believe your mom's like that. My mom was never like that!” I kind of feel like in some respects it's generational but it's also location. My parents are not from a big city, they're from southeast Kansas where everybody's married and so I kinda feel like in Bachelorette, 34 it might've been an issue in the 60s but because my parents were from a particular region of the world, it was different. It's a topic that's been discussed by filmmakers a generation prior to me so I certainly was not on the cutting edge of that by any means, but it worked because my mom is such a strong character. 39 ½ I feel is pretty timely though with alternative methods. People having the options now to be single and to have kids, or to be lesbians and have kids. Alternative family structures are exploding everywhere. I went to Sweden ten years ago and there’s such good medical care there that half the women that are having kids are single, it's totally normal. The trajectory of marriage and kids isn't even a thing. Like child care, all these hurdles you face as a single woman in the states doesn't exist there.

In 39 ½, my protagonist was actually unable to have a kid. It's a sad but also an uplifting ending, because there’s other things that happen. But that was really sad for me because it was something I really wanted to be able to do and I tried really hard to. I still kind of mourn that failure. But I was also in total denial in my 30s that I’d better get going. I was just too caught up in my own life, doing what I was doing, that I didn't say, “Oh I should have kids because time's running out.” My friend Meg, who’s a therapist, she’s like, “Kara, if you really wanted to have kids you would have done it earlier. So maybe there is a part of you that didn't.” Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. Now there's no major pressure to get married so if I meet someone great, if I don't that’s ok. It's not wrapped up with having kids anymore so maybe I could meet someone when I'm sixty. There's no rush. And I don't base happiness or a sense success or failure around the relationship, but I did more around having kids. I really like kids so that’s something that I wanted for myself: to be a mom.

AW: Did seeing your films sway your parents' views about you not being married or having kids?

KH: Yeah, my mom. At the Bachelorette, 34 premier, my mom was super embarrassed. She's like, “I can't believe I said all those things!” And then she's like, “Okay I'm totally over it.” So yeah it kinda worked, but that wasn't necessarily my intention. They don't even talk about it anymore. But my niece who’s twenty has this boyfriend, and my parents were like, “No, don't get over wrapped up in him. Go to graduate school.” They were worried that she was getting wrapped up in a young man too soon. They were just like, “No, you're too smart. You've got too much going on. Don't let this this lame guy hold you back.” So they were sort of putting pressure on her in another way, but that's because she was making decisions totally based upon this guy and she was so smart and they were just like, “What are you doing?!”

AW: In Bachelorette, 34, Ms. Powers was portrayed almost like this foreign being that in many ways was far more progressive than a lot of other figures in your story. I was wondering, as a child, what did her life of independence signify to you and does her embodiment of this give you any sense of confidence in your choices and where are you today?

KH: Let’s see, as a kid, I think I felt sorry for her. Even though she was totally cool, I didn't even see that. She was both sort of eccentric but super smart and super cool and she traveled around the world. I don't think I've thought much about her really recently but now you're making me think I should! I think she was a cool role model even though as an eight year old I felt sorry for her, maybe because my parents did. Like, “oh if Ms. Powers could only find love” or whatever they would say about her. Even though she seem perfectly happy and was having affairs over the world, I think she had a whole alternative life going on at my parents didn't know about.