Kelly Sears

Kelly Sears is an experimental film director and animator who critically examines American political and social issues and history with her unique image interpretation and collage style. Her films, which interpret the contents of found footage and collected images with politics and history, help audiences connect the social problems of the past to those of the present. She specifically criticizes inequality, social biases, and surveillance society in her works. She produced numerous works including Pattern for Survival, The Rancher, Imprinted, Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise, Voice on the Line, The Body Besieged and The Drift,. She also presented her work at various venues, including the The Sundance Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. I had an opportunity to interview Kelly Sears about her thoughts on feminist media and social inequality. During this interview, one can see how she approaches feminist issues and social problems as a director and producer.

This interview was recorded on October 27, 2017 via Skype.

Kylie Bae : Okay, first, I was very impressed when I watched all of your work because I've felt like all your works were very poetic and, in the most of your work, I think you are talking about what is going on in the United States.

Kelly Sears: Uh-huh.

Kyile Bae: I’m an international student. So, I don’t know much about the American politics. However, I could understand what’s going on and I could understand what really you wanted to say in your artwork. So It was amazing to watch your artwork.

Kelly Sears: Thank you. You are from Korea?

Kylie Bae: Yes, I’m from Korea.

Kelly Sears: So you know, I think that maybe you can. Even though the films are anchored within American politics. We are very much at a moment where American politics and Korean politics are coming together and so even if it’s an institutional critique of America as a super power, it still has larger international ramifications.

Kylie Bae: Most of your artworks are related with political issues and what is the most important and relevant feminism political issue to you right now?

Kelly Sears: I think it has to do with all of the legislation that is imposed on women’s bodies, in terms of anything from reproductive health, policies around rape, policies around pay. If you triangulate those three issues, you can see a lot of disempowerment. I am in a place where I have a job that comes with healthcare, but a lot of women don’t. I’m watching Planned Parenthood being shut down and I donate to them monthly. I remember when I just graduated from grad school and I didn’t have a job and healthcare. I went to Planned Parenthood to get check-ups. That’s where some people find out that they have early forms of cancer. I think that it’s a valuable resource in terms of family planning, and a lot of other elements of reproductive health. But it’s really how our bodies are legislated by congress that is mostly not made up of our bodies.

Kylie Bae: You have said this in your previous interview. "When you see a Film 101 syllabus, the filmmakers are almost exclusively white and male.” And this phenomenon, unfortunately, continues. Most major film directors are usually the white male directors. As a woman director and also as an experimental film director, what do you think the reason why this vicious cycle continues?

Kelly Sears: I think it happens at all levels. I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder and I think about women more can be more present in all the levels of filmmaking. I noticed that, in general, this is not the case everytime, that when the tech is brought out, the men run right towards it where the women maybe hold back and they don’t get as much hands-on time. I look for that and I make sure that all my students touch everything, feel comfortable with everything, make myself really available, so that any student is not uncomfortable with the technology. Because that can be demystified very easily. But if that mystification is still there, it might be a barrier.

I’m trying to think about this along this every line, gender, race, and class. We have our students who pay for their equipment. I really tried to make assignments where it’s not going to cost them too much to shoot. This year, I’ve really been thinking about the production texts that I gave to my students. If you think about who writes the production textbooks again, there are plenty of important things that white men say and continue to say. But what I’m asking for with myself and my syllabi that I make is “let’s have more voices” in there. So, I have been working hard to find production texts about cinematography and editing that are written by women, filmmakers of color, and queer filmmakers where technical authority and technical information is not just coming from one place.

I don’t know if this is true for you, but this is what I feel as an educator that students, women and students of color don’t necessarily see themselves reflected in the film curriculum. Last year, I was teaching animation class, I had ended up having three students from China and on a syllabi we were looking at the work of Chinese animator, Lei-Lei. They were so excited because he works with elements of Chinese culture and conformity, and they said “ That’s why we’re here, and we’re trying to get a different kind of education,” and could locate themselves in the class. I hope that my syllabi can do that for a lot of different identities in my class.

But, I feel like that is not how the industry is structured necessarily, and once you leave the classroom, I think the industry predates a moment of women’s lib or civil rights. There are these older power relationships that are still embodied in there. I think a lot of people self-select out, and I think people are given unequal opportunities once they are working in there and some people get promoted up faster. In my class, we talked about who is cast as the lead in the film and who is the audience. They said male, I said “What race is he?” They said, he is white. I said “Okay, what economic class is he?” They said, “Middle class or more”. I said, “ Is he trans or cis, or straight or gay?” They said, “He is straight” I said “does he have any disabilities?”, and they said no. This is who is starring in film and here is the person that is largely carrying all t narrative films. It’s a reflection of the larger system that produces. That is not every film, but it is a lot of films. Films don’t pass the Bechdel test. Women don’t direct as much. I think they are very prevalent in the industry, but they do things like art direction, makeup. There are some totally badass women cinematographers, women directors, women producers, women gaffers, women writers absolutely, but those are not the norm or they just don’t get the same attention. I love seeing a top whatever list of women directors because oftentimes I learn about a new women director.

Kylie Bae: Do you consider yourself as a feminist and do you think you are a feminist artist?

Kelly Sears: I consider myself as feminist: a hundred percent, a hundred and ten percent I consider myself a feminist. When I was your age, I didn’t understand if I was a feminist or not and I thought that feminism was so far, you know, it’s just radical beliefs, but after I had more lived experiences I just started realizing how much bias, harassment and assault I had experienced related to gender. I apporach teaching aiming to distmantle some of those biases. And, I think about this in terms of my gender, I think about this in terms of race, I think about this in terms of sexuality of ability and just think about what these larger institutional systems that we live with how they protect certain classes of people.

When I teach film in my classes, I focus a lot of attention on what happens to the female body. I have a lot of male students. so, when they have narratives or plot devices where women are killed, I have to say, by using this as a form of entertainment and you're actually perpetuating this. I'm going to take you over to what I’m working on right now. I'm animating massage books and I'm thinking about the whole Harvey Weinstein scandal. I'm just thinking about our cinema culture with everything from Cinefamily to what's happening at the Alamo Drafthouse, Fantastic Fest to all these women coming for Harvey Weinstein. I’m thinking a lot about the systemic violence on women bodies. I am working on animating sequential images from massage books that are designed to evoke the healing potentials of massage, and reframing and manipulating these images to address this legacy of sexual violence.

Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Kylie Bae: Yes, I think so. I want to make films in South Korea to let people know about the feminist issues and, so I think I’m a feminist. What do you think about the genre of experimental film? Do you have standards for experimental and non-experimental films?

Kelly Sears: I think a lot of educators are trying to expand what experimental cinema is. If you pick up any experimental cinema book, you largely see a certain kind of canon. How can this cannon be expanded? I think experimental cinema can be many things. I hope in some way that people bring an experimental attitude to whatever film they’re working on if it’s narrative, documentary or animation or camera-less cinema, anything you are experimenting with to tell a story.

Kylie Bae: You have lots of collage artworks. How did you get those collage sources and did you plan shots first or looking for the sources first and edit it later?

Kelly Sears: It’s a combination. There are always the things I want to address in my mind, and there are a couple of different ways that I get material. Currently,. I’ve been buying up a lot of massage books in the Greater Denver area. If you’re looking for massage books, I purchased them all and there’s nothing you can find (laughs).. This film I’m making right now put me out in terms of images, maybe sixty dollars. I can spend sixty dollars and I can make a short film. It’s an economic way to make films instead of having to feed crews and rent cameras, rent lights things like that. But, I’ve also worked with a lot of films. The Drift (https://vimeo.com/17273237), Pattern For Survival (https://vimeo.com/124163256) and The Body Besieged(https://vimeo.com/17274116), their imagery all came from secondhand bookstores or libraries sales, garage sales, flea markets. I’ve also done work with online archives. Recently, I’ve been thinking about Youtube as an archive. There are a lot of fluid and less official sources these days. I’m recently interested in videos that people make themselves up as they talk about the subject, and how that ends up as an archive.

Back to the animation I’m currently working on, I was in a used bookstore and I happened to come across a massage book and I thought, that’s it. It’s a totally perfect vehicle to talk about this moment. With each image I see, I think about how I can respond to it with animation. When I teach animation, I use the words like ‘activate’, ‘respond’ and ‘intervene’. I like working this way because it is almost like playing scrabble and there’s already a word there and you have to build off of it. That is a really enjoyable way making a film. It’s like a problem solving or geometry.

Kylie Bae: The works like The Rancher and the Voice on the Line criticize the history of the past and I think that there is also a clear message to the present.

Kylie Bae: When I watched Pattern For Survival, I felt you are pointing out the gun issues, but at the same time, you also criticize something inevitable political and social issues in present.

Kelly Sears: With that film, I was thinking about the frentetic energy directed at preparing for disasters. I think about how the response to 9/11 shaped this country. How aggressive security measures were: everything in the airports,, “Be on the Lookout”, and it becomes less about safety or security, it becomes about policing. I was thinking about all this and came across the text from the U.S. Army Survival Guide. It’s three hundred pages. Really, every single crazy disaster you could think of are covered in there and it became the instructional text foundation for Pattern for Survival.

. I don’t think we cannot think about guns in this culture with yet another mass killing happening last month. It’s aggression directed towards a larger body on many levels. I actually think the most violent images in the film are things like the Cuisinart images that seems so boring. But with the sounds and how it’s animated, those ones actually feel so much more violent than any of the gun imagery.

Kylie Bae: The messages in your work are not direct, they are very abstract. Also, you have a lot of experience in participating in a big movie festival and showing your movies. Sometimes your purpose and audience interpretation may be different. Have you ever had that experience? If so, what did you think?

Kelly Sears: I really like that experience! After I made Voice On the Line (https://vimeo.com/182469335), I realized I pretty much made this voice over to take people through the film. I put the road through there. The film I made after that is called Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (https://vimeo.com/182450314). I left it really ambiguous. This one is set in a high school and in the politics in a certain moment in American history. I thought people could watch this and pick up all the political references or they can think of their own horror stories from when they were in high school. We’ve all gone through high school and had some challanging experiences, There are other high school horror stories like the Columbine Shooting. And if people have their own interpretation, it’s not for me to decide.

Kylie Bae: Thank you for spending time with me and I really enjoyed watching your works.

Kelly Sears: Thank you, I’m going to go back and spend time with my thrifted books.