Lana Lin

Lana Lin is a feminist filmmaker, artist, and writer whose work takes on experimental, collaborative, and embodied practices to approach ideas ranging from race and gender to illness and the construction of history and collective memory. Her latest film The Cancer Journals Revisited frames and animates Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals through Lin’s and others’ experiences of cancer and survivorship. Since 2001, she has worked collaboratively (as Lin + Lam) on multidisciplinary research-based projects that have been exhibited at venues including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, the Busan Biennale 2018, South Korea, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China. Lin is an Associate Professor of Film Theory and Digital Cinema at The New School, New York. Her work thinks collaboratively and across time to ruminate on the politics of identity, vulnerability, and cultural translation and has been screened and exhibited at venues ranging from UnionDocs in Brooklyn to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to Gasworks in London, among others.

This interview was conducted via Skype chat from Santa Cruz to New York on February 5th, 2020.

HP: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me! I really enjoyed reviewing your work after seeing The Cancer Journals Revisited last spring. I just wanted to start by asking what led you to pursue film and video? Why are you interested in these specific forms?

LL: As a kid, I always wanted to be a writer, actually. I never imagined myself as a filmmaker, although I loved watching films. I think what drew me to film and video was that I could collect things/material from the world and work with it, whereas with writing I was confronted with the blank page. With writing, it seemed that everything needed to emerge from inside myself, whereas with film, I felt like I could bring the outside world into myself. Plus, there is an animate quality to film by its nature, and words need more help to become animated for the reader. But it's funny that I say this in response to you bringing up The Cancer Journals Revisited because what I hope that film does is precisely to animate Lorde's words.

Also, one more thing — film/video is time-based in a more immediate way than writing, or in a different way than writing. With film, I control the duration of the reception, whereas, with writing, the reader can take the pace they need or want. I guess I like working with that level of time.

HP: That makes sense, film feels more immediate. I think that's what I appreciate about The Cancer Journals Revisited — it makes Lorde's text re-embodied today. I noticed that text and the transformation of text came up frequently throughout your body of work. It led me to wonder if you ever read something and think "that should be in a film" or if the discovery of texts is more part of the research and production process?

LL: I am often inspired by texts. The Cancer Journals Revisited is probably the first film that was basically conceived expressly to bring a text to life. When I read it, and this was after I was diagnosed [with breast cancer], I didn't think that it should be in a film, but rather that it should be a film, or that I wanted to experience it as a film — this was largely to hear (rather than necessarily see) contemporary women reading and responding to the text. In the past, I have been inspired by the writing and life of Jane Bowles and made a film, Almost the Cocktail Hour, that responded to her work.

HP: I'll have to look her up! In this feminist filmmaking class, we frequently discuss the nature of labels and defining what "feminist" and "experimental" films are. How would you define these terms? Do you identify yourself or your work with them?

LL: Yes I identify with both of them. While I would probably say that I am a feminist filmmaker, I prefer to say that I make feminist films — this is because of the way that 'feminist' ends up being a qualifier the way that gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. can be instrumentalized to be. I don't want to be categorized as a woman filmmaker or a queer filmmaker. I am a woman and a feminist and I'm queer, and I make films in a tradition that draws on experimental practices. I do have a conflicted relationship to experimental filmmaking as a history and tradition because it is so dominated by white men, but I have definitely been informed by experimental filmmaking, and like to think that I experiment with film form as well as content.

Oh, I realize you had asked for a definition. I guess I kind of defined experimental film, but feminist filmmaking — in a nutshell, I would say that it is filmmaking that questions patriarchal structures.

HP: I like both of your definitions! Something that I have been wanting to ask about since I explored your website is the work you've done with H. Lan Thao Lam as Lin + Lam. Do you feel like the process of collaboration is a part of being a feminist filmmaker? Has this collaboration shaped your individual work?

LL: I think that collaboration is a really important aspect of feminism. All filmmaking is collaborative, it's just whether or not that collaboration is acknowledged and valued, by the filmmakers themselves and by audiences/the culture at large. I say this with all the hesitation of someone who is very suspicious of certain kinds of community formations, or claims to community that actually generate feelings of alienation. I feel like in many ways I think and work alone, but I have also sustained a collaboration with Lan Thao Lam for 20 years. Lan Thao is my life partner, so we know each other very well, and have learned how to work together. It is very useful for me to have a collaborative partner with whom I am in dialogue. We throw ideas back and forth. It's always important to get a different perspective, a perspective outside your own, on whatever you're doing.

I don't know if you noticed, but Lan Thao was the DP on The Cancer Journals Revisited. As Lin + Lam we work together equally, but this is the first film where I was the director and Lan Thao was DP. TCJR started as a solo project, but since I consulted with Lan Thao on everything, we ended up deciding that she should officially take on the role of the DP. I trust her to be my eyes, and this freed me to concentrate on being with the readers and really listening to what they had to share.

HP: That level of trust and care is very evident to me while watching the film. So much of your work is very personal and intimate and really aligns with the idea that the personal is political. As an artist trying to make work about my subjective experiences with queerness and illness, I was wondering if you had any tips about how you navigate putting the self onscreen? What goes into that decision that can make one feel so vulnerable?

LL: Although I feel like I'm a very private person, I probably took up filmmaking as a way of working through the personal. I always found a way to mediate that so that my films were not apparently autobiographical. I think The Cancer Journals Revisited is the first film that is so evidently personal, and this is after making films since 1992. I was not initially going to literally put myself in The Cancer Journals Revisited at the outset (I mention this in the film.) But there was no way not to include myself. I realized that my presence needed to be there as a kind of holding environment for all the other voices. So I would say that the decision to make oneself vulnerable arises out of necessity. What does the work need? What can it not live without? This was definitely true about the last shot in the film where I bare myself in a way that I never imagined I would. But I came to the end of Lorde's script and I knew that I needed something, something that would be the image of vulnerability. I filmed that shot myself and put it into the film in the solitude of the editing room, and wondered if I would dare leave it in. I actually sent it to Lan Thao to make sure that I would not regret it later. And lived with it for a while, and realized that it needed to be there. And so it is.

HP: Your approach to filmmaking seems very thoughtful and deliberate to me, while still being incredibly emotionally expressive. I was wondering how (or if) you see the divisions between the art world and the world of academia? Is there one that has been more productive or receptive to you and your work across your career?

LL: I feel a bit of an outsider to both, but maybe that's because I feel like an outsider in general. Probably academia has been more receptive to my work than the art world, but I would divide the art world into at least the film world and the art world, which operate very differently. It's ironic that academia has been a relatively welcoming place for me, given that it is often the other way around for a lot of folks. But I kind of fell into academia, and it keeps pulling me back deeper and deeper. I wrote a dissertation and it was almost immediately picked up by a university press - I sent it to only one publisher. Whereas I sent The Cancer Journals Revisited to festival after festival for close to a year before I finally landed a premiere.

The cynical side of me would say that the art world is often interested in trends. Lan Thao and I have been looking for an art space to show an installation for a long time — this has been very difficult to find. Few curators/programmers will take a giant risk; and when someone does (and usually it wouldn't be called a giant risk, but a small step) everyone else kind of follows. This is probably true in academia, however, I'm not invested in the same way. I consider myself a newcomer to the realm of scholarship, so I don't have as much baggage about it. But I don't know if scholarship is what you mean by 'academia.' I am invited by schools to present my work much more than I am invited to festivals.

HP: Your response is really interesting to me; this is something I like to ask filmmaker-scholars (or scholar-filmmakers) because I'm not sure which world I'm more interested in or drawn towards. I'm nearing the end of my list of questions, but I want to know if you have a speculation on where the future of feminist film is heading, or if you want to share a little about anything that you're currently working on or developing?

LL: Well, I'm glad you gave me a way out because I was going to say that I have no idea where the future of feminist film is heading! On that, I would say that I know that there is attention being paid now to Black and indigenous filmmakers, and to disability and filmmaking, and that wave will continue to rise — it will rise with women following the crest, meaning that there will be shows featuring Black and indigenous filmmakers who will probably be more men, and then there will be Black and indigenous women filmmakers who will follow — not because they haven't been making work all along, but because the opportunities most often open up initially to men until an outcry from women causes curators/programmers to reorient their lens. (I think I'm still in a pessimistic mode from contemplating your previous question!)

Currently, Lan Thao and I are working on a project that was inspired by a newspaper clipping Lan Thao encountered close to 20 years ago about a postal runner who crossed the border between India and China on a weekly basis to deliver the mail. The work has to do with the persistent will to be in contact with another, despite challenging climates (weather, technology, military conflicts). It's about the epistolary impulse over time and across borders.

HP: That sounds really interesting! To wrap everything I up, I wonder if you have any advice to give to aspiring feminist filmmakers?

LL: I think my advice is what I've heard before — make the kind of work you want to see in the world; make what is true to you (this is in distinction to what you know; it may or may not be what you know, and in some ways, if you already know everything about it, there is little point in making it); and make what you can (that is, with the resources and ability that you have — I always discourage young people from a model of filmmaking that is often taught, which is that you write a script and send it around and tweak the script, and hope for funding and wait and hope for funding ... and then years later the film never gets made. You learn from making work, and so you need to make it, and fail in certain ways, in order to make something else better.)

HP: This great advice and very inspiring to hear. Thank you so much for your time today! Good luck to you and Lan Thao on your project! This has been such a valuable experience to hear from you.

LL: You're welcome. It was great chatting with you!

Hannah Payne is currently in her third year pursuing a BA in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Her work is interested in narrative-documentary hybridization, analog video, found footage and archives, chronic illness, and embodied performative art. Her writing has been published at Film School Rejects and Poetics + Politics.