Lizzie Thynne

This interview was conducted by Ryan Gerberding over Skype on October 23rd, 2017.

Lizzie Thynne was born in London. She originally studied in English and Related Literature at York University, where her extra-curricular dramas included an appearance as ‘Madame’ in her own production of Genet’s The Maids. Theatre was her first love. She did an MA and PhD research in English Renaissance Literature at Sussex University. Her entry into film was as Education Officer at the Tyneside Cinema in 1988 where she devised courses and events around the cinema programme, including for the first UK Lesbian and Gay Film festival. After studying study film and television production as a post-graduate at Bristol (1990 – 91), she worked on both factual and drama projects for television. She began making her own films, After the Revolution (1994). and Child of Mine (1996), for Channel Four’s ground-breaking series Out on Tuesday and Out. Since then her work has often focused on how personal narratives are connected to wider political, social and legal changes.

RG: I saw it in your bio on your website that you also did theater before you got into filmmaking, and so how do you think that has influenced your career and your art later on?

LT: That's a good question. I studied English Literature originally, that was my original subject as an undergraduate. I only did one more one actual drama module because the nature of the course was mainly literature. I had done a lot of amateur drama when I was at school, I belonged to drama groups and I had friends who went to do drama. But I didn't quite really want to do drama, as I wanted to do English, but I wanted to keep up the drama on the side, and so I did it as an extra activity. And we had a nice theatre at the University of York, where I went, and so I was involved in a couple of productions. And I think I mentioned on my website we did the production of The Maids where I was Madame, and my two gay friends were the maids. It wasn't a great production, I have to say because I had one friend who could act, and the other who couldn't. And you know, sometimes people are very good at performing in real life, but you put them on the stage and you realize that maybe, you know, that was not a good casting strategy. But we had a fantastic set which we hired from Harrogate theatre in the north of England, so it looked really good.

So in terms of how that led to filmmaking, well, I guess I did always want to do drama in some form. I wanted to be a drama director originally, and then I got into studying English literature and then I kind of got diverted. Then I ended up doing a graduate study in English literature as well, and I kind of lost the thread of doing drama, but eventually I got back into working in a regional film theatre, which is like an art cinema that runs events and courses for the public, and so it was more working in film exhibition. But I met a lot of directors. Then I eventually got back into the field of filmmaking through them, and working on TV programs and some drama, and so then those original interests kind of got revived.

RG: Okay thank you. So what do the terms “experimental” and “feminist” mean to you?

LT: Gosh, those are very big questions. Well, let’s start with “feminist” because, in a way, it’s maybe easier than experimental. Well, feminist work, I suppose, is anything any kind of work that advocates equality of women. Not necessarily in a very overtly didactic or campaigning way, but work which challenges gender norms maybe, if we’re thinking about art or media. But within feminism itself, of course, there are very many different feminisms and different ideas about how gender relates to other kinds of categories of race and ethnicity and so on. And class and sexuality.

RG: And experimental? Just your own personal definition.

LT: Experimental? Well, I don’t think it can be just my own personal, because experimental assumes you're reacting against the norms and conventions of a body of work that already exists in a medium or media. So I guess in terms of thinking about my own practice, my own practice more been in documentary than anything else. I could say that I like to try and do experimental documentaries, so what I would mean by that is a documentary that embraces other disciplines.

So for instance, one of the films I’ve done was about the surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, who made these very interesting self portraits of herself in different personas. So yeah, that was experimental, my film about Claude Cahun, in the sense that I worked with a choreographer who was used to creating sequences of contemporary dance, using the photographs of this surrealist photographer.

So I got her to devise these sequences with me, which also were intended to refer to the life of the photographer, but every single one of them, every single shot, was based on a photograph by this photographer. So we tried to integrate these scenes into some more straightforward documentary sections, with interviews, for instance, and the actual footage and it works quite well, I think, because we tried to create echoes across these different sections in terms of lighting and setups, so that the whole was more integrated that it might have been, stylistically.

So I guess that's what I would call experimental with some of the work that I've done, in that I try to work across disciplines. Like another project I did recently was based on the silent film genre called a city symphony, and that was a series of films that were made in the twenties and there are some modern ones which looks at a day in the life of different cities by using experimental montage and music rather than speech. So for that I worked very closely with a composer [Ed Hughes]. So I guess thinking about it, which is why it's interesting to do this interview, as well as to think about how I have actually tried to work with people in different disciplines in a way that maybe is quite experimental in terms of documentary.

RG: Okay, so do you identify as an experimental feminist filmmaker? Both those things?

LT: Yes. Although I wouldn’t say that all my films are explicitly concerned with gender, not all my work is about what we might call feminist issues overtly, although there’s always some attempt within them to maybe touch on those issues in some way.

RG: Okay. So in your film On the Border, there are several scenes and shots of statues interspersed in there. And there's also the last shot of the boy in the lake with the flower, and I couldn't quite figure out the meaning behind them, so I was wondering why you chose to use those and what significance they had.

LT: Well, in relation to the sculptures near the beginning of the film there’s an interview with my aunt [Laila Pullinen] , who was a sculptor, a very famous sculptor in Finland, where my mother's family comes from. She's there partly because she's my mother’s sister, so she starts talking about how they were evacuated from where they lived, which was right on the Russian border in 1939, when the Russians attacked Finland during the second world war. And when they were evacuated, she explains in the first interview, or the second interview clip, that just before they left Finland, she and her brother, my uncle, were making little sculptures made of clay, which they had to leave behind when they left. So this is one of her memories, first trying to make sort of sculpture-like objects. And it seemed quite significant to me that she remembers this and it’s important in her story of herself about how she became a sculptor, that she was in a way trying to hang onto something that they had to leave behind. Because they never went back to this home.

And then you see, I thought the idea of juxtaposing her interview with her memory of a child trying to make clay objects with these kind of amazing kind of sculptures that you see in her garden that she made later, which are these grand stone sculptures, which are very monumental, they’re not little clay figures. And they also refer back to the place that they came from, when they had to go away, when they were evacuated.

And then the boy at the end, you see him earlier, in an earlier scene where he's showing around this place where my grandfather was fighting during the war. So he's a young Russian guy who we see, maybe it's not that easy to follow because he only appears briefly in a few other shots as our guide with this other older Russian man. And then basically at the end he goes, he dives into the river that we've been looking for where my grandfather was shot and brings back a flower from the river So it’s a sort of symbol, in a way, of recovering something.

RG: Okay, makes sense to me. So something that struck me across all of your work that I watched was the sound mixing, particularly in Voices in Movement, but across all of them. So what is your process behind thinking about sound mixing?

LT: Okay yeah. Well Voices in Movement, again I worked with the same composer I worked with on Brighton Symphony of a City [Ed Hughes], so we used some of his existing music for that short piece, Voices in Movement, and some ideas of his for the sound treatment, because it was originally supposed to be a multichannel installation, and so it was shown like that, only once in fact. And then it’s just been a single screen version just because I haven’t exhibited it very much as a more live thing. I suppose with that Voices in Movement piece, it grew out of a bigger project that was a series of very long oral history interviews. Very long, what we call 'life history method' interviews with the women are used in that film, that was made for a different purpose.

I mean, the interviews were made to be a kind of archive of the women's liberation movement in Britain, that is held at the British Library here in London and so that all kinds of researchers could research that period, around any topic using those interviews.

But when I was talking to Margaretta Jolly who led that project, it was clear that she was also interested in not just the interviews as they existed, but what the links were between the individual stories. And I was interested in what you could do with these interviews that wasn't just about following an individual story, but trying to get the sense of these women's lives and histories and campaigning and ideas being linked. And I suppose we were just trying to do that with this more fragmented editing in some of that piece, which is kind of like a fragment in a way. It sort of works in some ways as a piece, but I think it would be good to make something longer or more expansive with it. But because it was an experiment, I guess we were able to do those kinds of things in it. Those kind of rapid montages of bits of speech.

RG: You kind of already explained this a little bit, but how did you make your way into the industry of filmmaking and how do you continue to find new work there?

LT: Well yes, as I mentioned before, I worked in an art cinema which had an education program, so I got that job partly because I had done a lot of teaching part time in adult education, and also a little bit in at the university where I did my PhD, which was Sussex as it happens, where I now work. So I came back here many years later. So that was the way really when working in film exhibition and cinemas. That was how I first started, but because I didn’t really have the practical skills I then went and did a course, so I did a post graduate certificate course in film and video at University of Bristol, and that was when I was about 30. And then after that, I sort of worked my way up from being a researcher and a production manager to eventually getting some commissions as a director myself from mainly from Channel 4 television in the UK. I continued to work a little bit for other people on the production side, and I continued to do bits of teaching, so there was about 5 or 6 years when I was a full time freelance director. And then because it is very hard, as I’m sure it is there, to be a freelance director, I then started to do more teaching then eventually went back to teaching full time. So the films that I’ve made since then have mainly been in a university context. So, I’ve got grant funding from academic sources, and last year from a Brighton Festival, that film that you saw, we had a small budget from the festival for that. Otherwise, I’ve been getting grant funding from research council here in the UK. So I combine it with teaching, basically now.

RG: Is there a usual process for starting a particular project, or do they all occur to you naturally? Do you have a way of “I need to start something”?

LT: It varies a lot really, sometimes I get asked to do things because I maybe had a conversation with a colleague, and so that Voices in Movement I got to work on that big oral history project. I did a series of short films for that project, more straight forward short films which you might have seen on my website, there are some links through there. So that was partly through a conversation with somebody, and also she knew that I was interested in the Women’s movement and feminism, because we had shared interest.

And then other times it’s maybe I hear something that just sparks off an idea. The Claude Cahun project was like that, I read an exhibition catalogue and this photographer was mentioned. I saw this amazing photograph of her dressed in a suit with a shaved head and I thought “How come I’d never heard of her?” I thought that she was modern but this was from 1920, so that then intrigued me about why she was so little known at the time and what her life story was.

I suppose it’s just something draws you to certain subjects and you’ve got enough curiosity about them to want to continue. So it has to be something that really touches you, if it’s something that you haven’t been asked to do but you’re trying to get the money for, where you’re starting from scratch, that’s not part of an existing project or someone else’s project, because it’s got to carry you through a lot of difficulties. Quite often, getting the money and then actually making the film there’s a long period of time that it’s got to keep your interest up and it’s got to be work that you find very interesting. So it’s a mixture of things and sometimes it’s not the things that you apply for because you hear and you have more time to find the ideas that will fit those requirements, for instance. And that sometimes actually can be quite difficult which I’ve talked about though sometimes you can bring those together when there’s something you’re passionate about and therefore you can make it fit what someone else requires once you get your funding call. Or in the past when I worked for television, a kind of program call that we have here.

RG: So besides the obvious of Claude Cahun and your aunt, how would you say you’re influenced by other artists work?

LT: Well I think some of the people I met when I first started were quite influential. Not necessarily directly in terms of their style but maybe as kind of role models. So there’s Penny Woolcock who is quite a well known director here of fiction and opera and those kind of things. She was just a very determined and also quite experimental, she started as a painter and I suppose what I kind of learned from her was that often, people try and make you do things in the way that they want them to be made and fit a kind of more normal way of doing things, but that you’ve really got to sometimes stick your neck out and stick with an instinct that you have to actually do it differently. So yeah, she was quite influential in that way. Then there are other people of course I don’t know personally necessarily, but whose work I’ve always liked. One of them is, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her but she’s an older feminist director. Michelle Citron, do you know her?

RG: I haven’t heard of her, no.

LT: So she made a famous film in 1978 called Daughter Rite which was one of the first sort of experimental feminist documentaries, where she had this fake verité in it, so there are these two women talking about their relationship with their mother and you think it’s a documentary when actually they’re actresses and it’s actually improvised drama. And then it’s intercut with this kind of dream-like home movie footage, which is slowed down where you hear this voice that sounds like a diary voice of the director, who is never really specified again, reflecting on her own mother, so it’s a kind of interesting juxtaposition of what appears to be actuality but isn’t and something else that’s assumed to be first person but isn’t quite either. So it’s challenging ideas of knowledge in documentary, and also trying to get aspects of experience which are difficult to maybe get out through more conventional interview methods.

RG: Thank you. So specifically about Brighton Symphony of a City, what was the process behind creating that and what came first? Was it the shots and visuals you wanted first or did you work off the music first?

LT: Good question, yes. Well, we did a bit of both. Because we had a limited amount of time to make the film after it was commissioned and until it was ready. And I was working with an editor as well, so I booked him for certain periods. So sometimes we were working with just temporary music, and editing specific sections, and other times we already had the music and we could work more to the music. So it was a bit of both, really, and I think some places it works better than others.

Ironically the last movement is something that I edited something myself as a kind of pilot to show the festival. I put some temporary synthesized music that Ed had written onto it, and we put them together almost arbitrarily. Actually I remember that, we met up in a cafe, he brought the music and I brought some images and we basically just stuck them together, because we had to present something very quickly and it kind of worked. So it was some of it was very experimental.

I think some of it doesn’t work as well as it could for that reason. So it was kind of varied, what we did. I think it is important to say about project is that, as you may know, normally when you’re making a film, you might have some music in mind and basically if you commission a composer, he generally has to write the music to what you’ve already shot. Sometimes you might have already started editing already, and you basically tell him what you want. But this was a different process, in that it was a music commission, so we were trying to accommodate what Ed the composer wanted to do, and make the piece have a more musically symphonic structure. So it was kind of trying to do something different in foregrounding the role of the music and the composer.

RG: Yeah that makes sense, because I know a lot of Hollywood directors just use stock music and then basically tell their composers, “Do something like this.” But this seems very rooted in the music, so that makes sense.

LT: Yeah, that's right.

RG: Okay, so big question at the end, do you think there's one big idea or belief that drives all of your work? And if so, what is it?

LT: That's a good question. Well I mean, this maybe sounds rather melancholy, but I suppose one of the things is loss, one of the themes behind a lot of my own work. Not so much the Brighton film, although there is some of that as well. There is something there about the archive footage. But also, I think that you can see that from the film On the Border about my mother. I kind of lost my mother in some ways at quite an early age, not because she died, but because she had a lot of health issues and was kind of absent in some sense. So I think a lot of my work has been informed by, you know I often make films, like about Claude Cahun, about a photographer who was lost. And also some of the stuff I've written, I do academic writing as well, and some of the writing that I’ve done is about those kind of themes as well, the lost mothers or lost female figures from the past.