Michelle Citron

Micelle Citron has been a independent filmmaker since 1973 when she discovered her love of using mixed media to tell complex stories. Michelle began making films while studying for her interdisciplinary Ph.D. in cognitive studies and aesthetics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Many of her films are considered groundbreaking experimental narratives that comment on a range of issues from the relationship between mothers and daughter to the history of lesbianism.

Most of her work is out for distribution and has been shown in museums and film festivals around the world. Her work has also become a part of over 200 permeant collections worldwide. Michelle has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Filmmaking Grants, a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Grant, and Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for Filmmaking, Screenwriting, and New Media.

Michelle also wrote an award winning book entitled Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (University of Minnesota Press) which is an exceptional autobiographical piece of film writing that offers an intriguing new mode of thinking.

This interview was recorded in November of 2017 from my home in Santa Cruz, CA to Michelle's home in Chicago, IL.

How did you get your start in filmmaking? (Did you study filmmaking in college? Or pick up on your own time?)

I wasn’t trained as a filmmaker, I have a doctorate in cognitive psychology and when I was working on my doctorate I was creating stimuli with sounds and images. While working on that, my professor told me, very bluntly, that I didn’t know what I was doing, pointed out that there was this film department and suggested that I take a film course to better my work. Essentially it was that film course that changed my life; it was like a strange bump in life that lead me to filmmaking. Anyways, I was so close to finishing my doctorate, that I decided to finish it but in the meantime I started making films and taking film classes, in particular a Super 8 class and a 16mm class. Then when I got my doctorate I got a job teaching film and that's what I’ve been doing ever since. Well I’m retired now, but it is what I did for forty years.

To you, what does it mean to make experimental films?

It means trying to break away from the conventional structures and, for me, it’s about the form. About taking these conventional forms of narrative and documentary and breaking it somehow. However it also includes content:making an experimental piece means you should be creating things with content that hasn’t been explored yet. However, I do not think a piece is experimental if the film has new content but the form is conventional. I think it’s very critical for the form as well as the format to be unconventional.

Do you identify with the term feminism? Do you consider yourself to be an feminist experimental filmmaker?

Absolutely, I got into filmmaking so I could make experimental feminist films; it’s how I’ve identified from the moment I became a filmmaker. In fact it’s actually the exact reason why I started creating films. However, what you need to understand is that I became a filmmaker at a time when feminism, which had been dead since the twenties, suddenly became important again and was being talked about again after forty plus years of being forgotten. On top of that, experimental film was also making a comeback, so I became a filmmaker at a particular point in history which is different from the history of the time when experimental films were first popular.

What does feminism mean to you? What does it mean to create feminist work?

Feminism, to me, is about foregrounding women's lives, but feminist films have to include a critique of the patriarchy or come from a position where they somehow work on critiquing the patriarchy. Even if that’s not the focus of it, even if the focus is women's lived experience, at some contextual level at least, there has to be an acknowledgement or awareness of the power of the patriarchy over women's lives. So it’s not just about the individual woman it’s also about a cultural issue, which is what patriarchy is. You know, it’s not just about how women can do whatever they want, because that’s not true, it also needs to have an awareness about how the culture constrains women.

Have you always made work you considered to be feminist?

I’ve been a filmmaker for a really long time. I started in the seventies and my early work was experimental. You see I was a very strong feminist, so I had this idea that if you were going talk about a new topic, you had to remember this phrase “new forms for new content” which meant, if you were going to talk about stuff that you had never seen before in film then you shouldn’t use these old structures of documentaries and narratives: you should create new forms. So I made these experimental films; I made this film in 1978 which is very famous called Daughter Rite, which has been shown at hundreds of museums and schools and is about mothers and daughters. Then I made a film with a lesbian character, but it wasn’t the central focus of the film. Then, it's so complicated, I stopped making films for a long time because I wrote a book and it took me ten years to write this book, called Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. The book is really about my childhood, which is very traumatic: I was sexually abused as a child, my mother herself had been abused as a child, and we were also working class in this world that was much more upper-middle class. On top of that it was a hard book to write because it was almost like I had to go into this dark place in order to write it. So it’s a very complicated book, that’s part fiction part memoir that really talks about the relationship between artistic production and the art of life.

How was it to come out as gay? How did the people in your life respond?

Okay so it’s very complicated, I was married at the age of twenty to a man that I met in high school. We were really young, we went to grad school together and by our third year in grad school we split up. We were married for four years. Then I started seeing this man who I ended up living with, but I was also seeing some women. Even though I was with this man for a while, I think it was very clear that, if I had to categorize myself at that point, that I was bisexual. Then I became really active in the women's movement. I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in my own apartment and I was teaching at a university there. At that time in Michigan, in the seventies, there was this community of lesbian separatists, who really wanted to have a life completely separate from men. While I wasn’t that separate, that was the kind of world I was in, so coming out was very easy, and I’ve now been with my partner for 39 years and been in the lesbian world for so long, that the label of bisexual doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

How is your relationship with your family and did coming out to them change it at all?

Well I come from the working class and my mother actually for fifteen years worked at a very famous gay bar and restaurant in Hawaii and for that reason she, in the sixties, was what was known as a fag hag, which were straight women that hung out with gay men. So my family was actually very comfortable with me coming out. My parents divorced when I was in my twenties, but my father’s second wife, who he was with for over thirty years, was a lesbian until she met my father; so he was also very comfortable with it. My sister, who is three year younger than I am, has been married for twenty five years now, and also was with women for years and years before she met her husband; so she clearly was bisexual too. So between all of that, it was never an issue in my family at all, and it was never an issue where I worked because I always worked at universities that tended to be quite liberal.

What inspired you to work with mixed media and create interactive pieces such as Mixed Greens?

Well the idea of using old footage has always been a part of my work, even my early work like Daughter Rite all the way up to my most recent piece Lives Visible, which uses old photos. So I had this idea, which is part of my book, about how we write our autobiography with home movies, snapshots and selfies. As for the format, when I wrote my doctoral dissertation it was about how when we move through the world we’re constantly bombarded with all this information that we cognitively have to organize and put into narrative and stories. You know you walk down the street and you hear snippets of a conversation, a bus goes by, you see the advertisement, and it is like we are constantly taking this chaotic world and creating some sort of story out of the chaos.

So I think my films have always kind of had that sort of format. After I wrote my book I realized what I was doing with my films structurally was artistically exploring the same stuff I explored when I was a scientist. It was then that I decided to explore it head on by making these pieces that were interactive. Where you have all these different pieces that you have to put together. I’ve always had this political stance where I didn’t want to make a movie where people sat and the movie washed over them. I wanted people to have to be active participants, and so even in Daughter Rite it has these different sections which are intercut so it’s not clear what the relationship is between the voiceover, home movies, and these two sisters that are fake documentary. So it forces the viewer to have to put it together at some level. In some ways this is no different from what I was doing in Mixed Greens only Mixed Greens was more sophisticated.

How did you learn about the couple in your film Lives Visible and Leftovers? How did you get access to all of their personal photos?

When I was making Mixed Greens I did a lot of research. I interviewed a lot of lesbians from many different generations so I could come up with these stories that are told over these different generations. So there is this queer library in Chicago and I went there to do some research and I met this man who worked there and he told me that he had spent the last ten years taking care of these two old lesbians who had just died, and he invited me over. After these two lesbians had passed away, they had no family or friends left, and since this man had taken care of them they left the house and everything in it to him. Then as he was cleaning out the house he found all these photographs in boxes all over the house–over 2,000 photographs. When I came over he said, “You’re a filmmaker, do you want them?” and I said yes. So he gave me access to these photographs of these women who are a generation older than me. I knew women like them when I was coming out, which was the tail end of those illegal bars down dark alleys run by the mafia, so I felt a responsibility to those women; I really wanted to make a movie about them. You see life was very different back then. I think it’s very important for young queers to understand that, which is one of the reasons why I felt this need to create this film about an earlier generation. After I was done with them, we took those photographs and gave them to this archive, the biggest queer archive in the US which is at USC called One Archive So anybody can have access to them.

Did you create Lives Visible and Leftovers with a specific purpose? Did you know what purpose you were creating your films for (i.e. distribution, film festivals, etc) before you finished them?

Yes, I really wanted them to be distributed as my other work has been since the seventies. So my films are out for distribution by this company called Women Make Movies, which is actually the largest distributor of women’s films in the world. They are usually distributed to universities and museums and this sort of distribution allows them to live a long life. Women Make Movies has distributed two of my other films in the past so it’s easier for me to get them distribution than it would be for someone just starting out, because I can go back to the company and ask if they will take my new work. There is the chance that they may say no, but they said yes. So, here’s the thing: film festivals are fun and they really feed your ego because you get to stand up in front of an audience and answer questions. I’ve had my films shown at film festivals where there have been three thousand people in the audience, and it makes you feel good. But once the festival is over, the film is gone; no one ever sees it again. So I think it’s more important and better if you can distribute your films because then the film has a life; people can see it continuously.