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Screenplay & Film Consulting By Susan Kouguell

Category: Documentary (page 1 of 3)

Susan’s Script Magazine Interview with MEANWHILE Documentary Director Catherine Gund

In this wide-ranging interview, Susan Kouguell discusses with filmmaker Catherine Gund their respective work and shared artistic sensibilities in terms of employing nontraditional filmmaking structures, the inclusion of poetry in film, tackling challenging subject matter, and how to make it the most honest.

It was a pleasure to speak with Emmy-nominated and Academy-shortlisted producer, director, writer, activist and Aubin Pictures founder Catherine Gund about her new film Meanwhile. Gund’s media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and racial, reproductive and environmental justice. Her films have screened worldwide and on many platforms. She won the 2023 Gracie Award for Documentary Producer.

Meanwhile is a docu-poem in six verses about artists breathing through chaos. In dynamic collaboration, Jacqueline Woodson (text), Meshell Ndegeocello (soundscape), Erika Dilday (support), M. Trevino (structure), and Catherine Gund (direction), combine artists’ expressions with historical and observational footage to unveil a rare cinematic meditation about identity, race, racism and resistance as they shape our shared breath.

In our wide-ranging interview, we discussed our respective work and shared artistic sensibilities in terms of employing nontraditional filmmaking structures, the inclusion of poetry in film, tackling challenging subject matter, and how to make it the most honest. As it turned out, we realized we were both fellows (several years apart) at the Whitney Independent Study Program, which further enlivened our talk.

Meanwhile (2024)
Meanwhile (2024)Courtesy of Aubin Pictures

Kouguell: How did Meanwhile evolve?

Gund: The film at its core is about community and about relationships, especially at a time when we were isolated and separated and left alone. There was so much loss and different kinds of loss. Obviously, the loss of people first and foremost, but we were also losing this whole sense of ourselves and our identity. And then this sense of our society.

It really started in June of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered. Also, I had a dear friend who is in the film named Ivy Joan Young, who had been sick for a while. She died in 2023. She became homebound with emphysema, which politically is hideous; menthol deadly cigarettes were being marketed to the African American community.

There was a lot about breath.

It was unmistakable that George Floyd was asphyxiated; he was strangled. People couldn’t breathe and they were dying. We were sharing one air. Then my other dear friend’s mother was also on oxygen and struggling to breathe. Breath at its core, was the genesis.

Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration. Did the images or text come first, or did they work together from the start?

Gund: One of my oldest friends is Jacqueline Woodson, who wrote the narrative; we have always collaborated in some way or another. There was an opportunity here for us to try to deal with what was happening around us in the ways we knew how. Honestly, I imagined she was going to write a text and I would come up with some imagery but it became a bigger collaboration with many others, including Meshell Ndegeocello. It was a dynamic back and forth; it was not one or the other. I filmed on my little phone. It’s sort of a journal. I was inspired early on by Agnes Varda.

Kouguell: Me too! I was fortunate to interview Varda several times for this publication.

Gund: Varda’s documentary The Gleaners And I was definitely a main inspiration for me because I was collecting images. I’d see these men sweeping, and those images became such a dynamic part of the film, even at the end with the women finishing building their bed and they clean out the room. And then the archival footage of the one man in the 1950s sweeping in his baggy clothes, and he just looks right up at the camera.

I’ve had this approach to imagery – whether it’s a poem, a song or something that gives you a feeling just from its association – to let myself edit associatively and work associatively. Jackie would send me text, and it would inspire me to film in various locations where there were people of all races and classes. It wasn’t just about race, it was about class – strata.

Jesse [Krimes], the white guy in the film who has served so much time in incarcerated facilities who’s from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and not Amish, said: ‘I didn’t know what race was. Everybody was white, so there was nothing that made that edge.’

To me, that edge is again the association, associative editing and putting the edge between Jackie and I, between words and pictures, letting each other figure out what that association, and our association is.

Kouguell: These associations felt like a conversation. You were allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions and to create their own narrative.

Gund: You’ll notice no one in the film ever says ‘that was racist’. In the extreme, that’s an opinion, right? We wanted it to be something where people were just experiencing what we were experiencing. And then realizing that they may have a different experience from someone else. That was a key takeaway for us.

We’re all seeing the same thing, we’re all in the same world of “meanwhile”, but also of our world. We have different choices we can make. But we still have the same materials to process.

Kouguell: How did you come about choosing the various artists to film?

Gund: The choice of artists really gets at the notion of community because we did not set out and make a list of artists and then go and talk to them. All of the artists are people I was in deep, sometimes decades-long, conversations with.

That sense of community has a kind of internal coherence or an internal sensibility. They are friends of mine and Jackie’s. It was more like one conversation led to another, and it turns out a couple of them are more well known or recognizable, and some are very new or are people that wouldn’t be considered artists at all.

What was interesting to me about working with them was that we. This is true for the whole film. I never wanted them to explain anything, not about our relationship, not about their work. I didn’t want them to say, ‘I use the color orange because sunsets are important to me’. I wanted to be in this “meanwhile” moment with them in between.

Kouguell: Tell me about incorporating archival footage.

Gund: I looked for footage that really engaged with ideas around race and racism, and places where races overlap because that’s where you learn about race and you learn about what we think about race. This is something Jackie and I were very committed to.

We were always trying to deeply contextualize them into our experience and not just pull them randomly out of nowhere. In the film you see Doc Rivers on the TV in an Ohio community center when he says, “I should just be a basketball coach, not an African American coach”.

It was a ripe time when we were making this film, because sh-t like that was happening all day. Every day. All the old stuff was coming back as being things we could use. Like the James Baldwin scene, it was really important to see that 50 years made no difference at all.

Kouguell: The film is structured with the six verses. It reminded me of symphonic movements, except generally there are only four movements with several exceptions, including Mahler’s 3rd Symphony.

Gund: I love what people bring to the film and point things out. I did obviously create a space where those associations made sense. There were some obvious yet unintentional associations related to breathing from some of the artists.

I had no reason for there to be specifically six, except that I had six ideas, and that’s what it broke into. To me it was really based on breath. The end point was our ability to go on; the vision and hope. The difference between being alive and being dead, is that you have one breath. But of course there’s more than one person. 

The second is, who is the we? It’s more than one breath. Then, as soon as you have more than one person, it immediately devolves into a power struggle, a relationship, right? But then unrequited love. And then the reality – chaos, right? Yes, there is chaos but we made it an explicit goal to not re-traumatize and to not exhibit violence, but also not to brush everything under the rug. That is really the pivotal verse or movement. And then embracing the chaos. And then reclaiming the meanwhile.

TRAILER

Meanwhile opens Friday March 14 in selected theaters. Visit their website for more information about the film and screening schedule. 

Susan Kouguell Interviews ‘Leap of Faith’ Director Nicholas Ma for Script Magazine

Filmmaker Nicholas Ma discusses the process behind making the documentary, from his collaboration with Morgan Neville, the writing process in editing, and discovering the through-line to tackling tough subjects with the pastors, and more.

Susan Kouguell for Script Magazine

I had the pleasure to speak with award-winning director Nicholas Ma about his new documentary Leap of Faith. This poignant film follows 12 diverse Christian pastors in Grand Rapids, Michigan of varying theological, racial and political identities and ideologies. Brought together by Michael Gulker of The Colossian Forum, the pastors struggle with some of today’s most contentious issues. The divisions between them become apparent and test both their common belief in the universal importance of love and kindness and the bonds they build over the course of a year.

Nicholas Ma is an award-winning director, writer and producer based in Brooklyn. Ma produced the WNBA documentary Unfinished Business (directed by Alison Klayman), which premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. His feature directorial debut, Mabel (San Francisco International Film Festival, 2024), which he co-wrote with Joy Goodwin, was awarded the Sloan Prize.

Nicholas has been a DOC NYC fellow and Film Independent Fellow.

Director Nicholas Ma and film participants.
Director Nicholas Ma and film participants.Photo by Moguel Photography/ Courtesy Picturehouse

Kouguell: Leap of Faith is about faith but it’s universal. It’s not about one particular religion. The seed of this project started with the 2020, Wall Street Journal written by Janet Adamy, which introduced you and Morgan Neville to the Reverend Michael Gulker, a Mennonite minister based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Ma: Something you just said struck me. The film is about faith but it’s universal and I completely agree. Morgan Neville and I made a film together Won’t You Be My Neighbor? about Fred Rogers and that movie was universal but also about faith. I think there’s a way we think of faith as something that narrows us and says we’re part of a smaller group, as opposed to something that broadens us.

That’s what was so interesting about the WSJ article, Michael Gulker was saying we all have specific opinions that sometimes contradict each other but what if there was a way of that being true and also our being in community together. There was this interaction between faith and universality, which I think is countercultural in the humanist community and the faith community.

Kouguell: Talk about your collaboration with Morgan Neville in this film.

Ma: Morgan is one of those filmmakers who has a capacious understanding of the form of documentary, he’s like working with a master chef. He’s a wonderful mentor. Morgan was so helpful with his farsightedness to bring everything to life, such as the direct-to-camera conversations that have a special continuity to them. Instead of being prescriptive, he would offer suggestions, such as ‘Here’s what I think you’re trying to do and here’s how we can make it better’.

It was a curious process for him too. He’s such a prolific director and it’s been a long time since he’s worked in this vérité space and it was energizing for him too.

Kouguell: Did you work from a script?

MaTamara Maloney is my editor; she’s such a brilliant human, editor and writer and I’m so grateful for her. There is almost a suspicion: what does it mean to write for a documentary? There is no narration in this film. If you’re trying to reveal the truth, to distill the truth of something that occurs over more than a year into 90 minutes, there’s a part of that that immediately requires a kind of writing, and with this film, even more so.

Nicholas Ma, Producer, Writer, and Director of LEAP OF FAITH (2024).
Nicholas Ma, Producer, Writer, and Director of LEAP OF FAITH (2024).Courtesy Picturehouse

Often in documentaries you can find specific moments, for example: let’s take a two-minute chunk out of this scene and that’s really it. Whereas here, it was actually about distilling a conversation that happened over a course of 90 minutes into a scene that is three minutes long. That requires looking at each conversation, and asking, how are we layering this to find the through-line into three minutes, and then do that repeatedly with each conversation.

We had to work so much from the transcript in order to see what is the broader argument made here and how do we do justice to that broader argument into something that doesn’t feel like shorthand, which I think is gesturing at an argument that you already know or feels fragmentary. Figuring that out was really challenging.

What we discovered was if you’re going to do something that has such complicated and contentious ideas at its core, you have to do justice to that argument but you also have to give enough space on either side of it in order to digest it. That was a huge part of the writing process as well.

Kouguell: That space was indeed there to give the viewer time to consider and digest. It was also evident that you did not have an agenda as filmmakers. In the film, you tackle tough subjects, including sexuality, gay marriage, policing, and racism. I imagine some of the pastors might have been reluctant to share their thoughts for fear of consequences from their parishioners. There’s a lot at stake here. Talk about building trust with the pastors.

Ma: The pastors all knew how to not say something if they didn’t want to. They’re very practiced at it. The leap of faith for them at that moment was to choose to say something they didn’t know how to say. How do you say that thing that you don’t know how to say?

I think what allowed us to really be vulnerable was having a shared question. The question wasn’t, ‘How are we going to resolve our differences about sexuality’, the question was, to put it into universal terms, ‘Can we all belong to each other or are some differences too great?’ What made it possible is that it’s possible for either answer to be true. It’s not like I needed the answer to be one way or they needed the answer to be another way. It was an exploration. It allowed us to say, there can’t be an agenda here because we don’t know the answer. It’s up to us to choose what the answer is.

That’s also what led to all the surprises in the film. Everyone was making these decisions as they went along, ‘Do I belong to you, do I want to try?’ You see that kind of fumbling that we’re so afraid of in this world. We feel like we have to get the right words, the right engagement or it’s better not to do it all. They definitely said we need to be careful but also, what does that mean and what are the consequences of doing that. It doesn’t always look pretty.

[L-R] Pastor Line Exercise; Artie Lindsay, Dr. James Stokes, Joan VanDessel, Ashlee Eiland, Tierra Marshall, Ben Kampmeier, Kim DeLong, Chase Stancle, Troy Hatfield, Andrew Vanover, Molly Bosscher and Cornelius Ting, LEAP OF FAITH (2024).

[L-R] Pastor Line Exercise; Artie Lindsay, Dr. James Stokes, Joan VanDessel, Ashlee Eiland, Tierra Marshall, Ben Kampmeier, Kim DeLong, Chase Stancle, Troy Hatfield, Andrew Vanover, Molly Bosscher and Cornelius Ting, LEAP OF FAITH (2024).

Courtesy Picturehouse

Kouguell: The line exercise the pastors do requires them to respond to questions only by stepping forward or backward, is a critical dramatic moment in the film.

Ma: Yes. They have to walk towards or back to each other. The movement is physically happening and the question is, can it happen less literally too.

Kouguell: Your father, the world-renowned cellist, Yo-Yo Ma has performed at various events in support of this film, as well as appearing with you and Morgan on many broadcast interviews. How is it to be working together in this way?

Ma: We share a common yearning, a belief that we want the world to feel more whole and want to be part of that. I think the film brought us closer. He’s a spirit animal for our project.

I think about the experience of sitting in a concert hall, listening to him play and you look around and see people who have been emotionally moved, and you also know that you don’t know who any of them are, and none of them know who you are, and you may believe all sorts of different things but you have been moved by the same experience. It’s what I hope for with a movie like this. It’s going to challenge you more than a piece of music because you do hear opinions and see people act in ways you do or don’t agree with, but my hope is that at the end of it, you watch it with someone you don’t know and you look around and ask what could that mean as possible?

Leap of Faith is now out in selected theaters across the country.

Trailer

Susan’s Interview with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter about their Documentary ‘Occupied City’

In a deeply personal conversation with filmmakers Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter, they discuss the recurring themes of time, memory, and history in their respective work and in their collaboration on ‘Occupied City,’ as well as breaking the rules of traditional documentary filmmaking.

SUSAN KOUGUELL

Script Magazine: DEC 22, 2023

About Occupied City: The past collides with our precarious present in Occupied City, informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest.

Steve McQueen is a British film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist. His film 12 Years A Slave received an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and in 2016 the BFI Fellowship. McQueen’s critically acclaimed and award-winning films also include Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), Widows (2018) and the anthology series Small Axe. Past documentary works include the BAFTA-winning series Uprising (2021). For his work as a visual artist, McQueen was awarded with the Turner Prize, and he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited in major museums around the world. In 2020, McQueen was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for his services to the Arts.

Bianca Stigter is an historian and cultural critic. She writes for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and published three books of essays. Stigter was an associate producer on 12 Years a Slave and Widows. In 2019 she published the book Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945. In 2021 she directed the documentary Three Minutes – A Lengtheningwhich premiered in the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival and was selected for the festivals of Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, as well as IDFA and DocA- viv. It won the 2022 Yad Vashem Award for cinematic excellence in a Holocaust related Documentary.

There is a haunting quality to Occupied City, hearing the emotionless voiceover text about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam over images of contemporary life in Amsterdam. With encouragement from McQueen and Stigter I began this interview on a personal note, recounting when I saw the film at a recent press screening. Images of the neighborhood Apollolaan where my mother grew up, and the text about the Hunger Winter, the countless atrocities, including the many Jews forced into hiding, and the specific identification cards with the letter J stamped on it. My grandmother was among those in hiding, and she too had these documents, which I shared with McQueen and Stigter. I thanked them for allowing me the time to share this with them and expressed that this interview is not about my story, but about their film.

Still from 'Occupied City'
Still from Occupied CityA24

McQueen: It’s all of our stories. I don’t think you should leave yourself out of this interview; it would not be in service to your readers. It’s important to have this transparency. To be honest with you, it’s wonderful to add your experience into the interview because you’re a survivor of this situation.

Kouguell: Steve, in your interview with curator Donna DeSalvo in 2016 at the Whitney Museum, you discussed your installation piece End Credits about the Paul Robeson FBI files. The idea/theme of words being redacted, brought to mind not only the obvious government censorship but the idea of the literal erasure of history.

There is a thematic correlation between this work End Credits and Occupied City, and Bianca’s documentary: Three Minutes: A Lengthening Trailer. These works are historical investigations, which address the erasure of history, and the fragility of memory and time.

Bianca Stigter
Bianca StigterCourtesy Bianca Stigter/A24

Stigler: What they also share is that you can find new forms to deal with the past and you don’t necessarily have to stick to the strictly well-known feature film or documentary genre, you can try to find a new way to convey history and the erasure of certain histories. And, also to make it more of an experience than a history lesson. There’s certainly common ground there.

McQueen: Both of us are very much about the audience and how things can sink in. With End Credits, it’s much more sculptural than Occupied City and Three Minutes, it’s for an art space due to the nature of its presentation.

Kouguell: Occupied City’s length of 4 ½ hours including an intermission requires a type of commitment from an audience. If it was two hours, for example, I don’t think the film would have the same impact. Steve, you mentioned that the film had to have the weight of time, the weight of recounting history, and to give the viewer time to reflect.

McQueen: Once people see the film, the length is never discussed. If anything, when it comes into discussion people wish it was longer.

Stigter: People said they lost any track of time. You enter a different zone of time, you don’t feel the clock ticking and you are transported somewhere else. One thing is for sure; you hear so many individual stories and you see so many people that you realize you can’t hear everyone’s story, then the film would have to be 100,00 times longer. It gives you a certain tension that no matter what you do, you can never know it all.

Steve McQueen
Steve McQueenCourtest Steve McQueen/A24

McQueen: It’s about the practice. It was the whole idea of using Bianca’s text, which occurred over 19-20 years of research, and projecting on that the every day. We never contemplated it to be shorter. When I was shooting it, I didn’t know what it was going to be, I had to find it through the process of filmmaking.

Kouguell: Bianca, in your film Three Minutes: A Lengthening, you made the decision not to show any contemporary faces except at the very end. We only see the three minutes of footage repeatedly shown and freeze frames of a home movie in 1938 Nasielsk in eastern Poland months before they were deported to ghettos by the invading Nazis.

With Three Minutes: A Lengthening and Occupied City you both made some unconventional choices in conveying your narrative, such as avoiding talking heads, and not including or only including archival footage from the past.

Stigter: In Three Minutes, it exists only out of archival footage from 1938. Doing things in this way makes you think about time more. With the other forms of documentary, people almost forget there are also forms; here you are asked to think about it.

Kouguell: Occupied City was shot over the course of 2 ½ years on 35mm film, and you had 34 hours of footage. With the exterior shots, did people know you were filming them?

McQueen: Most of the time people knew because the camera was there but sometimes not. It was the case of getting the everyday and wanting to be spontaneous.

Kouguell: Was anything staged? I’m thinking about the scene where the bicyclist hits a woman towards the end of the film.

McQueen: It just happened. Sometimes you have to predict the unpredictable.

Kouguell: There is a huge responsibility to the history of Amsterdam, the people of the past, and the present. Obviously you cannot include it all so the choices then become what to include or embrace, what to honor, what to leave out. How did you arrive at these decisions in Occupied City?

McQueen: We shot everything in Atlas of an Occupied City – over 2,100 addresses. When we had the footage, it was a case of certain things being repeated so therefore we could leave that out, and then we decided what was the best for that particular version. What flowed and what didn’t. We were fortunate to have this rich footage and situations to make this movie.

Stigter: When I was writing the book, the most harrowing part was when I couldn’t find any information about someone except that he or she was born and murdered, and that was all. If you can keep a little bit by telling about someone, there is at least something left instead of nothing. For me that was difficult to come to terms with; you can’t tell everything.

Kouguell: Bianca, I read that you referred to your book Atlas as “time machine on paper” – it’s a beautiful way to reference it.

Stigter: For me, it felt like that because you have a lot of history books that deal with the big picture or have the story of one person. What fascinated me was, could you imagine walking through a certain street back in that time so you knew things about the shops and the offices and the people that lived there; that you can get a sense of how something was in a different time and that fascinated me.

The strange thing about Amsterdam, in the city center, the canals, and so on, is that they are very much from the 17th and 18th century. You cannot see the Second World War and what happened there but you know it happened in the same spots where people were round up or executed, or took their own lives. The book and the film both try to cross that, while at the same time acknowledging that it is uncrossable. There are all kinds of tension between the past and present throughout the whole film.

Kouguell: What questions haven’t you been asked in previous interviews that you would like to address about Occupied City?

Stigter: The music; it’s very important for movies in general and in this movie, it is especially important.

McQueen: What composer Oliver Coates brought to the table was so transcendent; it brings another layer into the narrative, another echo in the audio sense.

Stigler: It makes it more abstract in a way but also grounds it very much.

Kouguell: What was then and what is now repeats for me. Ending with the bar mitzvah rehearsal and then the actual bar mitzvah was quite moving.

McQueen: We were invited to our friends’ son’s bar mitzvah. We thought it would be a good idea to shoot it. It was one of those things that everything in this movie is about our city; it’s about where we live, where our children go to school. We talked to the rabbi for permission.

In a way, it was to say that after all that, the Nazis didn’t win. There is a Jewish life that continues and exists in Amsterdam today. It was a very personal way to end the film. It’s about our family and our friends, and all of our futures.

Stigter: It’s beautiful and hopeful. It’s something fragile of course. We see and hear the boy’s voice trying to read the old words – it is very touching for me. It was also about not showing just the bad things but also the good things.

Kouguell: What has been the response to Occupied City from the Dutch audience?

Stigter: We had the Dutch premiere in the most beautiful cinema in the world, the Tuschinski theatre. The original owner was murdered in Auschwitz during the war.

McQueen: It was extremely special to have the premiere there and we dedicated it to him. It was a packed theater. You could feel the atmosphere was special to put this movie in this cinema.

Stigter: To see it in Amsterdam or another cinema, when you walk outside, I think one will have the feeling, I’ll look differently at my city now. In a funny way of course, people realize yes, that it’s very extremely local but it also has something universal. One can imagine this film in Paris or in London or New York. One can imagine the film anywhere.

Kouguell: Indeed. It is universal.

McQueen: Your background and history is amazing and thank you for sharing it with us.

thin black line

Occupied City is in limited release in theaters and is available on most streaming platforms.

Susan’s Interview with Trailblazing Filmmaker Nina Menkes About Her New Documentary ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’

Filmmaker Nina Menkes discusses her thought-provoking and illuminating documentary ‘Brainwashed: Sex- Camera-Power,’ which explores the sexual politics of cinematic shot design, showing how this visual language of cinema connects to both severe employment discrimination against women – especially in the film industry – as well as to the epidemic of sexual harassment and abuse that was exposed through the #MeToo movement.

Still from Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC.
Still from Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC.

Considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers, Nina Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals and museums. Honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an AFI Independent Filmmaker Award, a Creative Capital Award and an International Critics Award (FIPRESCI Prize).Menkes holds an MFA in Film Production from UCLA , is a directing member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a member of the faculty at California Institute of the Arts.

In our wide-ranging and eye-opening conversation over Zoom, Menkes and I discussed her thought-provoking and illuminating documentary Brainwashed: Sex- Camera-Power, which explores the sexual politics of cinematic shot design, showing how this visual language of cinema connects to both severe employment discrimination against women – especially in the film industry – as well as to the epidemic of sexual harassment and abuse that was exposed through the #MeToo movement.

Nina Menkes. Portrait by Ann Johansson.
Nina Menkes. Portrait by Ann Johansson.

This social issue documentary uses over 200 film clips from 1896 through the present and includes 23 interviews with women and non-binary industry professionals, including Julie Dash, Penelope Spheeris, Charlyne Yi, Joey Soloway, Catherine Hardwicke, Eliza Hittman, Rosanna Arquette, and Laura Mulvey.

This must-see film should be included in the curriculum for all filmmaking, screenwriting, and cinema studies students.

KOUGUELL: Let’s start with your personal background. Your mother’s parents were German Jews who fled Hitler’s genocide, settling in Jerusalem in 1933 and your father’s Austrian Jewish family perished in the concentration camps. This type of trauma, particularly for you as a first-generation American, forever remains. How does your specific background of family trauma and the violence of objectification inform your work?

MENKES: I’m so glad that you brought this up, no one else has brought it up. I happen to think it’s really key. My mother was a baby in 1933, and her parents got out of Berlin and she was raised in Jerusalem. My father’s whole family were all gassed to death. My father was taken as a child, in a secret rescue to Jerusalem in 1940. My parents got married there and later immigrated to the United States.

This experience obviously impacted my family. The fact is that they [researchers] found that trauma is transmitted via DNA, I grew up with the idea that systems of power can be corrupt, and systems of power that are supported by the majority does not mean they are right.

I grew up in a household that rejected the idea that popularity is a sign of moral greatness on a very deep level. A second important point to this, the Jews before they were murdered in the Holocaust, were objectified by the Nazis. You cannot treat another person in the way that the Jews were treated in the concentration camps if you think of them as full-on human subjects. You have to denigrate them in your own mind before you can even do these actions; this has all been extensively documented.

I’m not trying to make an equivalency between what happened in the concentration camps and sexist representation in film, there’s a big gap there. There is a certain level of intersection with the idea that objectification is not a beautiful thing, and objectification is tied to violence. Extensive research has shown that women who either consume objectifying media or self-objectify as it’s done on Instagram, every minute of the day, has been correlated to body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and higher levels of shame than those who don’t do it, and a higher acceptance of sexual harassment, and even sexual assault. This whole thing of objectification is not just fun and games.

KOUGUELL: Brainwashed stemmed from your lecture presentation “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression” which was at Sundance’s Black House in January 2018, for the launch of Gwen Wynne’s Eos World Fund. Tell me more about this and how it turned into this film.

MENKES: There are a lot of differences between the two. The lecture had 10 film clips and this film has 200, and millions of other differences. The idea was, how can we bring some of these concepts that some people in the PhD film theory world discuss, to film watchers who are not exposed to those ideas?

For those people who know my other work, it tends to be slightly towards the art film and avant-garde film direction. I certainly never thought about the audience when I made my own feature films. This documentary was about how can we prove our case and have the film be fascinating and interesting for sophisticated filmgoers, as well as some person who is not focusing on film as a profession, but a film watcher, which is kind of everybody.

That was challenging, and based on reactions, some people seem to love it. We’ve shown it in all the major film festivals and have gotten some amazing reviews, and we’ve also been attacked, and interestingly we’ve mainly been attacked by other women. People are very invested in their feelings about cinematic masterpieces.

KOUGUELL: Would you say that this lecture served as your script and/or outline for this documentary?

MENKES: The lecture is the core thing that we jumped off of but making the film I worked closely with the editor and creative producer, Cecily Rhett. In fact, I’ve been telling imdb.com to take my name down as writer. I don’t really claim to be the writer, but in a documentary film, the editor is in many ways the writer of the film. I was there for every second of the journey and participated in the decisions. There was no bona fide script as with most documentaries. Cecily had an amazing program called Dynalist, which we used to organize and structure our ideas. It was very collaborative.

Nina Menkes and Rita Hayworth. Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC.
Nina Menkes and Rita Hayworth. Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC.

KOUGUELL: In your own experimental narrative films, you worked with a small crew. How did that change, if at all, when working on this documentary?

MENKES: It seems like a bigger crew when you look at the credits, but each shoot didn’t have that many people. The overall project was more elaborative, in terms of making my narrative films, which I write, produce, edit, and direct.

This film was more complicated on so many levels. Regarding editing, I needed a pro editor who understood the deep issues that I am laying down here and knows me and my work and has background in commercial narrative and documentary film. I was lucky to get Cecily Rhett who had all those qualifications, I’ve known her for a long time, it was a very collaborative process.

There were a lot of people involved in the film research, and then there was the legal part, you have to clear every single clip through attorneys. There was a lot of attorney interaction and the attorney actually influenced a lot of our decisions, because he would say, ‘This clip won’t fly for fair use, you have to find another clip.’ Or he would say, ‘You need to include voice over because it won’t fly for fair use.’

The postproduction was complex, with all these film clips. There was no time code; every single picture and sound was hand matched by Jim Rosenthal, our brilliant postproduction producer.

With the score, I never worked with a composer before. It was challenging for me because I always did the sound myself on my films. Composer Sharon Farber did a genius job.

All those things made it a bigger production. A lot of the interviews were over Zoom because we were in the middle of the pandemic. For example, it was me on Zoom and a team in Atlanta when we interviewed Julie Dash.

Kouguell: How did these films that you include in your documentary, such as Orlando, LeBonheurDaughters of the Dust, and so on inform your own work?

Menkes: I was more reassured by seeing [Agnès Varda’s] Vagabond and [Chantal Akerman’s] Jeanne Dielman (which Menkes didn’t see until after making her film Magdalena Viraga) that there was someone else out there in the world who had similar feelings.

Kouguell: During production, the Brainwashed team reached out to representatives of almost all the living directors whose work is included in the movie, including Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Denis Villeneuve among many others, to invite them for on-camera interviews. They declined the opportunity to participate.

Since the completion of this film have you heard from any of them?

MENKES: No not yet – the film is coming out on Friday.

thin black line

The film will open in New York City at DCTV downtown and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Theaters Friday October 21st with a national rollout to follow.

Trailer

Learn more about the film and rescources here.

Yvonne Rainer

 

Yvonne Rainer Performance June 14 2015 001Thank you, Yvonne Rainer, for an inspirational evening. at MoMA

I am so grateful to have studied with Yvonne at the Whitney Independent Study Program.   Yvonne made an enormous difference in my life as a writer, filmmaker, and woman artist.   I am so fortunate to have been able to tell her this once again last night.

 

 

2015 NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

Great to see old friends and colleagues at the NYFCC Awards.

A few photos from last night…

Photo credits: Tatiana Kouguell-Hoell

2015-01-05 06.45.25

MARION COTILLARD

2015-01-05 07.05.56

Timothy Spall

2015-01-05 07.11.34

Ethan Hawke

2015-01-05 07.12.16

Richard Linklater

2015-01-05 07.19.06

Jon Stewart

 

2015-01-05 06.10.09

Patricia Arquette

2015-01-05 06.27.39

J.K. Simmons

2015-01-05 06.20.15

Bill Murray

2015-01-05 05.54.13

Nick Offerman

2015-01-05 06.08.07

Ellar Coltrane

 

2014 Awards (From: http://www.nyfcc.com/awards/)

Best Picture
Boyhood
Best Director
Richard Linklater
Boyhood
Best Screenplay
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Best Actress
Marion Cotillard
The Immigrant, Two Days, One Night
Best Actor
Timothy Spall
Mr. Turner
Best Supporting Actress
Patricia Arquette
Boyhood
Best Supporting Actor
J.K. Simmons
Whiplash
Best Cinematographer
Darius Khondji
The Immigrant
Best Animated Film
The LEGO Movie
Best Non-Fiction Film (Documentary)
Citizenfour
Best Foreign Film
Ida
Best First Film
Jennifer Kent
The Babadook
Special Award
Adrienne Mancia

 

HAPPY SWISS NATIONAL HOLIDAY!

The countdown to the 66th Locarno International Film Festival has begun. 

Stay tuned for more of my Festival interviews, and more…

In the meantime…above is my photo of the setup of the screen in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.   

For more information visit:

http://www.pardolive.ch

Ask the Screenplay Doctor column: Web Series Wisdom…An Interview with Anne Flournoy

Web Series Wisdom: An Interview with Anne Flournoy

How to succeed in the film business without really trying (but actually trying really hard)? More and more, people are recommending that aspiring filmmakers tackle a web series. Screenplay Doctor Susan Kouguell talks to Anne Flournoy, an independent filmmaker who’s done so and lived to tell the tale — her series The Louise Log was just successfully funded for its third season.

READ MORE:

http://www.newenglandfilm.com/magazine/2013/06/flournoy

SUSAN’S ASK THE SCREENPLAY DOCTOR May column – Interview with Jon Gartenberg

Experimenting in the Digital Era: An Interview with Jon Gartenberg

Interview with Jon Gartenberg

Susan’s April ASK THE SCREENPLAY DOCTOR column…

Ask the Screenplay Doctor: Preparing & Navigating Screenplay Conferences and Pitch Festivals

This month, Screenplay Doctor Susan Kouguell heads to the Screenwriters World Conference as a featured speaker. Before she goes, she offers advice for how to get the most out of your visit to a pitch fest…

PREPARING FOR SCRIPT CONFERENCES AND PITCH FESTS

http://newenglandfilm.com/magazine/2013/04/screenplay

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