A Lesbian Collective Aesthetic:
Making and Teaching The Owls

Introduction

This essay is about making, teaching, and learning from lesbian cinema in two completely interrelated ways. On the one hand, I will focus on making (and then teaching) The Owls (Cheryl Dunye, 2010), “a generational anthem for Older Wiser Lesbians [OWLs], aging revolutionaries in a world they cannot control. A funny, humane look at the bonds that restrain and the dreams that remain.”1 The Owls is a production of the Parliament Film Collective, which I formed along with Dunye and fellow producers Candi Guterres and Ernesto Foronda as a way of acting on our frustration with the limitations of both corporate and contemporary (mainstream) queer filmmaking. We invited others to join us, and the sixty or so of us—lesbian and queer, multiracial and with a range of professional experience—worked together to create the film. Beginning with a script written by Dunye and lesbian novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman, the cast and crew drew on their own experiences to add to the understandings, interpretations, and script of the film (not to mention its unscripted documentary elements; most of the cast and crew were interviewed about the film’s ideas and processes, and some of these interviews were included in the film), thus reflecting the importance of collective process for the OWLs generation and our film about it. On the other hand, I will discuss how this conversational, open-ended, film-based making and teaching is our “lesbian collective aesthetic.” Which is to say that, while most understandings of cinema aesthetics look primarily to film form and content (style and story), here I will suggest that the extra-textual feminist processes of collectively making (by first discussing and leaving room for multiple interpretations) lesbian cinema and identity and then critically and communally teaching (and then conversing again) about the practices of making cinema (and identity) are of greatest importance for me as an activist scholar, an educator, and a filmmaker, as well as for the collective I participated in: one committed to radical, inclusive, collaborative lesbian filmmaking.

For reasons both political and precise to our practices, I will argue that our film’s lesbian aesthetic is a product of its collective methods and its inventive forms, which are both inseparable from its lesbian story, politics, and ideals (even as many queers were part of this “lesbian” collective process). The same holds true for the lesbian collective aesthetic of this essay. As we did to make the film, I will play inventively here with queer collective expressivity. I have composed this essay (and its Partial Canon) using the collective writings and videotaped words of eleven volunteers from the Parliament Film Collective. In this way, the form and method of the article attempt to mirror the collective engagement and processes of the film it discusses. And in this way, the piece introduces, through its form, one of its main arguments about lesbian cinema aesthetics: method and form matter, and then education (or teaching) must as well, because the making of cinema is typically obscured from its text and the text’s reception. In relation to lesbian collective cinema, teaching can be particularly powerful in its own right if this pedagogy can keep its focus on process as much as story, or, harder still, on process as story.

I worked on The Owls as one producer among many (including Agusta Einarsdottir, Cheryl Dunye, Ernesto Foronda, Candi Guterres, Skip Snow, and Molly Sturdevant), all of us doing our part in a collective crew working for free in the name, spirit, and celebration of low-budget, collaborative, experimental lesbian cinema. The film is a feature-length documentary/fiction hybrid about four Older Wiser Lesbians who accidentally kill a young lesbian and try to get away with it. Our lesbian film does a rare thing within this tradition: representing post–baby-dyke lesbian life with no sugar coating. It watches four women in two long-term relationships trying to make sense of the weight of alcoholism, infidelity, infertility, aging, and murder. The Owls also gracefully (if sometimes gruesomely) mixes the stories of its thriller characters with those of its behind-the-scene makers, creating space first within its production processes and then within the film itself for the difficult and often glossed over debates and conversations that underlie contemporary lesbian identity, culture, and cinema: the friction created within cross-generational interactions and relations between butches and trans men, around politics of identity and visibility, and amongst the competing practices and histories of lesbian/queer cinema.

For instance, while making The Owls, Campbell (she goes by this name only and was previously known as Inge Blackman), our “sound-man” (a talented British director in her own right, i.e. her B.D. Women, 1995, is “a celebration of the history and culture of Black lesbians”) noted in one of her talking-head interviews (the crew as well as the cast were interviewed across the production to create documentary footage that addresses the themes and meta-themes of the film: queer cinema and identity, lesbian culture, aging, and the like) that as an English-woman of Caribbean descent she found it important that the two black characters in the film (Cheryl Dunye and Skyler Cooper, playing Carol and Skye respectively), were not named as black in the screenplay. The B-team (shooting the “documentary” component of the film), discussed (on camera) with Campbell what she saw as the productive potential for unknowing or unnaming in this queer post-identity move and movie. But this was only the beginning of cross-generational, cross-racial collective aesthetic because this documentary footage of Campbell, stating this concern, is cut into that very narrative film where race is not named, thereby naming it. Hence in the collective’s production process (and the record of it inscribed into the film), a difficult conversation about how to understand black lesbian history, visibility, and identity is raised, maintained, and left open to be addressed in the film’s text and later teaching, and not simple as a political question, but as a formal one as well. Unlike more traditional narratives where contradictions (in production and theme) are stylized and smoothed away, our collective lesbian aesthetic seeks to let them be seen, as should teaching based upon it.

This is the first example of what will be my focus throughout: the lesbian collective aesthetic of The Owls lies in the way in which it was made as much as in its content or form, or perhaps more to the point, the way it is made is visible in its experimental content and form. This lesbian aesthetic, much focused upon, discussed and recorded when making the film, can be revisited when viewing the film (as well as the other queer/feminist films listed in our Partial Canon), in effect continuing the aesthetic outside the film’s text via critical, feminist reception and pedagogy. Method and form both hold and produce lesbian content, and because these may be new, radical, and complex, audiences need guidance to get it. For those who watch or teach cinema, but have not yet had the opportunity to make it, the careful work of envisioning, conceptualizing, and then actually constructing film, scene by scene, player by player, is often obscured (by transparent style) or obscure (because most viewers take legitimate pleasure in watching all-consuming, easily unrolling stories). By using this opportunity to allow some of the players who made this film to discuss their own work and influences, I hope to model a (queer/feminist) method for discussing, understanding, and teaching lesbian cinema. Given that many of the readers of this essay may not have made film themselves, I will conclude with some framing questions focused upon keeping the often elusive production process in sight.

Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Cinema, Lesbian Aesthetics

We made The Owls in the summer of 2009, shooting for one week in Los Angeles, editing over the fall, and premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2010. The film was made for $21,000, acquired through the collected contributions of its six producers at $3,000 each, and an advance of the same figure from our sales agents, the queer-run Collaborative.2 To be clear: Hollywood films shoot for months, most indie films take several weeks at minimum, and most movies need millions of dollars to move from page to screen. How did we do it with next to nothing? Critically, the entire cast and crew worked for free under a “favored nations” agreement where everyone got $100 per day (from producers to production assistants) as a deferral (to be paid if and when the initial investment of $21,000 is recouped). I emphasize our unique economic model for three reasons. First, we hope others will use it, since it allows women, queers, people of color, and marginalized others to make cinema because and when we want to, within our own communities, and about our distinct needs and interests. Second, it is only recently possible to do what we have done, given the new accessibility of inexpensive, professional quality equipment and, in our case, a crew of sixty queers who are professional (or aspiring) film artists—this a recent phenomenon itself enabled by feminist/queer film education, scholarship, and community. And finally, it serves as a partial but critical explanation of the (lesbian) collective forms or aesthetic we chose and made, the main preoccupation of this article.

While much feminist/queer cinema scholarship has been productively devoted to the theoretical and formal nuances that might define a feminist/lesbian cinema, I choose to add to these conversations not more critical nuances, but the element of collective production that was central to The Owls. I will allow queer filmmakers to explain their motivations, practices, and aesthetics and will suggest that these are visible in the text we collectively produced. In this way, this effort differentiates itself from and hopes to augment more “theoretical” discussions of lesbian film by looking to filmmaking practices and filmmakers’ influences as conscious, self-aware articulations of theory (and politics) in their own right. Let me be clear: the vast majority of members of the Parliament Film Collective have studied (and/or taught) academic film/queer/feminist theory and history in Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, English, Creative Writing, Dance, or Media Studies classrooms. Scholarly ideas inform our work at every level. However, in The Owls, these academic and political concepts are translated into the forms and practices that best suit feature filmmaking and lesbian cultural production—our collective lesbian film aesthetic—rather than the classroom, textbook, or even scholarly article.

That is why this essay also includes five video clips and further writing by the Collective members who chose to participate. Via their biographies and some video clips, you will hear more in this essay from eleven members of the Collective: the director, producer, and actor Cheryl Dunye; screenwriter Sarah Schulman; producer and production designer Candi Guterres; editor and producer Agusta Einarsdottir; actor V.S. Brodie; photographer, data and information transfer, production assistant, and craft services crew member Love Ablan; sound mixer Campbell; propmaster, set dresser, and production assistant Tania Hammidi; cinematographer Alison Kelly; and actor Michael Lucid. In the first video component, you see and hear several members of the Parliament Film Collective (the ones who could afford to get to Berlin ...) publicly discuss our work on the film at a question-and-answer session after the premiere of The Owls at the Berlinale Festival.

The Owls, Q & A at the Berlinale, part 1a [5:16]

The Owls, Q & A at the Berlinale, part 1b [4:12]

Featuring: V.S. Brodie, actor; Cheryl Dunye, director, producer and actor; Agusta Einarsdottir, producer and editor; Candi Guterres, producer and production design; Alexandra Juhasz, producer; Sarah Schulman, screenwriter

These clips introduce and model four concerns about lesbian cinema that are central to this essay: 1) a commitment to collective authoring and process leads to alternative forms, 2) the work and description of production are integral to constructing and understanding a lesbian aesthetic, 3) an assurance that in the age of digital technologies, lesbian cinema is easier to make and distribute and takes on a variety of forms (including YouTube interviews as well as low-budget features), and 4) people who self-identify otherwise can participate in the development of lesbian cinema. Two of the collaborators on the Berlin stage for the question-and-answer session do not currently identify as lesbian even if we have in the past, and even as we are committed to lesbian cinema—I identify as queer and Guterres as third-gender. While such digressions in certain contexts might seem unnecessarily personal and thus beside the point, I insist that understanding the personal and political connections and gaps between self-naming and the political project of visibility production are critical for making sense of the current state of lesbian (or queer) cinema, The Owls serving as only one example. My earlier examples about the unnaming of blackness serves as one example of this conversation, while conflicting debates among the OWLs about the necessity of the naming of trans in the film did as well.

Trans theorist and activist Jack (Judith) Halberstam was invited to participate in our cast and crew preproduction discussions about trans and butch identity and politics in the “lesbian” community. In the B-team’s taped documentary interviews with him, it came to our attention that the film’s six characters were, like the black characters, also unnamed in relation to their gender/sexuality identification, although given Cheryl’s interests, the initial assumption was that all the characters were probably women who were lesbians, and mostly butch. Just so, it turned out that Skyler chose to play her character Skye as an androgynous-looking but female-identified black woman, just as she chooses to enact herself. And here the so-called “generational divide” between the older and younger (in heart and theory, as much as age) queers working on the film presented itself: on one “side,” the nostalgic celebration of the lesbian or female or feminist; on the other, those seeking a more radical gender and sexual unmooring detached from outdated dependence on the “female.”

Given this split among us, the collective spent a lot of time, both on screen and off (many examples of this conversation appear in the film’s credit sequence), discussing our multiple choices for self-identification, from lesbian to queer, trans man, and Halberstam’s “transgender butch.” While the majority of participants in the making of the film identify as “lesbian,” there is one gay man and two currently straight women in the group who participated in the writing of this article. Then, as I’ve already said, Candi identifies as third-gender, Tania writes that she is “queer and trans-leaning,” and Campbell identifies as a “fag Daddy.” Furthermore, the eleven participants in this article include two Asian Americans, a Lebanese American, two women of African descent, two Jewish women, and an Icelandic, none of which is made visible in our descriptive prose (while some of which is visible when we speak on stage).

I go to these lengths of description and identification to point out that lesbian filmmaking remains a form of identity-based activism even as ours increasingly becomes an era of post–identity politics and self (another theme of the movie). Because we made The Owls collectively, we strove to hear the voices, commitments, theories, and politics of our diverse and committed crew, and these were decidedly not uniform. While all agreed to work for free on this lesbian feature film, divisions in the group were informative and definitive. Perhaps most painful for the Older Wiser Lesbians—the OWLs—in the group was a decidedly clear disavowal of the term “lesbian,” although thankfully not “feminist,” by mostly the younger members of our collective, who felt the word was too closely linked to the biologically female for their taste. After decades of trying to champion female-centered spaces, practices, and lifestyles it was difficult to account for the many championings of masculinity across our ranks, from trans men, gender-indeterminates, straight women, and gay men (not to mention lesbians).

The film changed to represent these debates about the politics of identity and visibility within its cast and crew: conversations about gender, sexuality, and community occur within both the narrative and documentary elements of the film as well as in its staging and cinematography.3 Therefore, I choose the word “lesbian” to describe our aesthetic—the visible and public rendering of our methods, forms, and practices—because this word forefronts the complexity and even conflict within our collective filmmaking in this moment, whereas “queer” currently works to soften out differences, conflict, and internal dissonance.4 Admittedly, the word “trans” might function similarly, marking our internal differences. However, since lesbians were by far the majority in this collective, I choose to use with the word “lesbian” to highlight our efforts at open-ended community expression.

Thus, in this writing about The Owls, “lesbian cinema” is understood to encompass the following elements: cinema about lesbians (by men or straight women), by lesbians (working in the many roles of film production from director to costumer), or for lesbians; cinema that creates a lesbian gaze (looks from the point of view of a lesbian), is itself about lesbian cinema or queer theory, or strives to create a lesbian aesthetic (a unique style to encompass some or all of the above elements). In The Owls, our collective filmmaking process seeks to achieve all of the definitive qualities listed above: a film by, for, and about lesbians and queers, utilizing new forms while relying upon reflexivity, theory, and inventive looks. Lesbian cinema comes from a need to see images of the complexity of our lives; a belief that film is well-suited for this political and personal project; and a longing to see reflected on the screen our unique journeys, our unconventional lives, the diversity within our community, and our radical politics and practices. According to Sarah Schulman (after she read a draft of this article), given that so little lesbian-made representation exists, this “justifies the extreme measures necessary to break through the censorship. But these conditions are not desirable.” Digital production and distribution allow us to break through cultural censorship at a scale unprecedented in cinema’s history. In other writing (about YouTube),5 I have expressed dismay that our recent DIY revolution has mostly led to paltry efforts in mediamaking, primarily attuned to commercial culture and undertheorized self-expression. This is where this essay’s (and The Owls’) commitment to both collectivity and education comes in. Tools alone (even the Master’s) do not a revolution make. We need to talk together, so as to stretch and challenge each other, then to read and watch, debate, and support each other, so as to make our best attempts at a lesbian cinema attuned to the multiple needs of our community.

Q & A at the Berlinale, part 2

Featuring: V.S. Brodie, actor; Cheryl Dunye, director, producer, actor; Agusta Einarsdottir, producer and editor; Candi Guterres, producer and production design; Alexandra Juhasz, producer; Sarah Schulman, screenwriter [7:50]

Collective Practice, Lesbian Aesthetics, and Teaching

I am certain that viewers of mainstream cinema (queer or straight, no matter) will find our film provocative, original, erudite, and unconventional. As hard as this may be to understand, the film is not for a generic (lesbian) audience. It is not supposed to be easy, or routine, or classic, and even if it is at times fun it should also be hard: it needs (collective) work to be best understood and enjoyed. While The Owls has been dismissed in reviews for being academic, having a “slight whiff of the women’s studies seminar room about it,” I’ve attempted to model that this is something we are proud of: a mark of our commitment to the convergences of avant-garde form, political content, collective process, and lesbian culture. Thoughtful, educated, political, and self-critical artists understand our work in conversation with but as a different form from scholarship or theory. We’re making (and watching) film after all! But, then again, The Owls feels little like mainstream cinema (although it refers to it), was made with a different production model, and has a different heart. We hoped to perhaps pay ourselves back but never to make money. We wanted to have fun together. We planned to model a possibility for the production of queer low-budget cinema. We wanted to make a critical intervention into (lesbian) film style and history. Thus, The Owls has a complicated form (moving from documentary to fiction, from quotation to innovation), an unhappy and inconclusive ending, breaks its own storyline, and is rooted in our collectively expressed dark emotions, unhappy resolutions, and angry eruptions about lesbian identity, politics, and cinema.

And (at long last) this is where teaching comes in. In the classroom, on these pages, in film festivals where there are question-and-answer sessions, and in radical collectives, we can provide viewers versed in traditional (lesbian) cinema a different education, one akin to that which we created by working collectively across generation, nation, sexuality, gender, and self-identification. The critical first step is to become familiar with a great history of innovative queer/feminist cinema, and next to refine one’s own language to best describe the hard, beautiful, new things one sees there as well as what still might be missing. Thus, a first step is that project of naming and unnaming discussed and used across the film: what do you see (or not see), how is it different from what you have seen before, and in what ways are radical issues and their related forms necessary to express lesbian content? Our difficult conversations about how to understand black and trans lesbian history, visibility, and identity are raised, maintained, and left open in the film so as to be productively addressed in the film’s teaching, and not just as political questions, but as a formal ones as well.

While The Owls represents lesbian questions from a lesbian point of view, it also asks cinema questions from a cineaste’s point of view, and production questions from a collective’s point of view. Conversation about lesbian film can always circulate around what the work expresses about (lesbian) film. How does this film comment on queer film style and history? For instance, a documentary/fiction hybrid is often used to make claims about truth and fiction in cinema, and in the case of a lesbian film, around the identities, communities, politics, and representations held there. How does this film understand lesbian identity and community? Then, the beauty of digital tools (seen in the film’s visual language) is that they allow every niche group two related possibilities: to name, refine, and define our own aesthetic (as already discussed above) and to share that new vision within our community and beyond. However, these new tools provide another advantage in the classroom. These newly available video tools can allow your students (or yourself) to learn about the cinema one might need by seeing more examples of it and, even better, making it for oneself. The videos included in this article were shot with a hundred-dollar Flip camera that has one button that needs to be pressed once to shoot and once again to finish the shot. The low-budget, low-tech, low-end videos here share the lesbian collective aesthetic of our more finely rendered feature film, The Owls, because they are rooted in the same commitment to self-expression through communal interaction, open-ended conversation, and using new forms, dependable theories, and radical politics. Anyone can make such a film to comment on and contribute to lesbian cinema, and everyone should! In this way, students and teachers who view such films, discuss them, and perhaps even add their own images to the conversation build on an aesthetic where collective process first makes a story and then is the story. What is your (class’s) lesbian collective story?

Cheryl Dunye and Alex Juhasz at the Berlinale, part 1 [4:45]

The Parliament Film Collective’s (Partial) Canon of Lesbian Cinema