Experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens discusses secondary perspectives, the nature of emancipation, and the performance elements of her film Terra Femme.
by Chris Cassingham
Terre Femme (Courtney Stephens, 2021)
Since 2014 Courtney Stephens has amassed a body of experimental and non-fiction film work, including the 2020 documentary feature The American Sector (co-directed with Pacho Velez), steeped in, among many things, the expansive possibilities of the archive. Weaving together women-made travelogues from the first half of the 20th Century, her newest feature, Terra Femme, simultaneously acknowledges the socio-historical precedence of these women’s movements, and holds a critical lens to their relationship to empire.
On behalf of ALT/KINO, Chris Cassingham sat down with Stephens ahead of a live performance-screening of Terra Femme at Bertha DocHouse on 15 August for a wide-ranging conversation about the historic record, presence, emancipation, and what traveling around the world with this film has meant to her.
ALT/KINO: Early on in Terra Femme you make allusions to the way in which the travelogues, and their makers, lack an agenda. They’re seemingly free from the crushing weight of social and political import; “outside the flow of historic time” is how you characterized the footage of a Bahamian window display by Carry Wagner. When you were looking at these films early on in the process, what about the footage led you to this interpretation?
Courtney Stephens: I think this is exactly what I found perplexing about these films from the start, this loitering tendency in some sections. We can’t really call them home movies because they document an unknown world rather than things that live within the domestic sphere. But you also can’t really call the material documentary footage either since they have a tenuous relationship to spectatorship. They’re more like visual autobiographies. But I was also thinking about their relationship to tourism, and I was very attuned to what these filmmakers chose to spend their time, their precious film, on; an interesting tree or someone selling vegetables or other women carrying their babies or whatever – often things that wouldn’t be in the guide book and people who didn’t make it into newsreels, most likely. So I was interested in the trifecta of film, filmmaker, and film subject all falling outside the historic record and instead taking the shape of something more personally resonant to the makers.
A/K: That sort of brings me to the end of the film, where you're revealing this more sinister way that the films are reflective of the colonial project. Why was it important to you to strike a balance between these two conflicting ideas?
CS: Great question - yes this was what was so complex about the material: here is some person’s private impressions, with all the space afforded for exploration inside of that - but this frame is also not accidental. The filmmaker’s mobility. The Western painting tradition that informs her frame. The person on the other side of the camera and their occupied homeland which now receives a steady flow of Western travelers.
It’s interesting that you call it a balance because to me it’s irreconcilable. I remember a producer asking me early on why the film isn’t formulated around the idea of female trailblazers. “What you’re making is so sad.” (That was the end of my commercial hopes for this film! [laughs]). But then, I don’t know that I’d use the word sinister. The films are not propagandistic, they are determined by a kind of larger machine, and then these women are also there in their private lives. It’s me dragging them into the light to ask questions about public life and privilege and things.
A/K: This film is a reminder of the unfortunate reality that a lot of people, especially women, in archives remain anonymous without much of a chance to become known. I was trying to think about the ways in which that idea runs through your other films, and Mating Games and Ida, Western Exile came to mind. Tying these ideas to your reference to Ursula le Guin's "She Unnames Them" at the end of Terra Femme, I thought it was a beautiful way to think about and even complicate this issue of the push and pull of anonymity, known-ness, presence and absence. Could you relate these films together and talk about your intentions in making the women in them known, however you may interpret what that means?
CS: Yes, I thought so much about this, and I think something that really changed for me as I spent time with this material, was the question of the status of the unnamed, which really goes back to the question of what and who count in the historical record, and then the anonymous wave of humanity past, which is most of our female ancestors. It’s interesting you bring up Mating Games, a film I made with KJ Relth about beauty pageants and public exhibitionism on LA beaches in the 1960s. I mean that film is really all about the surface of things, I wonder if we can think of being visible as a way of being known, exactly. Perhaps, it’s often that visibility provides a mask.
A/K: You talk about an archive of sensation in the film, which seems like the kind of intervention we might have to take within the archive to right some of these wrongs in the historical record. Could this be tied into some questions you raise early in the film about the differences between men and women, and whether or not “women” can be a transcendent category. Do you see this archive of sensation as inherently gendered, and has your thinking related to these questions changed over the years you've spent with this film?
CS: I guess the project is being made under the banner of binary gender – “these are the films women made” – that’s the rubric so I can’t escape it, but I am very wary of claims about how women see things. There is a passage in the film about a google alert I set for “female gaze” and the different results I get. More to the point, for me, has been that my own feelings about my own gender remain somewhat unresolved, and if that category wasn’t active and vexed for me I don’t know that I would have been motivated to make this film. Sensation is a nice way to think about an approach to gender that is responsive as opposed to closed. I guess I like to think about the word woman being tied to a larger category of secondary perspectives, something that is more about a relation to the idea of a neutral mode.
I mention this le Guin story about Eve unnaming the animals in Eden and the fantasy that the unnaming is tied to a kind of hidden power in anonymity, in refusal. It’s more powerful to name than to unname, or so we’ve always been taught.
Terre Femme (Courtney Stephens, 2021)
A/K: This brings me to another thing I wanted to talk about in the context of all your films, which is the idea of emancipation. From the woman in Ida, Western Exile preparing for a trip out West, to the young women in Mating Games breaking free temporarily from the performance of womanhood to everything we've been talking about in Terra Femme, it’s evident through everything you've made. What role does the idea of emancipation play in your own thinking when you're doing a new project?
CS: I’m not sure I feel very emancipated.
A/K: Well if anything your films do explore the limits of it as well, I guess.
CS: Maybe it's less about emancipation as a place you arrive than a place that you imagine. Emancipation, liberation, freedom, they are laden words. For a lot of feminists in the 70s language, as in the le Guin story, really was a category of release - so women dropped their father’s name. I do see liberating, magical properties in words. I had this great critical theory professor in college who said when we think of using the word "seminal" to consider replacing it with "germinal.”
A/K: You mention the origins of Terra Femme early on in the film coming from a diagnosis that might limit your future mobility. And later you talk about struggling to marry your own travel footage with the archival footage we see. Do you see your live performance of the film's narration as an attempt to bring yourself back into the film?
CS: Maybe! I think it was necessary to anchor the film, even if I offer relatively little about it, in a desire to travel that comes from a different place than leisure travel might. It remains pretty unresolved but I wanted to suggest that travel is also maybe a vector of understanding one's fate - a place where maybe we get to participate in our own unnaming, maybe.
A/K: Could you describe your experiences traveling with the film for the past couple of years, maybe what kind of things you find you're still gaining from the performances?
CS: Well, I feel incredibly fortunate to get to do it, and I think it’s been very interesting to move through the film so many times. It manages to not feel like an old work but like something that I get to complete each time. It always, from the beginning, seemed like the material should be modular, and feels more like a dialogue audience. Earlier iterations of the film were less formed and we would actually kind of discuss the footage together. It almost became a workshopping process and I’m really grateful for it.
A/K: This discussion around performance has reminded me of when we first were in touch about a film you acted in, Topology of Sirens, all those months ago, and you said, essentially, “just a heads up, I've never seen the movie and I don't know if I really want to.” How do you differentiate between the trepidation you felt about watching yourself perform on screen and the feelings you get from performing this narration for Terra Femme live?
CS: Well that cuts right to the core of the film, right? The question of women on camera versus women behind the camera. Between physical life and interior life, between being a body or being a voice, or an eye. I did enjoy the process of acting in Topology but think I have more to offer as someone looking with the audience.
A/K: Is there any reconciliation you have to do regarding the presence you have as a person doing a live performance during the film and the ideas about anonymity and known-ness that we talked about earlier? Presumably some people in the audience will be there, in part, because they know that you are going to be there “performing”.
CS: That’s a good question, though I think sometimes people forget I’m there! Once they get into listening and watching maybe I still become more of an acousmatic voice than a theatrical presence. Also, the footage itself is so embodied - cameras hanging from the arms of individual women. And the project in its most expansive sense is about the experiential dimensions of life that go beyond what can be known at a distance, so it seems like the material deserves an embodied voice.
Terra Femme screens on 15 August 2023 at Bertha DocHouse.
You can also watch a selection of Stephens’ short films and her other feature, The American Sector, on the documentary streaming service TrueStory.film.
Chris Cassingham is a US-based curator, programmer and critic. His screening series spotlighting new American microbudget fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, Beyond Interpretation, runs at the ICA this Autumn.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.