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Transcription from
phone conversation
Sandi: I think these two tapes work well with each other.
Mindy: Yeah I think they work well too. Many times there is
this arrogance that film and videomakers have that you're
the master of your material and you're in control, and controlling
every bit of this information that you are presenting to people,
and that the videomaker is the one with the intellectual capacity
to read the subject. And what happened in Delirium was the
power and authority of the director or, in this case, the
daughter, is subverted in this one moment where the subject,
my mom, demands the camera and turns the lens and the questions
back on me. And in your tape you set that up from the very
beginning. I think for many viewers it is very disarming for
the director to announce from the beginning that he is willing
to relinquish power and control and give the subject the power,
even symbolically, to read or interpret her own life, even
if that means shaky camera movements and low lit, unfocused
shots. But for me this happened because my mom made it happen,
and I in fact ended up asking for the camera back where you
set up Tomboychik from the very beginning by giving your grandmother
the camera. I wonder how conscious you were of this while
you were making it because it seems to have this anti-polish
or anti-mastered quality.
Sandi: It really just started out without me having very much
technical training or equipment and being too impatient to
wait to get it before I made a work. But I wasn't making a
work. I was just making this home video with my grandmother.
It just started out as this chronicle of my family history,
but when that family history started surprising me, it became
a video. Because I had no idea what was going to come out
of my grandmother's mouth ‹ we had the traditional grandchild/grandmother
relationship. I never knew that she thought of her gender
in that way.
Mindy: Oh you didn't?
Sandi: No, no idea.
Mindy: But, why were the wigs there?
Sandi: Well it seems like it was shot in a day ‹ like
it was just a trip to Grandma's. But it was shot over six
months. So when she started telling me this history of her
life and how she used to fight like a boy and push the boys
into a puddle if they tried to get too fresh with her, it
stirred my fantasies about having this completely queerified
family ‹ this gender bending family. So, I started pushing
it further by bringing the wigs and also playing with my own
gender with her. I couldn't really come out and say it ‹
the words 'gay man' had no meaning for her. The wigs were
just a way for us to have the queerest relationship together.
And she loved it because she was so performative.
Mindy: Yeah, I know what you're talking about. When you watch
Tomboychik at the end there is a desire, at least on my part,
for you to come out to her and to push it further. But I think
you are coming out as who you are in a way that only makes
sense within your particular relationship through the process
of making that tape. I understand this because the ways in
which I first started worki-ng with my mom developed as a
way of communicating which I couldn't do unless the camera
was on. There is something about family life that is so coded
and pre-determined and the thought of actually talking to
her about how I felt was impossible. But when the camera entered
the picture and I took on the role of setting up scenes and
she became the actress, then this whole other kind of dynamic
was made possible that allowed for communication, collaboration
and dialogue. And it wouldn't have happened necessarily if
the camera wasn't on.
Sandi: Because it is so true with your mom that she is such
a savvy performer. She is so camera sharp and my grandmother
wasn't.
Mindy: Oh I don't know ‹ I think she is camera sharp,
actually. I think to you she is your grandmother, but to other
people she's a charmer. And I think she is performing to a
certain extent. Also remember that you may have worked six
months with your grandmother but I started working with my
mom in photographs and videos when I was a teenager, and she
has gone from being inhibited in front of the camera to being
very performative. This was a process, because the more we
worked together the more she wanted to collaborate, and it
shouldn't have surprised me that she would finally seize control
of the camera after my constant probing about why she took
everything out on me during my childhood. It was a logical
step or a natural progression for her to do that. Because
the fact is that she was being scrutinized by me armed with
the camera, and her ability to finally break through that
power relationship was born out of a long process of becoming
familiar and comfortable. But you do it so instantaneously.
Sandi: But I do it instantaneously in the editing, because
I did have an agenda. I don't want this to be a portrait of
a pathetic old woman. I wanted her to have power from the
start.
Mindy: There is something else that is interesting to me ‹
the fact that within the current field of media art and specifically
within the area of queer media which has been very active
for a long time now, Tomboychik still stands out as something
very unique, because while there is a great deal of gay/lesbian
work addressing the body and sexuality, there is very little
work about family sexual history.
Sandi: For me the tape comes from living away from New York
for four years and coming back to my neighborhood and my family
now as a gay person. When I left four years before, I was
straight. And upon my return I felt a need to queerify those
institutions and those things that were rampantly hetereosexual.
I'm so tired of the gay agenda these days and I just have
no need for it.
Mindy: What is the gay agenda?
Sandi: Peter Friedman and I were speaking about the different
generations in gay media. He felt that his generation was
about creating a gay ghetto, while I felt the edge now is
about leaving that gay ghetto and coming back to our communities
and meshing our gay and lesbian sexuality with all the other
identities that intersect it. My grandmother and I are Brooklyn
boygirls, born and bred.
{A break in tape
occurs here}
Mindy: Somehow
I think that there are these very strict gender roles that
our society defines as normal. And the more strict we are
about these gender roles, the more false and unhealthy it
is because people's needs are not really being served by these
falsely constructed definitions. But I do think we need to
understand the social and political context of people's lives
in order to understand why they make the choices they do,
rather than naming and blaming and risking further polarization.
Sandi: There is this part in Delirium where you talk about
your social memory instead of personal memory and it's interesting
how you take your localized family situation and talk about
it in terms of madness, hysteria and how patriarchy defines
that.
Mindy: Right, because from the very outset of the tape I announce
my impetus for making the work was my frustration and anger
at the fact that my mother blamed herself for her illness.
But as a child growing up in that situation, it was so clear
to me that this was a societal issue. And yet we live in a
society that is so focused on the individual. And mental illness
especially is always defined as an individualized problem
right down to your DNA and genes. And the political structure
is left off the hook. So it was very important to me to make
this link, because in my mind personal memory and social memory
were in the same camp.
Sandi: I wanted to explore ‹ and I think this is why
Tomboychik is really different from other gay tapes that explicitly
state "this is who we are" ‹ I wanted to explore the
ambiguity about what happens when you wind up returning to
your neighborhood where things just aren't clear cut. And
I just think of my grandmother and how she had this 19th century
view of sexuality in which you could be butch/femme, drag
king/queen, but as long as you married and reproduced you
were normal. My grandmother even told me that she didn't think
she was a woman until she gave birth to my father. It was
those little moments of undefinability of identity politics
which were most interesting to me, and that's why I didn't
want to include any theory or any text and just wanted to
leave our footage raw.
Mindy: There is a certain way in which you don't need to introduce
theory because your grandmother speaks the theory. There is
something to be said for theory being formulated from art,
events and communications rather than art replicating theory
itself. I need to have a sense of discovery in video as a
maker and as a viewer where the political agenda is not wholly
decided from the onset. And that is something about Tomboychik
that is really wonderful because you are right there discovering
on par with you and it is not overdetermined where that discovery
will lead you.
Sandi: With Delirium it's the playfulness that keeps your
tape from being dogmatic.
Mindy: Primarly in my mind was this desire to strike a balance
between emotion and theory and try to achieve this delicate
tension between serious critique and playful humor. I was
very conscious of audience and not really willing to relinquish
any audience, I guess. I have always wanted to be able to
show my work to people like my mom, and most audiences do
respond whether they are initiated into the language of video
or feminism or not. It's the subject that sustains interest.
July 1, 1994
The End (of Phone
Conversation)
To: Mindy Faber
From: Sandi DuBowski
Dear Mindy,
Here are a few things that I had scrawled notes about, but
didn't talk about in our impromptu interview ‹ which
was really great. I hope it came out on tape. There are also
a few things I can't remember if we discussed, so maybe when
I look at the transcript I may add some more if that's 0K.
Also included are some excerpts of more prose-y writing I
had done after coming back to NY from visiting Nana in the
hospital. Let me know if any of this is worth including. There
was a course, at school‹ The Work of a Work of Art. Is
our essay The Home of A Home Video?
I made Tomboychik under my parent's roof, behind their back,
with their camera, and with their mother.
It had its New York premiere at MIX, The New York Lesbian
and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival, which was held at
The Kitchen. After the screening, this 60ish year-old lesbian
came up to me and said in a big Brooklyn accent, "Hi! I'm
Ronnie. I knew your grandmother. I run a pesticide business.
Here's my card." She went back to our coastal Brooklyn neighborhood
and told everybody. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the
Jewish year, at Temple Beth El, Dottie Schiff's grandson approached
my parents and inquired, "So I hear Sandi made a film about
your mother." (She had died a month before.) "Oh," my parents
said, surprised. "It played at The Kitchen." My parents looked
at each other and asked, "Whose kitchen?"
I hadn't been home for a few days. There were piles of tapes
around, some reviews, evidence of emergency trips to the post
office, but unless my parents snuck behind my back, they still
haven't seen the tape. Independent media is not their world.
The closest they came was when my father yanked my mother
out of the theater after 10 minutes of My Own Private Idaho
(probably because he got turned on by the blowjob scene).
But when the New York State Council of the Arts awarded Tomboychik
a Media Distribution Grant, things in the household changed.
For my parents, The Government had legitimized this work.
The Government had proclaimed its blessed authority with a
fat check. Despite the gay movement's "Marketing Moment!"
and Christian Right propaganda (those two-person childless
households making over $75,000 a year!), my parents associated
homosexuality with downward mobility if not outright poverty.
But then, I heard my Mom on the phone brag to a relative,
"You know these young people today have things they want to
say, messages they want to tell society."
If anything, the message of Tomboychik is oblique, ambiguous.
Rather than being an academic project of reclaiming lost family
sexual history, it's a chronicle of how Nana and I fell madly,
fiercely in love over six months before she died, in all its
wacky drag-esque gender-blending ways. Our relationship in
its intimacy is central. Its small and poignant moments build
into an intergenerational, queer message, rather than a message
that dictates our moments.
The studio at 594 Broadway was an alternative home. The Airwaves
Project ‹ ShuLea, Rea, Ela, David, and Kathy helped me
visualize an active media community and provided me with the
editing resources and advice which made making videos possible.
Rea's friend was editing at the studio on the same system
I had edited Tomboychik. I had just showed her Tomboychik
the night before. She fell in love with my grandmother, her
wink, the purse of her lips, the beret cocked over one eye.
I called my answering machine and got two messages from my
aunt, with a very shaky voice, "Sandi call me at Nana's. Something
terrible has happened." No one was home. I called every hospital
in Brooklyn. An hour later, my aunt arrived back after a long
walk around the block. Nana had died. Five blocks away from
my house, for five days, my aunt had watched her die, projectile
vomiting on the wall, bleeding, unable to eat. She didn't
call me because she wanted to protect me. I didn't get a chance
to say goodbye. I was ensconced in my new home, one hour by
D train away, with Nana trapped in a visual coffin. Eject,
Rewind, Play. Eject, Rewind, Play. I'd avoided visiting for
awhile. I was so busy editing, I said, but really I was scared
of facing the truth of the hey hey girl's decline, and her
eventual end. I was superstitious. I thought I caused her
death by stealing her image and taking it into the borough
she hadn't stepped foot into in 7 1/2 years. We had shot from
September to January. In February, she had her first stroke,
lost her memory and slurred her speech. In July, she died.
Now I think Tomboychik is a living memorial and await the
day when Nana and I will meet in some Jew heaven. She hasn't
seen the entire tape, only the sections I showed her in the
film, so I don't know if she'll press her lips to my neck
for ten seconds and call me "loverboy," or call me a "good
for nothing tramp."
I don't know why
I grieve, bent over into the ground. It's not like she's there.
For a time, I imagined she hid in my belly button, maybe curled
in stray lint. On the day before the funeral my mother noticed
a red spot on the ceiling in the family room. Aunt Miriam,
Nana's sister, was lying on the couch, her position of the
past 40 years, a schnorrer on a divan, expecting to be served.
Mom got a sponge mop and I got a stepstool. But I claimed
the spot was Nana clinging to the ceiling, the red of her
blood refusing to leave the room. Mom snapped, "That's crazy,"
and Aunt Miriam just lay there weary for no reason. I climbed
the stepstool to examine the mark and tried to fight Mom and
the mop from wiping it away. I grabbed the handle and caused
a smear of dirt, but at least prevented her total disappearance.
Nan clung like a bug, or a bat, through the shiva period,
watching her family gathered around her, even if she was 1/1000
of her original size.
Sandi
To: Sandi DuBowski
From: Mindy Faber, Video data Bank
Dear Sandi:
I just finished your letter and the part about how when Nana
died, and you thought you had caused her death through video.
My mother didn't die, but she came as close as you can get.
Within 12 hours of completing post production on Delirium,
I got word that mom was in the hospital barely surviving pulmonary
edema and was being prepared for quadrupal by-pass surgery.
I flew down to Kentucky immediately. I was unable to watch
or show Delirium to anyone else until my mom was released
from the hospital several weeks later. At that moment, I thought
mom's heart attack was punishment for my selfishness. But
my mom assured me that it isn't the freezing of a person into
a visual image that causes death. She told me as she lay in
her hospital bed before surgery that the videos "we made together"
freed her to die knowing that she was leaving something important
behind "besides having kids." I was never quite sure until
that moment
how important these videos had become to her. I think it is
also possible that your Nana was freed up to die by the making
of Tomboychik and by the importance you placed
on seeing her and hearing her stories. She must have known
that ‹ in you ‹ she had a way to live on.
You also spoke of making a video behind your parents' backs
with their camera and their mother. I, too, have always felt
naughty when I made videos and photographs with and of my
mom, because the process revealed family secrets and violated
taboos of loyalty and privacy. But I also knew that I needed
to show Delirium to every member of my family when I was done
because even if it was painful, knowing they would see it
would force me to stay honest. You asked me what scenes did
my mom generate? In some ways this is like asking at what
points did you as a videomaker, relinquish control or perhaps
remain honest? This is somewhat difficult to answer. I have
always worked with my mom in a fairly controlling way. I set
up scenes and ask her, like an actress, to perform the roles.
But I justified this by thinking of these scenes as way to
initiate a dialogue with her although I was probably more
interested in indoctrinating her with feminism than in really
listening to her. So again with Delirium I had certain preconceived
ideas which were informed by various feminist and psychoanalytic
writings, and I began to script in my old familiar way based
on these ideologies that I sought to illustrate. But my mom
had become a video veteran by now and no longer contentedly
and unquestioningly performed the script which I provided.
She questioned the why's and how's of everything and continuously
offered her suggestions throughout the taping process. The
struggle to be honest and relinquish control for me was just
that ‹ a struggle.
€ I taped a three hour interview with my mom, but was
dead set against using any of that footage until I realized
I absolutely had to a week before my final edit session.
€ When my mom asked for the camera during one of our
last shooting sessions the scene before she seized the camera
was supposed to go like this:
Mom: I'm simply incommensurable with the world.
Mindy: But why did you take it out on me?
Mom: Oh Mindy I just taught you the female role of submission
like all mothers do.
But instead of
saying this last line she demanded the camera and said as
she pointed the lens at me:
Mom: I never took anything out on you. Your'e a perfectly
normal little child. I took everything out on me.
I think this scene
became one of the most powerful and critical moments in the
tape and her assertiveness at departing from the script forced
a different structure for the tape. The ending that I had
already decided upon and did end up using actually falls flat
once I take the camera back because I reimpose this stubborn
but simplistic conclusion that her mental illness could be
read as a rebellion against patriarchy. Her own reading ‹
that the only real pain suffered here was by her and any rebellion
present was internally directed against herself ‹ is
a much more complex and painful expression than the one I
wanted to present.
With Delirium I felt like I began to learn to use video as
a way of listening as much as telling because the subject
was my mom .
Mindy
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