Spatial Being, Temporal Harvest: an Interview with Filmmaker Courtney Stephens
By Katherine Williams
“Everything beckons to us to perceive it,
murmurs at every turn, ‘Remember me!’” …
“Who shall compute our harvest? Who shall bar
us from the former years, the long departed?”
– Everything Beckons to Us, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J.B. Leishman
Computation is a particularly finite act. It precludes being, produces mere information, deals in the discrete and the objective. It processes those former years, that “everything,” as an object of data and deduction. A harvest is, in a sense, quite un-computable: it is at once a collection and a collecting, a process in flux rather than a stable, stored object. It is a past and a present, or a present attendance to the past. It bears much resemblance to an archive. But, like Rilke’s harvest, the concept of the archive becomes particularly finite when subjected to computation. The “everything” is indexed in the omnipresence of eternal storage, unable to be forgotten. Left with the mass, beckoning our perception, to compute and catalog is to tame the archive. But perhaps there are ways of being with the past that suggest not the stored but the infinite, that allow more than something beyond perception, reference, and historicity.
Courtney Stephens is not a computer. But her films, nonfictional and experimental, resemble a kind of harvest: one of histories and presences, of fragments and wholes. Much of her work emerges from archival footage and an interest in the historiographical: when the time of history becomes the time of film, where do we locate the seen and the seeing? Often that location is more of an echo, a presence that occurs in traces—in fragments of the Berlin Wall, as in The American Sector (2020); in travelogues, as in Terra Femme (2021); in landscapes of the West, as in Ida Western Exile (2014). But where Rilke’s harvest traps us in the antiquarian, Stephens turns the harvest of archival filmmaking into something more immaterial, in which the past is not time but space, and is placed here, materialized in being through film. The past and present may exist separately in time, but they reflect being in inner space: What have we learnt from living since we started, except to find in others what we are?
Stephens’ films do not compute the past nor do they make any claims to particular conclusions; presence as a form of being resists computation itself. What can be perceived outside the seen? she asks. What are the traces of what Rilke calls the inner-world-space? What we have learnt from living is to re-enkindle commonplace; it is also, in many ways, what we have learnt from film. Stephens’ work, filled with the seemingly quotidian, is a re-enkindling of the past and the historically overlooked fields of vision, but also of being with and within the past through that of the commonplace. The documentary footage in her films also allows a vast ambiguity, and Stephens’ attention to the presence they contain collapses time, inviting affect outside the boundaries of the didactic. Through perception and stillness we find something more, lingering beneath the surface of the image on screen: After all, like language and harvest and history, what is footage if not the object and its perception? “O house, O sloping field, O setting sun!”
Stephens has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Sloan Research Fellow, and a Fulbright Scholar. Her work has been shown at New York Film Festival, Viennale, Berlinale, the National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image, the Royal Geographical Society, and a myriad of other spaces across the world, to critical acclaim from The New Yorker, the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, and more.
The following interview transpired on November 16 over Zoom, when Stephens was in California.
Why don’t we start with Lesser Choices (2022). In this film, your mother speaks about an abortion she received 50 years ago. We don’t see her, or you, and I’m wondering how you chose to only include the footage from Mexico City.
The original interview was conducted as audio only, so I didn’t film my mom. I didn’t want to film in part because I knew she would be more relaxed and able to concentrate on the past instead of the present, but I also didn’t want the story to be overly focused on her personally. I felt that if we were watching her, or seeing both of us, the effect would end up being more about our relationship, or end up as a portrait of a particular person and the effect of this event in her life. Instead, I was hoping the story would resonate out over our present situation, and feel like a memory that the viewer is able to enter themselves. As far as shooting in Mexico, the part of the story that was most on my mind, at least conceptually, was her being blindfolded on the way to receive the procedure, that this was a memory without images. So I was thinking about building this collection of images she didn’t see because of the risk she was taking in order to pursue this decision. I wanted to play with whether what we’re seeing is an archive or a reenactment, and somehow place these images in our own family photo album which we see at the beginning of the film. So my focus wasn’t so much representing her herself but creating a space in which the present is slipping into the past.
So that was a political choice to play with the temporal aspect of the film?
Well, I was definitely thinking about the tunnel that’s opened up between those two time periods, yeah. The film doesn’t take a stated position, but it presents a story of what the logistics of procuring an illegal abortion look like, how much risk it places women in. But I think what felt most substantial to me, and part of the politics for me, was the fact that because fifty years have passed since these events occurred, she can relay this story to her daughter, and place it in a context that is about knowing when she was or wasn’t ready to be a mother, and actually positioning the choice as a family act. Without my presence, which is still pretty minimal, the story would remain in its time, but it felt important to include myself as the listening daughter.
Because it’s not archival footage, do you think the use of your own super 8 footage alongside the pastness of her story created a kind of medium between her past and yourself now?
Well, I wanted to shoot super 8 because it felt like a medium she could have had access to at that time. Plus my mom was an amateur photographer, and it’s a corresponding medium. But yes I’ve also done a fair amount of work with home movies and amateur travel footage in my own work. My last feature film is composed entirely of these kinds of documents from the early 20th century, so I suppose it is a way of collapsing time between her generation and my generation’s interest in their media. For me, it’s an interest in the creative possibilities those mediums opened up for women. But there’s also this real friction because an abortion mission is not the kind of thing that would often be documented. And it maybe felt secretive and shameful, so I wanted to retrieve it from that shame and give it some substance and some images. It was a reenacting of a memory. And also a way to help the audience absorb themselves in the space the story is taking place.
That’s something I think came up a lot at NYFF, the archive and mothering, lineage. You had Annie Ernaux’s Super 8 Years, that compilation of family footage with her voiceover––very much a form of personal essay. The difference though is that she’s actually in the footage. I’m wondering if you think about that distinction, of inserting yourself visually.
I don’t have much interest in putting myself on screen in my films, but I also don’t know that presence is always about being visually present. And especially for women, presence as subject rather than visual object is a loaded thing in itself. In Terra Femme, these women shooting are not on screen, and their presence is definitely essential, it’s just a different kind of presence. Maybe perspectival presence is what I’m more interested in, and also maybe playing hide and seek with my own presence. And I think a fair amount of my work is interested in how to project presence into seemingly empty spatial environments. In The American Sector, which looks at pieces of the Berlin Wall scattered around America, we often did this with offscreen voices echoing over these objects or the places they were situated. I’m definitely interested in what I recently learned is called the acousmatic voice, and what a voice can do in terms of activating a world onscreen that maybe doesn’t even contain people, that maybe is just landscape. Or opening up different temporalities, something that physical presence can’t do in the same way. I guess it’s also a question of the value of constructing characters as physical entities or as vehicles into point of view or just fantasy. I think when there’s a person onscreen it’s very powerful, and also very concrete. Sometimes it can be nice to leave a viewer yearning after that nucleus.
I think in documentary, especially when concerned with history, broadly conceived, you often get this voiceover that’s quite overdeterministic and there’s a decided link between what the narrator is telling you and what the footage means.
What I think is interesting about your films is that the voiceover is not necessarily describing the footage on screen, or not determining it. It’s more open-ended. How do you think about that relationship between the audio and the visual aspect on screen?
Well, I think it can be challenging to find proportions that allow a listener to feel grounded in a context but still free to roam around in their own thoughts, and also to build out those contexts or facts while avoiding a pretense of neutrality. Entering a subject matter through subjectivity rather than through objectivity, or the conceit of objectivity, is really interesting to me. I don’t actually mind films that are loaded with facts and numbers when I’m trying to learn about something that involves facts and numbers, but I have this almost petulant resistance to films that try to invoke that kind of self-assuredness about things that are truly only knowable through a personal lens – and that is, in fact, a lot of things.
When Lesser Choices played in New York it was programmed with other films that focused on generations and family. I think there is a lot of work being made right now thinking through our own inheritance, maybe as a proxy for our cultural inheritance. And I think that genre of what you might call subjective nonfiction is entering a phase of real sophistication as people filter social issues or experiences through what they themselves have known and can touch emotionally.
I think entering a subject matter through subjectivity rather than through objectivity, or the conceit of objectivity, is really interesting to me. And I think the challenge is, especially when you’re in the realm of ideas or you’re needing to build historical contexts, how you can avoid the mode of neutral fact. But I think that’s a useful challenge. I find myself very resistant, almost in a petulant way, to voiceovers that are making these global pretensions. I guess the reality is that I’m after our felt internal realities, and if you can transmit that and also larger social ideas through the personal, frankly I think that’s more honest than trying to come in like an overhead God.
How do you conceptualize the connotations of personal filmmaking in that context? Maybe also in regards to the association between women and the personal or domestic and how home movies fit into that.
There’s so much baggage, and misogyny, around the “diaristic,” being dismissed as a slight genre. I learned so much at the Met’s recent Alice Neel retrospective about how her mode of portraiture was dismissed by the same logic. Now there are so many films, like Jordan Lord’s Shared Resources, that are not precisely feminist but that look at the personal and familial and invoke much larger meanings and themes. I don’t think of any of my films as overtly diaristic, and yet I think they all experiment with that register at some level.
Terra Femme is definitely about these other people’s visual diaries, and speculating on their incompleteness as diaries, their opacity, in terms of them lacking a descriptive text. I like incomplete objects like these and how they pose a challenge, to me as something like their interpreter, but also to the audience. There’s that difference between representation and description. I think of the diaristic as a mode of describing experience as opposed to enacting or reenacting or doing other things with personal experience. There are so many angles into that word, I guess.
Can you talk a little more about that distinction between representation and description? I think it’s something that comes through in your films, particularly in allowing these documents to speak for themselves or to allow less interpretation.
I thought a lot about this during the research that culminated in Terra Femme. The film is composed entirely of silent images, but the project actually came out of an interest in 18th and 19th-century travel writing, which is a super florid genre of writing. Working with the silent travelogues I was then acutely aware of the way they hold ambiguity about their makers or intentions. We don’t get judgements or readings or an interpretative apparatus. But in a way that’s so much of what we’re dealing with in the 21st century, this deluge of media from the past, so much of it gushing forth without real annotation. It’s especially true of private media, the kind that ends up circulating relatively anonymously, but despite all the fictions we’re then prone to project onto them, amateur work often seems to hold more non-fiction than professionally constructed non-fiction. Take documentaries of the early to mid-century with their theatrical voiceovers and tell me which tells more truth.
There is this question of opacity that is on the front of people’s minds right now, of how media communicates, how it speaks, refuses to speak, keeps its own secrets. And with visual documents as opposed to written documents, we enter the mind of the maker so differently. We are put in their point of view, as opposed to having that point of view described. So it becomes more of a mirror for the viewer, for their desires, discomforts, and critical faculties. Visual discourse is so different from written claims. It’s more like a discourse of repetition and framing. But I think we’re always left with a set of questions that can’t be answered, and to me that’s a really creative space. Simply showing something is not the same as making a claim with language. Working with old films, it seemed valuable to ask questions of the present that were coming out of questions about the past. And also to ask what amateur films or visual diaries, scrapbooks, whatever have to say about the medium of filmmaking and its use in people’s lives beyond spectatorship. They were so far outside the realm of professional filmmaking. Maybe they’re dialogues with the self disguised as portraits of the world. Attempts to get to know yourself through the way you look at things and what the way you assign value. It was something that seemed to be happening in these films that was almost an unprocessed thing. In writing, one might do the same thing but it’s being processed through language and so it all becomes legible, but with visual material we have this chunky, trenchant thing. It has more to do with one’s bearing than one’s intellect.
I want to go back to what you were saying about travel writing and the present. There is what you could call a sobriety in the footage, and when I think of the personal form I think of it in its origins as a very serious or sober form of reflective writing. I don’t think it necessarily is anymore, just because there’s so much of it. But the footage and this relationship between place and self that comes up in the footage that you’re using, and your filmmaking in general, is reminiscent of the general project of maybe the personal essay. There’s a solemnity or sobriety to it. Particularly because your films deal with place –– I’m just thinking of Joan Didion and that interplay of place and self, but in the way that plays out differently in language versus in a film.
Maybe one way I relate to what you’re saying about Didion has to do with the nature of surfaces. Didion had an amazing ability to take something that might not seem so serious, then pull at the richness of its elements, but to also keep being interested in how it functions as a surface. To be very serious about unserious things. I’m drawn to things that could be easily dismissed. I like the obstacle of working with overlooked things. There’s a line in Terra Femme where I say that it seems one of the women has a particular attraction to anti-monumental things. There’s a shot of people in fancy outfits boarding a boat followed by a storefront window and things like that. These are not vistas, there’s something that attracts her eye.
Yeah, I think there are these very still shots of a fruit market following that line.
Right, these things that seem impoverished as images alongside pyramids and obelisks. Much can be found in things that don’t immediately say that they are grand, that make no pretense to having a richness of source. But in something like a way of cooking a dish, embedded in it are histories of war, weather, rations, trade. The dish is a living archive. There is so much density in small things, and this isn’t only a mode of feminist historiography. I’m really fond of the historian Carlo Ginzburg who does micro-histories and might look at historical economics through the bank records of a particular cheese shop,or something like that. I guess it ties back to this thing about personal or familial filmmaking, it’s a mode of microhistory.
Do you think with micro-history there’s more attention now to the archive itself, to what the footage presents? I’m thinking of the film you made with Lucy Ives. The essence of the film is just the questionnaire, the document itself.
There’s something fun working with something that operates as a prompt rather than as evidence. The silent films operate as prompts. They are evidentiary and substantial, but they don’t fill in their own blanks. It’s nice to open up fill-in-the-blanks spaces within a film, very difficult too. Didion was great at that, at chiseling out certain elements with the hope that something larger, perhaps inarticulable, arises in the space between those elements. You can open up a large space doing that, but it’s ultimately contingent on the viewer’s mind to assemble their own sets of meanings. For me it’s a more engaging way of watching than simply being told, Adam Curtis style, that this happened and this happened and therefore we can surmise this gigantic leap or large cultural generalization. It’s in a mode of receiving that I think is a little oppressive. It feels like bad faith curiosity, that kind of work. Curiosity for one –– it just holds you hostage.
When you have something like that playing in front of you the film is already complete and enclosed. There’s no way to enter that as a viewer. It’s less transcendental than being allowed to be part of the co-production of meaning.
Yeah, that unfinished element is so necessary, I think. It takes many different forms. An example at the other end of the spectrum is someone like James Benning or other durational filmmakers who offer up time for unstructured thought, for thinking that is not necessarily prompted by language but is really about filling space in a sense. Or a film can be dense with plot but the result is somehow on another plane entirely.
I think there’s also something about watching landscape footage in particular that is so elemental, or captivating. There’s so much visual expansiveness.
To be honest, in Terra Femme, my favorite parts of the film are when we’re lost in the American landscape. I love big spaces. The notion of elsewhere as an escape from here is interesting, and I do think, between the beautiful and the sublime, I’m kind of down with the sublime.
Maybe this is because I’m from the Midwest, but yes, the experience of openness is a very particular spatial feeling. And I genuinely think that looking at footage of a kind of vastness contains a semblance of that, of there being more than what is shown.
And maybe it’s about a kind of longing, especially in types of nature that don’t offer themselves up to habitation. They lock you out at the same time they draw you in. And maybe it’s about allowing yourself to take up that much space. Big-scale nature can open up possibility at the same time that it forecloses it through scale. You want to enter that scale, but can only ever enter the surface of it, but maybe that impossibility is a revelation, into the illusion that these spaces are or have ever been empty.
And travel footage in particular is always something that is capturing landscapes. In Jameson, right, it’s turned into an object that can be consumed for a Western public, in a kind of tourism.
Or seizure. America even exoticizes itself. The self conception of America is about putting oneself in the saddle of playing surveyor. Actually, in the O’Keefe film one of her houses was basically a dude ranch. It wasn’t wild land. It was a managed site where guys would go and play cowboy. It was already a kind of simulacra. It then became a Western movie site. Silverado, City Slickers. It was an enactment site of a fantasy. But in Westerns, it’s also totally different to enter the genre as a female character. The surveyor position is there, but it doesn’t belong to you. Women end up representing the antidote to all that vastness.
I want to go back to Terra Femme for a minute to talk about how the live performance changes the work, in terms of the sound brought into the space, but also the relationship between yourself and the film, or between the text and the footage.
I don’t really know entirely what it does because I’m not in the audience, but for me, it sets the film up like a conversation with the audience. And when I’m there in person inevitably that conversation does happen as a Q and A, so it’s guaranteeing certain terms of engagement. It’s a dialogue-oriented presentation. And formally, it’s reenacting the way these travelogues were commonly presented in the era they were made, and maybe also acknowledging myself as their interpreter, rather than hiding myself in some disembodied aura of expertise. Putting myself forward as a person. It’s definitely destroying the acousmatic nature of the voiceover, that seems to come from nowhere.
I saw a series of Ken Jacobs shorts recently and in the audience he was sitting with a radio. During one of the films he started playing the accompanying sound from the radio. I think there’s a way that bringing the sound into the actual space of the theater, or wherever the viewing is happening, is almost a return to embodiment rather than a recession into spectatorship. I think that’s interesting when the sound is your own voice.
I think with live elements you listen with a different set of faculties, you’re listening to someone speaking, as opposed to “speech.” You also hold the person accountable for their words in a different way, so there’s more investment from all sides I think. I guess it’s also a way of leaving the film unfinished. It’s not a ready-made object. It’s inscribing into the silence every time.
There’s something ephemeral about it, even as you read it from a script.
Yes, I like that idea. It’s like running a stitch through this material and then pulling it out each time. It’s almost saying, here’s one way of linking, or stitching with language, this material into this form. There could be any number of other stitches made. I think there’s a modesty to that.
More information about Stephens’ work can be found at courtneystephens.net.