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Homeland Insecurity:
Jennifer Reeves on The Time We Killed
by B. Kite
Guises of memory constructed and reconstructed
run through Jennifer Reeves’ The Time We Killed.
The initial story is personal: Robyn, a young writer (enacted by
the poet Lisa Jarnot), finds herself unable to leave her apartment.
She sleeps, bathes, worries about her radiator, periodically works
on a romance novel entitled The Handsomest Man, and, most
of all, remembers, tracing new patterns of meaning from the motifs
of her life. It’s a home movie in several senses: proudly
(and beautifully) handmade, shot largely in Reeves’ own apartment,
and intent on the porous spaces of urban dwellings and the paradox
of attempting to remain isolated while the lives and voices of neighbours
penetrate the walls, both aggressive and phantasmal.
As Robyn screens and reworks the movie of her mind
to patch the holes in her history (her early years occluded following
a jump from a bridge at age 17) and create workable terms for loss
(her isolation is initiated by the death of a lover), the world
outside is coming up with stories to explain its own traumas. The
film begins in November, 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq war.
That Bush production shamelessly drew on the nagging irresolution
of the images of September 11—“just like a movie”
was the refrain in the aftermath—to give them a blockbuster
logic. Since nothing satisfies the requirements of media psychobabblers,
their eternal calls for “healing” and “closure,”
like traditional narrative resolution, subbing Saddam Hussein for
a rootless terrorist network makes structural—if not factual—sense.
The resolutions in Reeves’ film are all provisional:
Robyn thinks perhaps a central event in her past—say an instance
of abuse—might explain her dilemma, but she never discovers
one. She says she’s “afraid of catching the amnesia
of the American people.” It’s a selective amnesia, intent
on making univocal meaning and discarding any incongruent elements—call
it the homeland insecurity movie. Reeves, on the contrary, opts
for a montage of circulating resonances, most memorably in a series
of duets with Jarnot, who wrote five poems “in character.”
The spoken words and the images share a set of motifs (i.e., dogs,
water, sunlight, birds, beach), but far from a lockstep march, they
move forward and apart in a dance of meanings in motion.
The apartment scenes are shot in black-and-white
digital video. The materials of the image reveries are multiform:
bits of stock footage, fragments of home movies shot by Reeves’
father, and mostly high-contrast 16mm. The quality of these last
images, the inky smudge of the blacks and blinding light of the
whites, suggest both the decay of an nth-generation photocopy and
the permanence of the fundamental forms that remain after the scouring
of time. The decision to use this stock was the first she made for
the film, deeming it the best receptacle for memory’s texture.
With the exception of Chronic (1997),
a 38-minute film dealing with self-mutilation which renders the
celluloid surface itself multidermal through an inspired and sensitive
use of the optical printer, Reeves’ earlier work largely dispenses
with narrative—the hand-painted films The Girl’s
Nervy (1995) and Fear of Blushing (2001) demonstrate
in particular a deep response to Brakhage. The Time We Killed,
a title redolent both of war and the in-between moments which make
up the bulk of a life, is Reeves’ 13th film and first at feature
length. It has won prizes at the Berlin and Tribeca Film Festivals
but has not yet found a distributor.
cinema scope: You
recently watched The Time We Killed all the way through
with an audience for the first time. What was that experience like?
jennifer reeves: It’s interesting,
because I had planned to leave the theatre since I had stayed too
long at a recent screening and had fallen into a bad mood. The film
is very serious, obviously. There’s depression and violence,
fear, shame, and isolation, a lot of difficult experiences. But
I remembered suddenly how important it was to laugh about it all
and that I had folded a lot of dark and sad humour into
the film. But it’s subtle and a lot of audience members will
be unsure if it’s okay to laugh at certain moments because
it’s like laughing at human suffering. But, the absurdity
of depression, the behaviour and the way of thinking you can get
into, can be really funny. So I put that in as a means of making
the film more enjoyable for myself. You know, this is what we do
to make our lives more bearable—we laugh at ourselves.
So at this particular screening at Outfest in
Los Angeles, I told the audience, “This is a pretty serious
film but there’s a lot that’s purposely over the top.
So feel free to laugh.” So people were really laughing out
loud. Throughout the film, they got more and more attuned to my
threads of humour. So it was great to see that the emotional range
experienced by the audience was greater and more like I had intended.
Contradictions are more evident when you become
somebody who’s very self-aware. You’ve been through
therapy or have read about psychology and you’ve spent your
life observing other people. And you learn there are these contradictions
between how a person feels and what’s the reality of the situation.
You become more aware of the layers of your past and present. Some
people will fly off the handle and think they’re reacting
only to a present situation because they have no self-awareness
at all. But Robyn is somebody who knows that it doesn’t really
make sense to never leave the house. She’s searching for an
explanation but is kind of crippled by her fear. Within that contradiction,
you can either start laughing or you feel totally pathetic.
scope: And people become very
exposed in regard to any social interaction, they lose the psychological
callouses people need to survive in the daily world. One scene that
brings out the awkward humour is the neighbour’s visit, when
Robyn starts by wondering whether she should get a dog and then
spirals off into tangents on what dog ownership involves, including
a consideration of the sound their toenails would make on the staircase.
reeves: That scene shows how
nervous you can get when you’re isolated, nervous about coming
off right. How do you have a conversation? These things are taken
for granted, but if you’re socially phobic or a person who’s
been very alone, you forget all these cues for simple things like
how you make a transition, how you invite someone into your apartment,
or how you get off of an awkward train of thought. She says one
thing about wanting a dog but that you can’t have one in the
building, then she goes into other people she knew who had dogs,
the dog on the wall, and what dogs mean to mankind...It’s
about getting stuck in a loop.
scope: Was that
scripted or improvised?
reeves: It was both. I would
say however that some of the best material was improvised. I gave
Lisa and Susan a script that had some key lines and a list of topics
that had to be discussed. And they had never met before so it was
almost like they had to play themselves getting to know each other,
but in character.
scope: Tell me about the film’s
long evolution. What did you start with and how did it change as
you were working on it?
reeves: At first, it was going
to be a montage film. I started collecting material for it in 1998,
and in 2001, I started writing the character Robyn. I kept writing
fragments of what I was thinking about. I’d just come up with
little lines that later I wove into a longer narration and film
plan. Phrases like “Going home now you’re going to die,”
or “When you’re dying you don’t have time for
small talk.” Or “Like distance, boundary allows closeness.
A moment is shared when eyes meet (camera eye). The film is about
a hermit. She becomes a hermit after her friend dies...Photos filming
the actual girl, fearing to ask and so on, and filming XXX to get
over my desire to bed XXX. Filming capturing deeper intimacy, proof
of significance.”
So out of all these idea fragments I was collecting,
Robyn began to emerge. Meanwhile I was shooting with my Bolex on
random trips out in the world—I went to the Berlin film festival
to show Darling International (co-directed with M.M. Serra) and
I filmed my friend Valeska there. I went to New Zealand in 1998
and went home to Michigan in 1999, and was shooting animals, landscapes,
people, and water. It was all about gathering and responding to
the world, almost like I was creating a home movie for a fictional
character.
scope: Were you planning on working
with Lisa from the beginning?
reeves: I actually put an ad
in Backstage and I got around 300 headshots and letters
from aspiring actresses. And all of them were presenting themselves
and trying to look really pretty and feminine, which I guess is
what you do. But the whole actorliness and glossiness of it really
turned me off. I also realized this was going to be another personal
no-budget film, so I needed somebody I could work with over a long
period of time in a more organic way. So I went back to my usual
method and thought of friends who were non-actors.
Lisa was the friend with whom I was most actively
talking about the concerns that I had for the film. And her poetry
is so very connected with my kind of filmmaking. She just made sense.
The majority of our shooting happened in the spring and summer of
2002. And later, I shot her point-of-view shots. For almost a year
it was just me, alone in the apartment, shooting out the window
or using myself as a stand-in. That was, I guess, another part of
picking her, because we both have long fingers, kind of bony arms—there
was enough similarity in our body types that I could be her body
double.
I lived the film. It was my apartment, I was the
body double, Lisa wore my clothes, and her point of view out the
window in the movie was actually just my everyday point of view.
For instance, one day I was at home editing the film and it was
so gusty that the wind blew the plants off of the windowsill so
they broke on the floor. And so I thought, “Okay, this is
a significant event that happened in the apartment,” so I
just got out my PD150 camera and shot the destroyed plants on the
floor, and used the image to imply Robyn had done that in a fit
of rage. I worked with available light. If the moon looked particularly
beautiful one night out the window, I’d just have to get my
camera out and shoot it. So rather than creating a scene for a movie,
I was responding to the actual environment.
I also went through my own archives. For years
I’ve been recording sound and shooting, so I had outtakes
from other films and home movies that I brought into The Time
We Killed. I wanted to create a more personal, “real”
experience, something that would be a movie but would also share
something more intimate of what I know. And what I care about.
scope: And was there something
about doing it through another character that made that process
easier?
reeves: It maybe makes it easier
to cut things out. But as a rule I think it’s more interesting
when artists transform their own experience, rather than recount
it. If I decide one day to actually do an autobiography, I would
probably want to do it in book form. But I don’t think people
really need to know about my life. I have things to offer in terms
of what I observe, what I feel or believe in. I think when we’re
really honest about our emotions, everybody’s a lot closer
together than they were aware of. Differences sort of melt away
if people are more honest.
And that’s probably one of the things I
feel most vulnerable doing. When I sit in the theatre and feel nervous
about my movie, it’s partly about feeling my own emotions
exposed. A lot of the film deals with shame, embarrassment, failure,
silly hopes, and kind of ridiculous fantasies. I’m doing it
earnestly but at the same time ironically, because that’s
what you have to do sometimes, it makes it a little easier. So making
this hybrid between actual home movies and a made-up story—there
was something to be revealed in that clash.
Maybe it poses a question about how people invent
themselves. I mean, one of the things with Robyn is that she is
an artistic person and you can see this connection between her novel
and her own desires and how she uses writing to be somebody else.
I wanted to get at that fact of human nature. Even autobiography
contains self-invention, but often disguises it. So in some ways
it felt more honest for me to make her an imaginary character.
scope: It does keep teasing the
boundaries, though. You integrate some of your family’s home
movies into the fiction and list yourself in the credits as playing
Robyn as a child.
reeves: Yeah, I used my father’s
Super 8 footage from when I was a kid. I was so happy to integrate
those images into my film, because my love of movies came partly
from the experience of watching those scenes on a Super 8 projector
in our living room as a kid. It was a way of looking back at these
different times and feeling better about them, because everyone
was performing for the camera. I didn’t have a very happy
childhood, and these home movies became a myth, affirming that we
actually had a happy family and that we did stuff together.
But I like the subtleties of those movies, you
can see awkwardness and revealing looks...like when my father shoots
me at age three straddling a bomb at the war memorial there’s
this skeptical look I give the camera. And I just think it’s
funny that Robyn is so into dogs, because in this scene of me as
a kid (standing in for Robyn) I am literally diving out and tackling
my dog onto the ground. This poor dog is so abused by the overzealousness
of my brother and me. But Sparky was a good sport. He always got
up and kept playing. But I found it wonderful to be able to bring
in a sort of self-critique through this document of my own childhood.
scope: What led you to choose
high-contrast stock?
reeves: Hi-Con was actually the
first decision of the film, before I even knew the subject matter.
I had shot a little Hi-Con for several other films and found it
so compelling, I wanted to make a whole film with it. You lose detail
and the subject that you’re shooting can seem more distant
or abstract, so it was a challenge. I felt I could use this in a
way that would bring out nostalgia, memory, and loss. With Hi-Con
you only get an impression and the basic form of what you’re
shooting, without the gradations of light. It’s pretty much
pure black and white with very little grey. It emulates how time
and memory abstract experience leaving only the impression of what
was most important. Which relates to another concern of mine—the
anticipated demise of film that people keep talking about. I had
this feeling like this was my last chance and I wanted to make something
really beautiful that had only to do with film at the most basic
level: light inscribing itself on emulsion, the lack of light not.
And that also brought out the continuity I saw
between totally different places and things. There’s a montage
where a llama in Michigan is connected with ostriches in Indiana
to race horses in California to farm horses in New Zealand to birds
flying somewhere else in California. These free associative montages
are like your mind, your mind can jump anywhere immediately.
But I like limits, I like rules, to a certain extent. Obviously
in a film like this that’s working with montage and free association,
with many ideas that don’t have to be tied to the plot, I
had to have certain parameters. So the Hi-Con was one. All the Hi-Con
is handheld, all the interiors were shot with video on a tripod.
To create the different worlds, the different realms of experience.
I’m a cinematographer also, so a lot of times when I’m
out shooting the Hi-Con I’m not thinking, “Where is
this going to fit in the movie?” but rather, “How can
I best render this moment, get at the essence of this moment or
this place?”
scope: The idea of constructing
memory also enters into the political material of the film. Robyn
speaks of the Bush administration making an improper use of memory,
using it as a rationale to kill people.
reeves: Yeah, she talks about
the anniversary of 9/11 and how it was used by the Bush administration
to gain support for invading Iraq, picking the scab of this wound
to get everybody riled up and scared enough to want to go out and
kill people. Meanwhile, Robyn is involved in the process of trying
to remember her past. She’s had amnesia from the time she
was 17, but wants to understand herself and to free herself to move
forward and do good. People can use memory for positive growth,
or else use it to further an evil cause.
Later on, Robyn says, “I’m afraid
of catching the amnesia of the American people,” which refers
to the times we’ve invaded countries and did things that were
wrong—that hurt people, made nations not trust us, created
poverty and starvation—things many Americans like to forget.
And it’s in the way the media operates. We’ll be so
inundated with some topic or scandal for a week or a month, and
then it’s essentially forgotten. It’s almost like being
in a perpetual state of the present tense without reflection on
the past and with no real consideration of the future. It breeds
this horrible ignorance, and I guess that’s another thing
I was getting at.
I was trying to weave in these different planes
that normally wouldn’t be brought together. Narrative film
is usually much more simplified, gathering information about what
unfolded in some story toward an end. But this film is very nonlinear,
it goes inside her head and it goes outside. And it even goes into
something that’s not in her head and not in the external world,
but more like my commentary on all of it.
So there are these different levels that are pulled
together. On the one hand, it might be overwhelming and hard to
put together for the viewer, but it’s also what I feel people
need more practice doing. Because we’re so completely inundated
with images and commentary through the media—it’s so
all-pervasive at this point that people just kind of shut it off.
There’s like a filter, like, “Okay, too much, not gonna
process that.” It’s strange, because people watch a
lot of tv but you don’t actually see that many different images.
You mostly see people speaking to you and telling you what you see,
what to think.
scope: Tell me a little bit about
the animal motif in the film.
reeves: I really love animals,
obviously. I also think the way people treat animals is an amplified
reflection of the way we treat other human beings. So essentially,
I wanted to break down that boundary a little bit more between animals
and people. Both on the level of emotionally connecting with another
being but also on a symbolic level.
If humans are used to believing that we are superior
beings, that there are lesser beings whose life is less valuable,
that in turn fuels how free we feel to kill and exploit other people.
You know, racism. Racism is coming into play in this dehumanization
of the Iraqi civilians. The “Shock and Awe” campaign
probably wouldn’t have been as easy to sell (to senators,
to the American public) if it had been against a nation of Caucasians.
But while critical terms like “dehumanization” and “treating
people like animals,” express injustice and sadism done to
human beings, there’s an implication that it’s more
acceptable to treat animals like disposable objects. I feel that
very different kinds of abuses and exploitation are actually connected.
So, on the one hand, my film is reaching out and
celebrating the “personalities” of these different animals.
Because I see them as individuals. And I shot portraits of them
in the same way I would a person, the way the shot’s composed,
the kind of eye contact. On the other side, the film references
cruelty. There’s the animal-testing footage. At another point,
there’s this really sweet poem about sheep running in a field
of grass on the soundtrack, but what you see is a sheep in a cage
with just concrete and stones under her feet, looking forlorn. So
there’s that contrast.
The animal theme is noticeable to people because
you don’t often see animals integrated into a serious movie.
If animals are in it, it’s got to be Disney, a kids’
movie. And I did something even more unusual, combining experimental
and narrative in a long piece.
scope: Other films that occupy
a similar territory might be Akerman’s Je tu il elle
(1974), Resnais’ Muriel (1963), Eraserhead
(1977)...
reeves: Also Guy Maddin’s
films. I love the fact that he’s created his own language,
that he’s been doing his own kind of narrative, developing
his own sensibility for so long that it’s really strong and
unique. I would love it if more filmmakers did that—or were
given the opportunity to do it.
scope: I was actually expecting
the film to be a lot more claustrophobic. Robyn’s enclosure
is opened up by the memories and associational footage. And also
there’s this weird way in which she’s both isolated
and really exposed, because of the constant barrage of neighbours’
voices and stimuli from the outside world. It comes to seem almost
impossible to completely isolate yourself in the film.
reeves: Other people might find
it claustrophobic because they can’t get lost in an action
sequence, or forget themselves. The film asks the viewer to think
about matters of the self without escape. Some people will do anything
to avoid being alone.
I like to spend time alone—I feel a need
to have a certain amount of time by myself to let the mind flow.
I can actually feel more “claustrophobic” out and about.
I have a threshold of how much time I can socialize, and then I
just need time to process new experiences and ideas. So for me,
having these sequences that were supposed to be her imagination,
was perfectly natural and important. I didn’t want them to
be like these typical little sequences that just represent the
fact that she imagines things. I wanted the viewer to actually
live in that interior space and feel how freeing and vast it can
be.
Somebody recently mentioned Repulsion (1965) with reference
to my film, but in that film it mostly shows the woman in her apartment,
moving the camera this way and that way to show her fear and instability,
and there are these little flashback moments in her head. But they’re
so truncated, they only give a glimpse into her head. She remains
a mystery, and her whole thought process remains very simplistic.
Though there are things I like about Repulsion,
I really get tired of movies that simplify people who are in a state
of mental illness. Besides that it’s irritating people need
to do that, I find it much more fascinating how the mind actually
works, all the different places you can go, how freeing and how
frightening it can be. Your own imagination can scare you to death,
and then other times it can totally soothe you, or excite you.
scope: Do you see this film as
more directly related to Chronic than some of your other
work?
reeves: It definitely
is, even just this topic of recovery from mental injuries based
on early trauma.
scope: But the end of Chronic,
with its apocalypses blooming behind every façade, seems
to suggest there’s no real escape or recovery possible.
reeves: Yeah, obviously when
you’re afflicted with this sort of self-destructive impulse,
or unhealthy behaviours which have come up in reaction to the world
as a survival mechanism, you’re either on this path of continually
getting closer to actually destroying yourself or you find a way
to replace those unhealthy patterns of behaviour and somehow become
a new person. So recovery is very uncertain, some people recover
and some people don’t. In The Time We Killed, Robyn
has survived and she’ll keep surviving, but the question is:
How much better can she get? I don’t know what the statistic
is, but probably most people are unhappy to a certain extent for
much of their lives—it’s the human condition, right?
So Robyn’s at a state where she’s “surviving,”
but she’s not living anything close to a full life. But at
the same time, and one of the reasons I brought in the world situation,
is that Robyn does have her apartment, her job, the ability to live.
Even though she’s suffering mental anguish, she also enjoys
her privileges of creativity, making meaning. Having time to daydream
is a luxury when bombs are falling.
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Articles in this
Section
The Unbearable Pretentiousness of Being Don McKellar
by mark peranson
Homeland Insecurity: Jennifer Reeves on The
Time We Killed
by b. kite
and in the magazine...
Locating the Past: Peter Lynch’s Stream
of Cartographic Consciousness
by ryan noth
I think it’s more interesting when artists
transform their own experience, rather than recount it.
The Time We Killed
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