Female Redundancies: An Interview with Jennifer Montgomery
Journal article by Amelie Hastie; Afterimage, Vol. 27, 1999
Journal Article Excerpt
Female redundancies: an interview with Jennifer Montgomery by Amelie Hastie Jennifer Montgomery has been making what many deem "personal films" for the last decade. Her first 16mm feature-length work, Art for Teachers of Children (1995), played widely in the United States and abroad. A fictionalized autobiographical film, it explores an affair between a female prep school student and the male school counselor who takes nude photographs of her. Montgomery's other work includes short super-8 films such as Home Avenue (1989), Age 12: Love with a Little L (1990) and I, A Lamb (1992), as well as the video Poet in the Ring (1992). Her most recent film, Troika (1998), premiered at the New Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film in New York City last June, and has since played at such venues as New York City's Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinemateque, Los Angeles Film Forum, Pasadena Art Center, Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo, the Milwaukee Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and various colleges and universities. A film about sex and power, Troika is composed of two narratives woven together. One is an adaptation - or, rather, a reenactment - of an interview by journalist Jennifer Gould with right-wing Russian demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky that was conducted in August 1994 and published in Playboy in March 1995. The interview takes place on a boat traveling down the Volga River (Montgomery actually shot the reenactment in Connecticut) during Zhirinovsky's campaign for President. A young woman, Masha, translates the conversation between Gould and Zhirinovsky; the dialogue therefore takes place in both English and Russian, with some subtitles for the conversation not translated aloud. Initially they discuss politics, but Zhirinovsky steers the conversation into seedier waters, at one point suggesting that the women have sex with his henchmen while he watches. The other narrative is a story of two women, Jennifer and Z, who are in the process of dissolving their relationship. Things begin going downhill as they prepare to go to Russia and continue to fizzle as they are traveling. The same actress plays Jennifer in both stories, but while she essentially reads the words of Gould in the interview scenes, in the other narrative she is a fictional character. These separate narratives are conjoined in a number of ways. Jennifer and the translator appear in both story spaces. Visual details also appear across the two narratives. The film cuts between scenes of the interview itself and of contentious discussions between Jennifer and Z. Words from the actual interview are spoken not only in the reenactments of the interview itself but also by characters in the parallel story. In this way, the film's form translates dynamics of textual and political power between the two scenes. As with theater and film, the relationship between literature and film has been one of the most fundamental ways cinema has been understood as a kind of multi-media art, or at least an art form that is indebted to other, written forms. The link is, of course, inevitable, considering the etymological and historical origins of "cinematography": writing in motion. This connection has further been severed and reconfigured in order to emphasize the distinct qualities of cinematic texts. Such connections and reconfigurations have been detailed by classical film theorists like Hugo Munsterberg, Sergei Eisenstein and Andre Bazin; by early arbiters of "auteur theory," especially Alexandre Astruc; by narratologists and theorists of adaptation; and by those who themselves adapt the language of literary forms to describe the "language" of film and video.A seeming return to the Lumieres' inscription of the term "cinematographe," Astruc's metaphor of the "camera-stylo" (the camera-pen) perhaps best represents the fluidity between media forms (and instruments). As he writes, "This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language."(1) Michael Renov concretizes this metaphor in a series of written works in which he examines the "essayistic" in visual texts. In "History And/As Autobiography: The Essayistic in Film & Video," he argues that the essay is essentially a "heterotopic" form and thus looks at films and videos that share this quality.(2) He maintains, "These visual works, like the literary essay form, can be said to resist generic classification, straddling a series of all-too-confining antinomies: fiction/non-fiction, documentary/avant-garde, cinema/video."(3) In connecting these antinomies, Renov ... |
End of free preview...
To continue reading this publication, you must have a Questia Subscription.
Try Us Today! Click Here
Questia provides the world's largest online library of scholarly books and journal articles, with integrated footnote and bibliography tools, highlighting, note taking and book marking. With a Questia subscription, you'll have access to the full text of more than 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles.
Already a subscriber? Login:
Sponsored Links
Free Newsletter
Get helpful how-to's, writing tips, search strategies, quizzes & more!
Search the Library
