Inspirations

I first got bit by the independent cinema bug as a 20 year old in college.  I grew up in a family of daughters in Florida, enrolled in ballet classes and loving the Sound of Music, Little House on the Prairie and the Waltons.  (We used to make the younger neighborhood kids act out the Sound of Music characters…)

I didn’t know what an independent film was until I starting taking modern dance classes and enrolled in a course on “Politics and the Media.”  We watched Coppola’s film The Conversation starring Gene Hackman.  It’s a film about sound, paranoia and interpretation and I’d never seen anything like it…. The Conversation showed me that film can approach literature in terms of depth, ambiguity and suggestiveness.  (I was really an English major first–Political Scientist second…this would get reversed at various points in my life).

By the time I hit graduate school, I was introduced to the fact that film can also equal poetry or painting, and, in fact, film recombined the arts in fascinating aesthetic ways.  I wound up writing about turn-of the-century dancer/filmmaker Loie Fuller because her experiments with lights, costumes, bamboo poles, and painting on film really defined for me that structuralist, poetic impulse to investigate the medium and its aesthetic possibilities.

Maya Deren’s early films and, later on, Brakhage’s Mothlight also went down these poetic, painterly paths….

While in graduate school at UF, Gainesville had the bad luck of being visited by serial killer Danny Rollings.  Suddenly, my feminist theory reading group didn’t make so much sense in the face of this macabre violence.  So, a group of friends and I picked up some cameras–video and film–and started making experimental documentaries.  Like Tom and his early compatriots–these first media partners and I have remained friends (and we got a little better at the film/videomaking thingee…)

Video and film are collaborative adventures (as was graduate school).  While struggling to finish a dissertation, I was introduced to the history of public access and Paper Tiger Television. (You can make TV for free!)  That’s also when I first heard about Tom’s Media Burn adventures–starting with Ant Farm.  More on collaboration soon….