LOCARNO 2024. LISTENING FILMS: A CONVERSATION WITH COURTNEY STEPHENS

LOCARNO 2024. LISTENING FILMS: A CONVERSATION WITH COURTNEY STEPHENS

By Libertad Gills

I sat down with filmmaker Courtney Stephens during a hot day at the Locarno Film Festival, where her recent film Invention, made in collaboration with Callie Hernandez, who plays the protagonist, has just premiered. Invention is an indie drama/comedy/science fiction about a young woman who loses her father. As she mourns, she speaks to the people who knew him and discovers an electromagnetic healing machine that he created and which she has inherited. She must decide how much she wants to allow herself to open up to his world of invention and belief. In the process, something like healing begins to take place. In this conversation, I talk to Stephens about her body of work, in which listening and voice play a crucial role. She shares her process of working with archival materials, the advantages of collaborating, and the excitement of trying to make something that might not work.

Libertad Gills: I really love the voices of all the people in Invention… Since you’ve worked with your own voice and voiceover in your previous films, I was thinking that we could start talking about the function of voice and the function of listening in your films. I first became familiar with your work during the pandemic, when you presented Terra Femme at Open City Documentary Festival in 2020. I found the live performance lecture element of the screening fascinating, as well as a very intelligent way of using technology (Zoom, etc) during this particular time. What was your experience of live voice narration in this film? How did voice narration allow you to open or explore the silent travelogue and home movie archives?

Courtney Stephens: Thank you – so the project that ultimately became Terra Femme began its life almost a curatorial project, of collecting these early women’s travelogues and talking about them while showing them live. I was originally inspired by Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscape films, where the audience provides the soundtrack. So I wanted to bring back the feeling of watching something together with the audience, and live narration helped achieve that, but also refers back to the way these travelogues might have been screened in the time of their making, with the authors providing annotation live. In my case, the narration can only ever really be speculative – trying to inquire into the films and open them up, or it could be seen as a fiction or fantasy element, hovering over the raw visual documents and creating some kind of narrative throughline that doesn’t actually exist. I also just like the opportunity to modulate my voice in the room, scenario, and audience and to move energy. Who knows if this really happens but I like to think so.

Libertad Gills: Was the element of voice a factor for you in the casting process for Invention? The actors’ voices give the film a sense of intimacy, and I was especially struck by Sahm McGlynn’s baritone voice and what it adds to the film’s tonality.

Courtney Stephens: I don’t think I was thinking about that overtly, we really just cast the friends who were up for doing it, but it’s definitely what I would call a listening film, and maybe that’s why you think about the voices so much, because a lot of people speak in the scenes and we (and the protagonist) listen. That’s considered bad screenwriting, by the way. But we liked the idea of other people to tell her who her father was. Interestingly, our sound designer, Emile Klein, did versions of scenes where he would add a lot of foley and background sound to the scenes, and we would always end up taking it all out to make room for listening to people. It’s a quiet film and you are asked to pay attention and asked to think about these different claims on the father’s memory. She’s kind of a sleuth putting together a fractured portrait of somebody who, in the fiction of the film, she was somehow estranged from. With the exception of the character of Babbie (the conspiracy theorist), it’s mostly male characters and so there are different male personae happening. Sahm McGlynn, who you called out, has this beautiful baritone voice, and he also developed a thick regional accent for the role so there is some geography in the voice too.

Libertad Gills: Maybe it’s also that emptiness of the rooms but the voices do create an intimacy… and since Joe Swanberg is also in the film, I was wondering if you could see a relationship between this film and Mumblecore films. The emphasis on the talking is also something your film shares with Mumblecore. 

Courtney Stephens: I don’t think I’ve seen enough Mumblecore to make a Mumblecore film but there’s definitely a lot of rapid speech. I am kind of a mumbler myself, actually. When you don’t have many resources one thing you can do is put people in conversation and have them talk, you know? Earlier drafts of the film were more plot-driven, more of an overt mystery, but the mystery became more emotional in the end, and these conversations are where the characters came forward. I think it’s better in a way. The film’s resolution doesn’t really resolve anything, and I think that’s appropriate to themes of grief.

Libertad Gills: I think that another reason why I connected to the film is that my grandfather passed away earlier this year and he was also someone with big ideas. He wanted to change the world, he believed that he could do it, and he shared with me a formula that he had come up with and that he wanted me to carry on. I filmed conversations with him a few years before he passed.

Courtney Stephens: I think there’s a special thing about dreams being transferred between fathers and daughters, about the feeling of being believed in, in both directions. My own dad was full of grand plans and it can be intoxicating when you grow up in a family where you feel like you have a superstar..  But there’s a heaviness to it too. And so, I think that the disappointment in that, and how that transfers to men in general is something Callie and I talked about and is there, to some extent, in the film.

Even for me, artistically, I think I always had male role models when I was younger… You are also grieving all the ways you’ve been shaped to love that person.

Libertad Gills: One of the ideas that stays with me from the film is the generational difference. The father had a platform on television to talk about his ideas and try to change the world and he really believed in something and she seems like someone who doesn’t really have anything to believe in. She’s skeptical and seems, at least at the very beginning, to be pretty indifferent to his passing. It’s only when Babbie appears looking for him and is told that he passed away and she exclaims “What?!” that we really hear someone expressing grief and bewilderment at this person’s death because the daughter seems more controlled. And the idea crossed my mind that there is a crisis of belief in younger generations and maybe a desire or need to believe in something. But it’s through her love for her father that she’s able to believe in something again.

Courtney Stephens: Totally, in order to love him.

Libertad Gills: It’s also a gift that he leaves for her, this possibility of now being able to believe in something. Now that he’s no longer there, maybe she can occupy that space…

Courtney Stephens: That’s beautiful. I mean I love the mystery of, you know… why does he leave her this thing? Is it because he wants her to salvage it and make money? Or is it some other… It’s a way of her struggling with this thing that’s quite opaque. The machine is a sphinx that doesn’t give its secrets away. It sets her on a kind of hopeless quest though.

Libertad Gills: At the beginning it feels like a burden. There’s the question of whether she will take it or not.

Courtney Stephens: But maybe she comes to feel that it’s his attempt to do something beautiful, you know? And the different people in the film, in their way, try to help her. It’s kind of gentle. To allow for tenderness toward the figure of her dad and towards the unknowability of another person’s intentions.. Was he deceiving people? I don’t know if it matters.

Libertad Gills: I don’t think we judge him in that sense in the film. At least I didn’t feel that way. Of laughing at him. I didn’t feel that way at all, it’s tender. It also has to do with her performance and her listening. Because for example in the scene where someone asks to pray for her she says, “You really don’t have to do that”. But she says it so gently. And he insists and she goes along with it. So her openness to these people who are trying to help her in this moment makes it so that you are not judging or laughing at any of these people.

Courtney Stephens: I’m so happy you feel that way. When Pacho Velez and I made The American Sector, which is about pieces of the Berlin Wall that are in the US, we struggled with how to let people have space to make their claims on the wall because a lot of them got things wrong or recited worn out rhetoric. How to give them grace? I thought a lot about how editing imparts respect, and I hoped that came through here.

Libertad Gills: Listening is also important in films by Alice Diop. She comes from a documentary and sociology formation. Do you think that your capacity or interest in listening comes from your background in nonfiction filmmaking?

Courtney Stephens: I was actually talking yesterday about Saint Omer which I liked very much and it doesn’t seem that surprising that people coming out of nonfiction gravitate towards almost these modes of reenactment rather than exactly fiction. Saint Omer, one could say, is a reenactment film, at least the court transcription is I think quite accurate.  It takes a nonfiction and frames it through a character. I’m somebody who works a lot with archives, as Alice Diop does sometimes too, and you are always thinking about the evidence. There’s this raw material and you find a shape to let it speak. That’s always the exciting challenge, especially working with material that doesn’t seem to matter to anybody. Somebody’s boring home movies or whatever –  to try to say hey, there’s something inside of this if you listen more carefully, if you look more closely. As a filmmaker you can invite someone in,  you can dignify the material. With Invention, the TV archive that we were working with doesn’t sing easily, that morning show register. Especially if you are a grieving child, it could even be alienating. These are residues of your parent that are not naturally sentimental –  how could we even use that to our advantage?

Libertad Gills: That’s interesting. The material is inaccessible…

Courtney Stephens: Inaccessible when you are looking for connection but so accessible and so normal for life in 1990s America. He too is inside in a performance when he’s on those shows.

Libertad Gills: Maybe there’s something like Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell?

Courtney Stephens: That’s interesting. I think there was one review that said we did such a great job of shooting those fake TV shows but no…

Libertad Gills: But there’s a feeling of inaccessibility that is recreated as well, of this mother that Polley (and the spectator) is unable to reach in the home movies and a wanting to reach into them. I’m trying to remember how the archival material in your film made me feel in this respect. I wanted to talk to you also about the subject of fiction, because this film could have gone another way, more towards documentary. But it’s like what you said about how to use fiction to open something that is real.

Courtney Stephens: Maybe it’s about playing with fictions because we talked about how we grew up around fictions. It’s not even a surprise that we ended up being filmmakers, because you’re conditioned into some make-believe.

Libertad Gills: Or you are taught how to do that…

Courtney Stephens: Yeah, I mean, my own dad was the kind of person who pursued his crazy ventures until the bitter, collapsing end. But it was also wonderful.  I grew up South of  San Francisco in this place where the fog rolls in really heavily over these mountains from the ocean. I was really obsessed with this phenomenon because I loved the Care Bears and they lived in the clouds so when I was really young I thought maybe that that’s where they lived maybe, and I would say let’s go there, and he would say, “Let’s go”. He would not say that they’re not there, that they’re imaginary. He would always say, “Let’s go find out!”. That was the kind of father he was. That’s the same kind of person who would follow his own crazy ideas but as a father it was beautifully precious. It’s also why I’m kind of delusional and take on impossible projects.

Libertad Gills: But despite the obstacles that you had making the film, you seemed to have learned from your father to see it -through to the end.

Courtney Stephens: I have a little of that but I didn’t always. It’s funny because fiction often, especially if you have investors or whatever, you need a proof of concept. You need a script and hopefully it ends up being what you thought it was going to be. But with nonfiction, I think ideally, for me, you don’t know what you’re going to find; ideas will shift as you make it. So I was excited that this process could also operate that way, that we didn’t know if it would work. That remained an open question and I think that’s a kind of risk that makes you double down and give it everything you have to try to help it find its way.

Libertad Gills: The film is shot on 16mm but it also feels free. There are these moments of emptiness and silence. Which is something that doesn’t really happen with film where things are more controlled because of money or in experimental films where there’s very limited film and you’re trying to do as much as possible with limited film. But in your film it feels like you were able to play and do what you wanted. 

Courtney Stephens: We didn’t have enough film. But we used every part of the animal, even things that were intended for other ideas that we could repurpose. One nice thing is that the leaves were very beautiful. We were shooting in Autumn and we were able to provide some interludes of beautiful nature that I’m so glad we had because it allowed some space to process the other scenes.

Libertad Gills: Where was it shot?

Courtney Stephens: It was shot in Great Barrington, in Western Massachusetts. Callie was living there at the time. It was very foreign territory for me, very not my world. New England in Autumn is something from poetry or literature for me. I’m a fog and ocean person.

Libertad Gills: Walden is mentioned at some point in the film, right?

Courtney Stephens: Walden gets mentioned, Whitman gets mentioned, also Emerson. They all get invoked at some point, which was slightly accidental. American history was on my mind when I was there.

Libertad Gills: So, the film did not have a script. You used your own money to make it. And you shot it on 16mm.

Courtney Stephens: We did everything wrong.

Libertad Gills: But it also feels like a very free film…

Courtney Stephens: It teeters on the edge of falling apart, and I like films like that.

Libertad Gills: How does shooting on film condition or alter how you make the film?

Courtney Stephens: I’m making another film right now that I’m shooting digitally and I’m able to shoot everything all the time, and now I have 50 or more hours of footage.

Libertad Gills: Which makes it harder in the editing…

Courtney Stephens: Much harder and it doesn’t push you to not respond to the moment. We had the fragility of the leaves changing. They would really change in three days. We had to show a progression and everything felt like it was running out in real time. We only had two weeks left in the house, it was going to be winter…

Libertad Gills: So the leaves were putting pressure on you…

Courtney Stephens: Yeah. The passing of time made visible. It was so “American” that place, in that season. I think so, even if I’m not from there. Anybody from there would take it as a given.

Libertad Gills: But sometimes when you’re not from there you can see other things that other people take for granted and maybe would not make a film about that…

Courtney Stephens: Totally. I think that’s why it’s nice to collaborate because you can work at different levels of distance from things, and for us, working on this film, it was useful to have two lenses of distance from the subject.

Libertad Gills: You often collaborate in your films. How did that happen?

Courtney Stephens: I don’t really know. When I was younger I wanted to write fiction novels. To have an adventurous life and write about it was a mythology that inspired me. I found that it was very hard for me to sit quietly alone and write. I think this is why my career started relatively late. I spent years trying to force myself with blank paper. I found that I’m much better as a person in response, when I’m working with material that already exists and helping to shape it – that is much more comfortable for me than working with nothing. Even in this film we were working with many real components, of course,  and trying to make a shape around  it. I used to think that was a flaw.

Libertad Gills: Do you have an approach when you find your material, is there a process that you could share…

Courtney Stephens: I think it’s just time and attention. Paying attention to your attractions and trusting your attractions.  I also kind of think that anything can have emotional content. I

But the challenge of trying to draw something affective out of something that is not intended for that purpose often needs something to act as contrast or friction. Sometimes that’s music, or removing the sound and seeing what goes on in the images without sound, or isolating a line and removing it from its context or whatever… More than anything just spending time seeing what different things can be and putting them in conversation with other things.