_______: An Interview with Tessa Hughes-Freeland
by Joshua Minsoo Kim
from Issue 2
Tessa Hughes-Freeland is a British filmmaker who moved to New York 1981. It was through her Cinema Studies program at NYU and her local arts community in the East Village that she began creating films with friends on a Portapak. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, she released works that documented the vibrant arts events around her (1985’s Bidlo Does Klein: Models in Blue, 1986’s Butthole Surfers, 1989’s The Story of the Little Green Man) and featured pointed commentaries on feminism and sexuality (1982’s Baby Doll, 1984’s Play Boy, 1994’s Nymphomania). Throughout her career, Hughes-Freeland explored collagic assemblage and expanded cinema techniques, regularly adapting to rapidly shifting filmmaking technologies.
Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Hughes-Freeland across two different Zoom sessions in late July and August to discuss the so-called “Cinema of Transgression” scene and the animating energy of the time. Despite the general dissolution of this community, Hughes-Freeland has continued to make works throughout the 20th century, considering her shift from a more aggressive style of filmmaking to one more concerned with beauty and tenderness.
JMK: I know you were born in Britain. Were there any formative experiences you had with the arts early on?
THF: In England, when I was around 10, I lived in an area that was close to Pinewood Studios, where they shot a lot of the Hammer Horror films, which I loved. I used to go through the park there, which was called Black Park, and we’d often see them shooting day for night. I became friends with the son of one of the directors and he took us to Pinewood Studios. I was really impressed by the sets and props and the magic of filmmaking. Furthermore, my father was an avid home-movie maker. Sometimes he’d ask me to help with the credits or he would direct me to walk here, walk there. I’d be a little actress in his films.
JMK: Do you remember what any of the films were?
THF: I think one was Thunderball (1965), and then there was the set of The Devils (1971). There was a big prop from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) among all these other props. It was sort of like going on to a sound stage in Hollywood, like one of those studio lots.
JMK: What were your parents like growing up? Did they foster an interest in the arts in your life?
THF: Yes, they did. They would always encourage me to draw and use my eyes. I was a typical English girl—I went to boarding school at the age of nine, and after that I’d only see my parents sporadically throughout the year. It was a very progressive co-educational boarding school, which as far as I could tell was filled with artists. [Laughs.] I spent a lot of time in the art room.
JMK: Was there a collaborative spirit with making art there?
THF: There was a lot of responsibility given to the pupils. There were plays that the school put on as well as musicals and recitals with a whole orchestra; it was pretty dedicated to the arts. I shot my first film there, which was not really much of a film—just me filming my friends—with a cameraI borrowed from my dad. It was a Regular 8mm Beaulieu, which is a nice little camera, but Regular 8 is tiny.
JMK: Did anything happen at this school that you feel was important to shaping who you are as an artist?
THF: Not particularly, I think that came later when I was in art school. I saw some expressionist and avant-garde films there; I wasn’t exposed to much of that prior. I saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and some film about a spider, but I can’t remember its name. It might have even been a scientific or nature film. I also saw The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920).
JMK: Were you at art school to study film?
THF: No, I was doing a foundation course, which is when you do a little of everything. But at the time, I missed writing so I decided to go to university and study there rather than continue art school, which was a bit narrow-minded of me. You know, if I’d been exposed to more conceptual artists or the Fluxus artists, I would have realized that I could’ve integrated text into my work, which I do now. At the time, I thought the disciplines were very separate. I ended up back in academia, which I’m not really suited to. I studied history of art and philosophy.
JMK: Why do you say you’re not suited to academia?
THF: I’m not a real academic, and I don’t really have an interest in academia. I found out that I’m more interested in art, and where I went to school, the department was right next to the art school. Of course, I spent more time hanging out with the art students than the history of art students—I felt more kinship with artists than academics. In general, I think artists have a better sense of humor than academics. [Laughs.]
JMK: What years were you in university?
THF: I think it was 1978, 1979.
JMK: So you went to New York shortly after this.
THF: That’s correct, I went to New York in 1981. And I came to New York because I love New York—I had been there before in ’79. I came as an international student to study Cinema Studies at NYU. I did some independent studies that involved shooting film, and video was of course a fairly new medium then—it was clunky and big. You had to carry a huge 3/4-inch camera around with a massively heavy Portapak. I shot with that, and then I met a bunch of people who were working with film.
There were these guys who were English and had a film club. They were lending out equipment and doing weekly screenings, and I started working with them. They eventually disbanded or went back to England or something but I continued doing the club.
I met a ton of people who were working with film, but none were really showing their works. I didn’t know why, so I decided to do that for them. That was the beginning of my programming. We screened in tiny clubs and bars and outdoor spaces; no theatres were interested. People were working with small-gauge film—mostly Super 8 or 16mm—and most of the commercial films, as you know, would be projected on 35mm.
JMK: How was the reception to the different screenings you programmed?
THF: One time we collaborated with someone where it was a weekend of film. We did it outside and people threw plastic bags full of piss on us. I think they had noise complaints, ultimately, but that’s just the way it used to be.
JMK: Is there anything you feel like you learned from programming? It’s not always the case that filmmakers are also programmers, and I’m curious if those experiences proved helpful
THF: I know that long films can bore people [laughs], so I learned the right length of film to make. I learned how different films would go together, I learned about timing, I learned about publicity, I learned about tech. I learned about people’s attention spans, I learned about artist egos.
JMK: The earliest films you made in 1982—Walking Film, Birthday Party, 33 R.P.M., and Baby Doll—were all just a few minutes long. What sort of things were going through your mind while making them? Were there any people you were inspired by?
THF: They were all just a roll of film. I wasn’t making films that were inspired by other people—I didn’t think I was able to do that. My influences at the time were, like, Jean Cocteau, but I only got closer to that [style] later on. At the beginning, I was more interested in the present and working with people in my community—it was so rich in the East Village. All of the people in those films were people I knew or lived with, so it was more like play. I lived with a lot of people in this converted butcher shop that also had a rehearsal studio in the basement. That’s where I met Ferne and Irene, who were in Baby Doll, and where I shot Birthday Party. I was just working with what was immediately around me.
JMK: Do you mind talking to me about Ferne and Irene? What were they like?
THF: They kind of just appeared. [Laughs.] I’m not quite sure what the story was, but they decided one day that they’d have a café in the kitchen, so it was transformed into being a service area. You couldn’t just have breakfast, you had to order it from Ferne and Irene. [Laughs.] It was called Café Always or something, and then they decided that it would spread into the backyard, too. Ferne was from Tenafly, New Jersey. I don’t remember where Irene was from, but unfortunately she’s deceased—she contracted HIV. I don’t know what happened to Ferne, actually. We all just hung out and we didn’t really pry too much into each other’s past; we were all about the present.
JMK: Around this time you made Joker (1983), which involves found footage. You’ve used archival footage throughout your career to comment on topics like voyeurism, exploitation, and femininity. How were you thinking about this technique back then with Joker, and how do you feel like your approach to utilizing found footage has changed throughout your career?
THF: I was living in an environment that was quite dangerous. There was a lot of violence around, so I had a lot of aggression and anger but also street smarts. There was a lot of terse energy in Joker and Play Boy (1984). Play Boy came about because the businesses on 42nd Street were transforming their peep shows and backrooms from film to video. They were getting rid of a lot of their film, so I went along 42nd Street asking businesses for any film they didn’t want. I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so I used that to make Play Boy and these sort of home-movie versions of black-and-white Hollywood feature films. Prior to going to 42nd Street, I used some footage from a film about Bette Davis in Joker. I realized I could find images that could express what I wanted to without having to shoot anything.
This was the beginning of that realization. There was a pre-existing visual language, the iconography was always there, so if I could find something that would work for me to express what I wanted to say—either by means of contradiction or conflict with another image—that was great. There’s a lot of conflicting imagery and juxtapositions of iconography, and sometimes it overlaps. It’s akin to music in how it’s woven together, and since it’s an image, it’s different from sound because it has figurative elements. We associate it with our experiences with other humans as opposed to the abstraction of music.
In experimenting with the technique of using two projectors simultaneously, it opened up a lot of doors for me in terms of blending images and using different colour gels. Around that time, I was developing a multiple projection practice as well, which was a live performance. I would do these with other people, and some would join us with their projectors. It was like a musical jam, but it was visual.
JMK: How did those performances go? How much improvisation was involved—how much was unexpected?
THF: There’s always improvisation, otherwise it’s not really a live performance. There were things that would repeat themselves every so often if we were using the same material, but it was rare. It depended completely on improvisation, and that’s the fun part of it—the immediacy, the spontaneity. At one time there were a bunch of us doing stuff at The Kitchen. There was Stephen Holman, myself, Ela Troyano, and others but I can’t remember who. Maybe David West did some things there. More often than not, I had a collaborative practice with Ela Troyano that was ongoing for quite a few years. The first time we collaborated was at her club, which was called Chandelier. There was a party there and everyone took LSD and we projected pretty much all night, as I recall.
JMK: Did drugs play a prominent role in your filmmaking?
THF: That’s a good question. Obviously Rat Trap (1986) had to deal with that, but in terms of doing multiple projections, doing acid made it hard to use the equipment—things would get complicated even if we managed. I wouldn’t call it a driving force, but I am interested in altered perceptions, so in that way, yes. Different realities, different levels of perception—my interest may have been raised by drugs in some way. I’m not encouraging people to do that, but it was that along with dreams—the irrational and illogical.
JMK: Earlier you mentioned how you documented what was around you. You can see that early on with Graffiti Hall of Fame (1984), where you have graffiti and hip-hop music, then you have filmed performances such as Poppo 1 (1984) and Bidlo Does Klein: Models in Blue (1985). Rat Trap and Play Boy, though, aren’t just about documentation, obviously. It seems like there’s a clear progression from your earliest work to the ones that came along in the mid-80s, where you’re still capturing a specific moment in time—you’re certainly documenting something—but there’s more going on.
THF: I work in many different ways and styles, in different situations, and that’s an ever-evolving thing. Right now, I’m working with sculptural cinema, and that’s completely different. I’m not set in one type of filmmaking, otherwise I wouldn’t be an avant-garde filmmaker. Some films are straight-forward documents of an art event that I thought would be interesting to shoot. And then there’s Butthole Surfers (1986) and Bidlo and Graffiti Hall of Fame where I used this machine for the soundtracks. You could record from the radio—it had a cassette in it—and I think I was recording WBLS. It was just one afternoon where I decided to record these soundtracks.
There are the multiple projection films like Play Boy, Gift (2010), Kind (2013), and all the others I’ve forgotten the names of. Then there are the films that I call the “live-action films,” like Rat Trap, Nymphomania (1994), Dirty, and The Bug/Lost Movie. I never thought of Rat Trap as a documentary because it was acted, but in reality, the person acting was a drug addict. But it was exaggerated in the film. The rat evisceration was done by Tommy Turner; at the time he was working in a science lab where he was working on rats and he used to make these rat pouches out of the pelts.
To me, these films are all different disciplines. I would never use the Bidlo film in a multiple projection performance—I would work with found footage over something like that. There are like four Poppo films, and I would maybe do a projection performance with those, but I wouldn’t mix across those disciplines. These films are things unto themselves. In a sense, I’m only ever making one film and it’s never finished. I shoot film, I reuse elements, and I’ll continue using pieces over time, like 10 years later. I’ve used an outtake of Nyphomania as a loop for some purpose, but I’ve never mixed it with something else, though recently I’ve been thinking of mixing found footage and live action. I’m trying to see if I can blend things, but I’m shooting them specifically to be integrated rather than kept separate. I would never include Baby Doll in a multiple projection performance, but I have used Play Boy because it already was a multiple projection performance—that’s its purpose. I have boundaries for these mediums.
JMK: Were you a fan of the Butthole Surfers? Did you see them a lot live?
THF: I’ve seen them a lot, yeah. That film was shot at The Cat Club. It had a low stage, and I was at the front ready to shoot them. The height of the stage was about mid-thigh on me, and when they came on, the surge from the crowd behind me created a pressure so intense that I thought I was going to break my legs. I went on stage and shot from there.
JMK: I wanted to ask about The Story Of The Little Green Man (1989). I don’t really know what I’m looking at exactly with that film.
THF: That’s because you don’t understand sign language. [Laughs.] There’s a friend who has a performance church that’s called The Church of the Little Green Man, and he was putting together an exhibition in Buffalo at Hallwalls called Nepotism. I made the film for that show. I can’t remember what the story is… someone who knows sign language will have to interpret it for me.
This was shot in Super 8 and I had to ask myself, “How am I going to present it in an exhibition?” This is always the filmmaker’s dilemma. What I found, and I’d used this once before when I showed Play Boy at a gallery, was these little suitcases that were tiny rear projection screens. They were little loop projectors projected onto a small rear projection screen no bigger than a computer. They were used by traveling salesmen in the ’50s and ’60s, apparently. To put the film in the loop cartridge, it had to be protected somehow. What they used to do is coat it in polyester to withstand being in the loop projector. I did that with one print of Play Boy, but I didn’t coat it for The Story of the Little Green Man, so it got worn over time. Since this was something you could plug into the wall, it was a convenient way to present a film in an exhibition.
JMK: In the ’90s you have films like Dirty and Nymphomania which are more involved and complex. Did it feel like a leap to make these bigger films?
THF: They were longer and bigger, weren’t they? I collaborated with Annabel Lee on Dirty, and that was quite a production. We shot it one night in the Chelsea Hotel as well as once at Max Fish for the bar scene. That was a time of transition, because video editing was becoming much more commonplace.
JMK: I’m thinking about the women in those two films and how they’re grappling with the terrors of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Can you speak to the experiences you’ve had that made you want to film these works?
THF: I collaborated with Annabel Lee on Dirty and we took the prologue of [Georges Bataille’s] Blue of Noon (1957), removed the male character, and put ourselves there instead. You know, all my films are about the experience of being a female. The sort of decadence and degeneracy that takes place in Bataille was sort of endemic in both the late ’80s and early ’90s, in both of our lifestyles, so we wanted to make a film about that.
Similarly, Nymphomania was a collaboration with Holly Adams. She said that she had this experience and really wanted to make a film about it, and sure, everything’s exaggerated and it’s a little cartoon-like. She’s a professional dancer, and [plays] the nymph in the film. We tried to turn it into a comedy to make light of an experience that is not so light. People interpreted the film in different ways. Someone said to me, “How can you make a film about a rape?” That’s pretty short-sighted. [Laughs.]
Nymphomania is one of the simplest films I’ve made—you’ve got parallel action and then conflict. It’s a very classical structure. And that’s when I think the influence of Jean Cocteau came in: the way the branches open up at the beginning, various other cinematic devices… I look to people I like and riff on them a bit.
JMK: What was it like for you to be in New York during the ’80s and ’90s? You’ve talked about older films, but I’m wondering if there was a sense of camaraderie within the so-called Cinema of Transgression scene. And what was it like to be a woman in that crowd? Obviously there were others, like Lydia Lunch and Casandra Stark and Kembra Pfahler.
THF: They say I’m part of the Cinema of Transgression, but nobody really knew what it was. [Laughs.] Having said that, there was a certain energy that pervaded the scene that might have contributed to this similar aesthetic, but I’m not sure it was that similar. You know the story I’m sure—Nick Zedd created a self-conscious movement to promote his films. A lot of people were dying, and we were upset, we were angry, and I think that was reflected in the work we were doing. There was a lot of chaos and anger and confusion. There was a sort of immediacy to do things.
JMK: Were you particularly close with anyone in the scene?
THF: I was really good friends with Richard Kern and still am, even though our films are quite different. Tommy Turner and I were good friends when we made Rat Trap and we were also working on Where Evil Dwells (1985).
JMK: Ah yeah, with David Wojnarowicz.
THF: Right. I was there for a lot of that. You know, we all lived pretty close to each other, like within 10 blocks. Kembra still lives a block-and-a-half away from me. At the time, we were all really close. There was a lot of empty space because there were a lot of burned down buildings, so the artist community was smaller and tighter-knit.
There was a collective energy and a collective effort, and it was also interdisciplinary. A lot of things were happening in clubs and there was maybe one night where you’d see a band, a spoken word thing, a performance, and then a drag show. Or maybe the performance was a play with everybody in drag. Everyone was working with each other in different ways; it wasn’t hard to find people to do things. So in terms of kinship with other filmmakers, we may have come from the same ideological place, but we still worked in very different styles. Some might have been more political, some might have been more sexual—everyone was slightly different.
JMK: What was the ideological place that you all came from?
THF: Confrontational, anti-establishment, independent, humorous, and irresponsible.
JMK: What are the virtues of being irresponsible?
THF: Well, you don’t really give a fuck if you’re irresponsible, do you? [Laughs].
JMK: Do you feel like there’s something distinct about your perspective because you were from the UK?
THF: Obviously I have a different background to those born in America, and maybe there are certain intrinsic cultural aspects to myself that I’m not aware of, but I don’t really address any of those in my filmmaking. Recently, I’ve been working more with notions of home in different places and the concept of nostalgia, how you can be nostalgic for a place that doesn’t exist. I made a film called Hiraeth (2019), which is really that feeling. I combined the two places where I live, so I guess that’s a cross-cultural sentiment.
If you look at the general cultural milieu and see what people were interested in during the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was modern primitivism, tattooing becoming legal, there was this fascination with serial killers and murder, there were grindhouse theaters, there was John Waters and Russ Meyer and Jess Franco. There was giallo too; we were all into that.
JMK: What has it been like for you to continue making films throughout the past 20 years given that this initial animating energy for those in the scene went away? Or maybe it feels the same, really, because you didn’t consider the Cinema of Transgression to be an actual thing?
THF: You’ve hit on something here. I think there were two waves of gentrification. In the mid-90s, there was one as AIDS wiped out a bunch of people. Rent started to go up and more buildings were built. By the end of the 20th century, many of the people living in this neighborhood went to Brooklyn or out of town. Even though a lot of us had cheaper apartments, the rent went up and the economics changed. There was more pressure to earn money; you couldn’t just hang around and do nothing.
Of course, there were technological advancements that completely changed the face of filmmaking. If you didn’t have a computer in the ’90s, you were kind of fucked. [Laughs.] We’ve been through so many different format changes and editing software changes and, along with that, some people dropped out along the way. With age, we realized that you couldn’t really make a living as a filmmaker, so people took up different careers.
I was actually trying to think of this recently, but in the 1990s, I was switching to editing on tape rather than cutting film. As we moved into the 2000s, there was another format—there was MiniDV rather than VHS, and then there was Final Cut Pro. The technical advancements determined the different ways I worked. There were some films I made in the ’80s that were actually edited on tape—I learned video editing really early on.
I was working with the collage-type films, if that’s what you want to call them. I like to call them the multiple projection films because I didn’t really intend them to be collages, but in terms of the metamorphoses and juxtapositions that occur, I guess you can perceive them that way. I consider them to be films that are alive and films that make themselves as I’m making them, if that makes sense. I also started making a lot of handmade slides.
I was focusing on that a little more because I wasn’t able to do a lot of production. I had a small child. This is the motherhood syndrome here. I was fitting in what I could do amongst raising a child, which is a lot of work. I don’t regret it, but one time my kid said to me, “When did you make those films? When I was in school?” And I was like, “Yeah, basically.” He never saw me working.
JMK: What year was your child born?
THF: 1999. He’s 26 now.
JMK: Do you feel like being a mother shaped the way you approached filmmaking beyond the time constraint that now existed? I’m thinking about how fairy tales have existed in your work back in the day with films like Nymphomania, but also with more recent works like Gift.
THF: In the ’80s and ’90s, there was this zeitgeist of all the stuff I said earlier: tattooing, heavy metal, the occult and weird religions, sleaze. But in the 2000s, I would describe myself as having a more emotional approach to filmmaking rather than a harsh one.
JMK: What do you mean? What’s the difference between emotional filmmaking and harsh filmmaking?
THF: That’s a good question. I guess I was less willing to make something that was violent. I was more sensitive, more aware, less aggressive, less angry. Instinct (2007) was made for an exhibition for Deitch Project that was curated by Kembra Pfahler. It was specifically about womanhood and the female. I didn’t make so many films then. I made Kind (2013); I was very touched by a very tiny moment of my child’s life when he’s kissing a crab, so I made a film. But that’s not so different from “The Frog Prince” in terms of fairy tales.
JMK: Do you feel like you were a really angry person in the ’80s?
THF: There was a lot to be angry about. Maybe it was anger, maybe it was sorrow. We were losing a lot of friends. After having a child it was a gentler experience, and more nurturing. But I don’t think I really nurture my films. [Laughs.] I don’t feel like a mother to my films. I still have an intention; maybe it’s more concerned now with beauty.
JMK: You were talking about the zeitgeist earlier. Do you think you’re still capturing the zeitgeist at all with your works from the 21st century?
THF: I think they’ve become more personal and less concerned with zeitgeist. The neighbourhood and the community became much larger during the early 2000s. There were so many students filling these buildings. At some point, Kodak almost stopped making film. It was really hard to get prints made, especially Super 8. It wasn’t so long ago that there was an analog renaissance, so then they made more negative film. People also started being interested in restoring my films. That made me feel… older. [Laughs.] But I was able to do things that I’d never been able to do before. Baby Doll never had the sound A- and B-roll, so when it was restored, thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation, it was the first time that I saw it with the sound fully synced.
JMK: I’m assuming, though, that you always embraced the imperfections of your films?
THF: I love imperfection—that’s one of my favourite things. You might notice that I’m always messing around with the film edges, like the frame. I’m not going to cut the edges off; I like things that are a little bit off. I want you to be aware of the materiality of the medium.
JMK: Music is such a visceral artform and it can overpower images. How do you balance the sound and image to make sure that the images themselves have power? I’m thinking of the fact that you use color gels, too, which I think can help keep a viewer attentive to the image.
THF: Sound is actually more powerful than image in many ways. I have a very brief history of working in sound editing in the industry. I understood how sound sculpts a film; it gives it a dimension that the images may not have. I appreciate that, but I’ll fuck with it as well—I won’t fade in or cross-dissolve, I’ll just stop it. Sometimes I’ll edit with it, sometimes I’ll edit against it. And sometimes I’m not editing with or against it.
My work process when I’m doing those multiple projection films is: I’ll go to my studio and choose different films that I think work together, and then I’ll play with them. When I think I’ve got something I’m excited about, I’ll start recording it, and I’ll do many, many passes. Then I’ll edit together the pieces I like. By that point, I’ll have an idea of what music I want to use, but it may not be the music I listen to while I shoot the film. I definitely think sound is 50% [as important] if not more important than the image in filmmaking.
JMK: What films did you work on when you were working in sound editing?
THF: I worked on the Foley for The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
JMK: Oh my god.
THF: I was the assistant, not the main person. I got to spit on Jesus, actually. And it’s because a woman’s palate is different from a man’s palate. I spit out of Barbara Hershey’s mouth, which was kind of magical. I also did some sound editing for a short independent film, but I can’t remember what it was called. I was supposed to work on the Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989), but I kind of messed up the opportunity and that was the end of it all.
JMK: How did you get involved with working on Scorsese’s film?
THF: I had a friend who was working with the company Sound One, which was in the Brill Building. He was this really great sound editor, Skip Lievsay, and he had a whole team of people. I heard they were looking for someone to assist Ron Bochar, who was in charge of Foley, so I got the job. I was doing a lot of jobs like that—I was doing production for Live at the Ritz. Bands would come and play, and I was doing sound recording there. There was Guns N’ Roses and The Saints.
JMK: There’s something beautiful about the spitting that you mentioned, and how it’s specifically because you’re a woman that you were able to create that sound. Are there things in your own films that only feel possible because you’re a woman?
THF: That’s a really good question. Somebody said to me once, “Why aren’t there any men in your films?” That was not too long ago, actually, so I consciously made a film that had men in it. It was Nowadays (2020), which I made during COVID. There are some women too, but it’s mostly men. I did that intentionally because I’ve never really thought about it. Because I’m a woman, I just always made films with women. Instinct has two parts—one is the “Bitches” side and one is the “Witches” side. I’m interested in expressing what it’s like to be a female and what my experience is like, and sometimes it’s very romantic, sometimes it’s very subjective, sometimes there’s a commentary on the woman’s lot, of sexuality or degradation.
JMK: What’s the most recent thing you’ve learned about the woman’s lot that you’ve never really thought about at any other point in your life?
THF: I think it’s a reaffirmation of what I knew in the first place, but there is something that became clearer in the past 10 years. Women are hard workers, they’re very good at management and organization, but men have really big egos and like to pretend they’ve done it all. There’s a certain self-importance in men. When I made Nowadays, it was about COVID and isolation and people dying, but there’s a sort of fantasy as well with the flying horse and the faceless characters—it was about alienation. It’s parenthetically held between two women’s actions: at the beginning, it starts with the witchy woman with the black cat and the sleepwalking woman, and at the end there’s a woman who comes out of a portal. So it’s a supernatural film as well, which I think is innately female. There’s a way to explore feminism through the backdoor of the supernatural.
JMK: So the supernatural is innately feminine and not masculine? Is it because men have such big egos that they don’t think to consider it?
THF: I think it’s quite simple—the moon can affect the tides as well as the female anatomy. Your menstrual cycle is dictated by the moon, every 28 days or whatever, so it’s physiological. In that way, women are more connected to a natural cycle, or with nature, in a way men aren’t. I don’t know if men are in touch with mysticism in the same way women are, and I have a lot of experiences with mysticism. I’ve seen ghosts. I’ve had experiences with spirits in the form of light. You’re gonna think I’m wacky, but I’ve also had the experience of hearing the ghost of a dog. There are also coincidental occurrences where one may have a thought and then something happens right after related to the thought. I believe there’s another plane of existence.
I was staying at a friend’s house in the South of France. Her and her boyfriend were sleeping in the main bedroom, and I was sleeping in her bedroom. I was taking a nap in the late afternoon, early evening. The window was open and I heard this snoring sound. I thought it was coming in the window from someone sleeping next door, but then I realized that it was actually in the room with me. I went to the room where my friend was, knocked on her door, and I said, “I’m hearing something. It sounds like a dog snoring or breathing.” The boyfriend came into the room, and it wasn’t there anymore. I came down to dinner and the first thing my friend’s brother said to me was, “Oh, I hear you’ve heard Balthazar,” and apparently he’s the dog who used to sleep at the end of the bed in my friend’s bedroom.
JMK: Can you talk about the story you mentioned with the spirits appearing in the form of light? That’s especially interesting to me given the importance of light in film.
THF: So about this spirit: a couple of friends died, and a little while later I would see a light in an unexpected place. One time I saw a ball of light near my bicycle, which was parked in a dim hallway. Then another time, I saw it pass across my vision somewhere while I was doing something mundane. And another time was more specific, where the lights started to flicker shortly after someone passed. A lot of people talk about lights flickering in those circumstances.
But what I’m more interested in than the supernatural is the difference between digital and analog recordings of light. Film is projected light, right? It has its own magic in that way. It’s very difficult to capture the refraction of light with a digital camera—-there’s no vibration around it. It’s quite frustrating that the digital stuff doesn’t record reflection or refraction correctly.
JMK: Right, if you see any film footage of water, it just looks completely different.
THF: Exactly.
JMK: What have you embraced and enjoyed about working digitally, though?
THF: I love the instantaneous nature of it. Pre-phones, it was a little bit more tedious. With film you have to be more economic because there’s not much of it on a roll. I really like the fact that I can set up a video camera and play around with multiple projections and see what it looks like. I can preview it and see what’s working for me and what isn’t. If I’m doing something live, I feel like there’s this feedback loop where you know if something’s working or not. That’s what I mean when I say the films make themselves.
JMK: What did you like about working with older digital cameras?
THF: The difference between a digital camera and a phone is that you can set the focal difference. You can zoom better than with a phone; you don’t get that jerky movement. With a phone it automatically moves between the different lenses; you can’t choose what you’re focusing on, particularly. The fact that you can’t set the focal length is annoying. And obviously with an analog camera you can actually pull focus.
JMK: What sort of things are you working on right now?
THF: I had this foray into abstraction. I created this triptych of cinematic sculptures. Each one of them has different multiple projections onto them. They have different shaped screens—they’re not flat—and that’s why I call them sculptures. The unifying element between the three of these pieces of prose that I wrote, which come from memories, is that I created them by using Letraset directly onto the film. These are handmade films, and there are handmade slides. It’s all original footage, though the materials I used to make the slides involve insects and pieces of fabric and different objects I found. So that’s really complicated and difficult because it’s impossible to show—nobody wants to show that, it’s a big production. [Laughs.] I’ve decided to leave it until it’s the right time. I’ve shown two pieces at different times, but I’ve never shown the whole triptych. It’s called The Three Mystics, but it has all kinds of other names because each element and piece has one. It’s really a nightmare in terms of names. You can see some of the stuff I’m talking about on the Installations section of my website.
Now I’m working on a film that I think is going to be a mixture of live action and multiple projection. I’m actually shooting people now. I’m at the beginning of it, and that’s my challenge. The journey into abstraction was really fun, but I think I need to do something I can actually project. And I also have those film fans. That’s something altogether different. Those started with the pun of “film fans,” and I like playing with puns. Like with Gift, [which] means “poison” in German.
JMK: Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you really wanted to talk about?
THF: What I do wanna say is that in my filmmaking, I’m ultimately trying to elicit an emotional reaction. Any kind of emotional reaction is good, whether it’s anger or appreciation or self-reflection. I want them to move people in one way or another, as well as hopefully being entertaining and maintaining a sense of humour. I think it’s really important to have a sense of humour, otherwise you’re in danger of being boring. And there’s nothing worse than boring films. That’s why I don’t make films that are very long—If I made films that were long, I’d get bored.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]