Artistic history: The Harun Farocki Institute celebrates American Artist-in-Residence Cathy Lee Crane

“What is a poetic cinema? That’s a question I’ve been thinking about, a question yet to be answered. It can’t just be that it’s not linear. It has to propose a different kind of language and a different kind of thought. And as a result, logic,” offered the American artist and educator Cathy Lee Crane when I recently caught up with her from several time zones away to learn what she’s been up to since we last spoke in 2018 about The Manhattan Front (her debut narrative feature inspired by a bizarre true tale involving a WWI German saboteur, ACLU founding member Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, and the Industrial Workers of the World). The self-proclaimed “decidedly nonlinear filmmaker” also happens to be a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow whose over two decades of work, much of which melds archival footage with staged material, was presented back in 2015 as part of the American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. And the multimedia vet’s award-winning films (including the intriguingly titled “experimental biographies” Pasolini’s Last Words and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil) have likewise played far and wide overseas; from the BFI to the Viennale, to the Festival du Nouveau Cinema and the Cinematheque Francais, and the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin. Which is where Crane is now ensconced, having become the latest recipient of the (Goethe-Institut sponsored) Harun Farocki Residency.

To read part two of my interview with the philosophical multihyphenate visit Global Comment.

Why trans bodies matter (hint: It’s the Patriarchy, Stupid)

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, leaving reproductive rights to be strangled by the groping hands of overwhelmingly male Republican state legislatures across the US, progressive activists demanded action. And the Democrat-controlled federal government, having dropped the ball on abortion and facing tough midterm elections this fall, swiftly responded with two bills: one which codified the right to same-sex (and interracial – an added fuck you/“dare you to overrule that” touch to Justice Thomas) marriage, the other the right to contraception. The former quickly passed the House – including with support from members of the party that killed Roe – while the latter seems DOA in the Senate. Which, perhaps unsurprisingly, led the professional political pundits to first express “shock” at both outcomes, and then to wildly hypothesize. How had an IUD become more controversial than gay marriage? And was this actually a silver-lined sign of progress? (Of course not.)

So to read the rest of my essay on how the political punditry got it so wrong visit Global Comment.

“The Story of the Borderlands Is Not Singular”: Cathy Lee Crane on Drawing the Line

Filmmaker last interviewed veteran multimedia artist Cathy Lee Crane about her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front, which combined staged performances and archival footage from the National Archives in DC to present the strange but true entanglement of a WWI German saboteur with the progressive labor movement of activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. While Crane’s latest selection of works likewise resurrects buried US history, they tread territory even further back in time, all the way down to the border, and are currently being shown a continent away. Throughout the month of July, the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin will be showcasing several projects from their second American artist-in-residence (Kevin B. Lee was the inaugural invitee), including Crane’s multi-platform hybrid series Drawing the Line, a 14-channel work in progress that travels from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean to grapple with what the 19th century US and Mexico Border Survey Commission has wrought. To learn all about this sprawling mosaic that combines “staging, interviews, observational documentary, sonic records, and the archive in collaboration with those living in the shadow of the Commission’s arbitrary line” — as well as the feature-length doc Crossing Columbus (2020) and the short film Terrestrial Sea (2022) — Filmmaker reached out once again to the globetrotting (2013) Guggenheim Fellow.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Margaret Byrne, ‘Any Given Day’

Margaret Byrne’s Any Given Day is a half-decade-long ride on the roller coaster that those living with a mental illness face — on “any given day” — through the stories of four distinctly riveting individuals, three of whom the director met while investigating the treatment of detainees at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, which in 2014 had the dubious distinction of being the largest single-site mental health facility in the country. And these individuals are participants in the city’s diversionary mental health court probation program. (Which, unfortunately, is itself problematic, since a guilty plea is often the price of admission.) There’s Angela, a dedicated preschool teacher and single mother of four fighting to regain custody of her youngest. Also Daniel, who studied fashion before his dream of being a shoe designer got upended by his illness. And Dimitar, an author (State of Schizophrenia) and anthropologist who emigrated from Bulgaria as a boy and worked full-time to put himself through college. And rounding out the quartet is Margaret Byrne herself, a single mother and the founder-director of an all-female film collective called Beti Films — whose lifetime battle with depression nearly derailed her latest doc. Any Given Day premieres July 7 as part of World Channel’s America ReFramed series. In honor of BIPOC Mental Health Month, Documentary reached out to the Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker-protagonist, who agreed to put herself in the spotlight and serve as our July Doc Star of the Month — and to let us in on the one project that forced her “to challenge the stereotype that a person with a mental illness is an unreliable narrator."

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Safe sex scenes: Body Parts

SEX: Exploring the female body in Hollywood by tracing the making of sex scenes, the toll it takes on those involved, and what it means for women in the real world. For most of its history, Hollywood has been globally gaslighting the world, exporting the lie that the male gaze is somehow always benign or «neutral,» when of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Fortunately, we now have Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s (Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines) eye-opening Body Parts, which world-premiered in the Spotlight Documentary section of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, to unpack both how we got to this patriarchal cinematic state and how those in the camera’s line of sight are now shooting back. Drawing from a sweeping range of classic film clips and knowledgeable voices on the subject of simulated sex onscreen – from film scholars to intimacy coordinators to Jane Fonda – the doc is, sadly, proof positive that it didn’t have to be this way; the «inevitably» of female objectification in the movies actually the result of a highly systematic manmade plan.

To read the rest of my essay visit Modern Times Review.