Questions from the Audience

Our film screened last night at STIFF (Seattle True Independent Film Festival). The packed crowd at the Jewel Box Theater had lots of good questions during the Q&A that followed our session. I thought I'd present some of those questions here, and try to answer them a little more fully than time allows during the brief period following the film.

Q: How did you gain their trust? How did you get access to so many intimate moments among people engaged in illegal behavior?

A: I have spent the better part of the past 8 years living with, documenting, and trying to promote harm reduction among the folks you see in the film. They all live in one very small "outlaw community" on the west side of Chicago. And in that community I have worked through the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a needle exchange/HIV prevention organization, to promote "any positive change" as defined by illegal drug users themselves. My first encounter with many of these folks involved providing them with free sterile syringes, condoms and/or lube, "safer crack smoking" kits, and other free stuff. As a researcher, I also invited them into some of my paid studies. Gradually I earned their trust. And instead of them coming to me at the needle exchange, I began going to them. They let me into their homes as "the needle and pipe guy." For various reasons--research, radio documentary, film documentary, print journalism--I ended up living with many of them in various places, including the house featured in this film. And as they picked up on my tendency to use film or audio to document everything in my life, they grew more receptive over time to being filmed. I also engaged in many different activities that convinced them I wasn't a narc or someone out to get them arrested. Also, I was always willilng to show them "dailies," raw cuts of footage, which I think ultimately convinced them that I was essentially making "home movies," and that I considered them to be members of my extended family. And this is really how I see "The Family at 1312": It's my way of representing one aspect of the people who have become like family to me.

Q: How much of the film is acted for the camera, and how much is "real"?

A: First of all, nothing you see in a documentary is "real" in a definitive sense. The camera can assume only one angle at a time. The microphones only pick up sound within a certain range. There's a lot you're missing as a director and audience member just by virtue of the camera and mic placement. Then there's the existential question of what's "real" and what's not, and whether there really is such a thing as "real". Those conversations bore the shit out of me, so let's not bother with them here. Let's take the issue of people acting for the camera: No one can act like anyone but themselves, at least in a documentary film. When people in a documentary are "acting," usually they're trying to be more like the role they're having to play at that moment in time. They focus on doing themselves more clearly and than they're accustomed to doing it. How could they be someone else? At most, they can only be themselves working very hard to perform their "selves" as poignantly as possible at that moment in time. And in many cases, that's exactly what you want from them as a documentarian--the clearest and most salient performance of role you can get from them. In this film, what you see is pretty much what happened. People weren't acting ... they were just being who they are. I can state this with confidence because I have lived with them and have observed them without a camera for hundreds of hours. A few times during production someone would try to spice things up a bit and would ham it up for the camera. Why were they doing this? Because life in a crackhouse is really boring most of the time, much as life in a traditional American household is pretty boring most of the time. The scenes of them hamming it up to keep us entertained were very amusing, and illustrated their commitment to making sure we were having a good time doing the work (quite the normative impulse), and ultimately were laid to rest on the cutting room floor. After we see Cat (or rather, hear Cat) enacting violence on Laura and hearing Laura imply that the camera's power to build an audience in the subject's mind propelled Cat to inflict pain on Laura, Cat says "fuck that camera, that's just me." I believe Cat. I believe that even if the camera had not been present, she would have "labeled into" Laura. Why do I believe this? Because I have seen Cat in action so many times before, and because I have seen Cat specifically go after Laura so many times before. And I have seen how Laura negotiates these situations, and how she quite unwittingly precipitates the very violence she bemoans.

Q: How much of the dialogue was prompted by your questions?

A: I tend to shy away from interview-heavy documentaries, for lots of reasons. The biggest reason is that I believe documentarians use interviews when they can't (or won't take the time to) figure out any other way to SHOW what's going on. So they ask someone questions, and then they edit the answers so that someone can be telling the audience what's going on. This film depicts a complicated situation--a matriarchal crackhouse brothel populated by 20-30 different people at one time. My dream is to make a 12-hour film (a la Warhol, right?) that allows the viewer to really get to know the place on its own terms, without having someone narrate the scene or explain what's happening or tell the audience who is who and who is doing what. But let's face it, only three or four people would ever watch such a film. And I really do want people to see the movies that we make. So we must condense and simplify. One of the most effective ways to simplify, in this case, was by having some of the key figures in the film talk about the situations and events and relationhips presented in the movie. So I would periodically ask some open-ended, vague question, and the person would answer it. About 20 minutes into their answer, they would say something really compelling and clear, and that's the part that you end up seeing on the screen. So yes, some of the dialogue is prompted by my questions, but most of what you hear was spoken a very long time after the prompt was issued.

Q: Why do you blackout the violence between Cat and Laura? Is it an artistic "thing"?

A: No, it's not an artistic or aesthetic decision, at least not in the way most people think about such things. I had several reasons for blacking out the visual representation of Cat waging retribution on Laura while retaining the audio: First, If you watch/listen carefully, Cat instructs everyone to "get out of the kitchen" so that she can punish Laura. I obeyed Cat, but I took my time doing it. As I backed out of the kitchen, I pushed the sound recordist behind me, into an adjacent bedroom, while I kept filming Cat beating Laura. Upon telling everyone to clear the kitchen, Mike Mike (the self-appointed rule speaker of the group), makes an effort to get people out of the kitchen. He half-heartedly scooted me out of the way, but I kept filming. This clearly violates Cat's trust. Just because she didn't really give me and the crew the necessary time to get out of the kitchen doesn't mean that I should have kept filming what she was doing. And just because I did capture the visual of her beating Laura doesn't mean that I should or must show it to you, the audience member. This leads to the second reason: You haven't earned the right to view this extremely intimate family moment. No one there, including Cat, enjoys physically injuring another member of the family. It's considered to be one of the most intimate and serious things you can do to a fellow family member. If I were documenting your family, and one of your relatives began to give a spanking to his/her young child, and I happened to have caught it on film even though I was specifically asked not to film it, would you want me showing the violence? So in a way, blacking out the violence reminds you, the audience member, that I was there, that this is my representation and is therefore not the ultimate TRUTH, and that I worked hard to gain the kind of trust necessary to witness/film such events. Moreover, I am reminding you that you HAVE NOT done the requisite work to gain their trust and as a result witness such things. Fourth, showing you the violence would have been unfaithful to the experience you would have had if you had been in the house with us. We shot 45 hours' worth of footage, and in the end we have presented a 34-minute film. Obviously we did a lot of editing. You're not seeing way more than you are seeing. My job was to distill, condense, extract, shrink, and simplify the footage and then fashion and mold it into some kind of structure that would give you an experience, provide you with some entree to this world, introduce you to a scence that you otherwise might never get to experience firsthand. Had you been in the house with me, you would have been ushered out of the kitchen, and you only would have heard the violence. You wouldn't have seen it. So why would I show it to you now? Doing so would be garish and wrong on many scores. Fifth, showing you the violence just for the sake of showing you the violence would render this film about as morally upstanding as the piece "Crackheads Gone Wild (Pick Your City)". In so many ways, this movie and every movie I make about the folks in this particular little part of the world is an expression of love and respect. While it's true that the films aren't always flattering to them, and I never glorify or celebrate them, I do try to create representations of events and situations, and in these representations the subjects humanize themselves. This is pretty easy for them to do because, after all, they ARE humans. But we like to forget that they're humans. This kind of inhumane amnesia allows us to dismiss them, to put the blame back on them, to silently condone through our collective inaction the kind of systemic abuses they incur every day of their lives. Each film, for me, is an expression of respect, even if I'm not depicting a person or persons in flattering terms. As they say on the street, "I'm keeping it real." I'm crafting a "straight up" representation, which is what Cat appreciates most. Same with Jeff. Also with Pam and Steve. And so it goes for every person who's ever appeared in and then watched a film I've made. Years ago I asked Jeff what he thought about seeing himself in a film I had made, and his words echoe the sentiments of most everyone else I've talked to, and their poignancy say it all for me: "I don't like a lot of what I see here, but you got it right, straight up ... it's real. It ain't all good, but it ain't all bad. It's fair, and that's more than what I get most days out of people. So I like it, even just for the fact that it doesn't tell lies about me."

Q: What's your next project? And will you ever get into fiction film?

A: Our next project is an extension of the short film "Matrimony," which follows a homeless, heroin-addicted married couple as they attempt to enact and realize their marriage beyond the bullshit cultural strictures and norms associated with this cultural institution. We're working on a re-cut ... the current version is 8m, and we're aiming for a good, solid 15-20 min. Then we'll finish post-production on a feature length film called "Sawbuck City," which presents a 7-year chronicle of the larger Chicago community in whose context I have made all of the previous films .... And yes, we'd like to get into fiction film. I have a few script ideas, as does Erin. All we need is a little bit of money and for someone to come along and say they'd like to serve as "executive producer" on a fiction film project.

Three members of the Sawbuck crew will be roaming Seattle's streets this weekend. Actually, we'll probably be sitting inside movie theaters watching films and surreptitiously nipping at the flask. Our film "The Family at 1312" screens Saturday, so come out and join us for some NC-17 fun!

The Family at 1312

What is this film about?

Family.  More specifically, the film chronicles the things that people (all of us) do and with each other in the name of "family", for the sake of "family", to accomplish a sense of "family".  Some of these things are beautiful and sacred; but then we also do horrible, abusive, and profane things to each other.  All of these things we do in the name of "family."  The idea(l) of family engenders righteousness and cruelty; it elicits the best in humans, and it excuses the worst that our species has to offer.

So this film documents a fictive kinship system created in large measure by several member's of American society's caste of undesirables--crackheads, junkies, hookers, thieves, and drug dealers.  Together and individually they work toward achieving a sense of connectedness, a feeling that they're a part of something bigger and, quite honestly, more beautiful than their individual selves.  In accomplishing this nearly universal human objective, they deploy techniques that range from empathy to physical brutality.  

This is not a film about crack cocaine, although everyone who appears in the movie does smoke or inject it.  Most of them use heroin, too.  They work very hard to acquire the substance that they use to treat their illness--addiction.  But the things they must do (rob, cheat, steal, lie, etc.) put them at odds with the law and with prevailing community norms.  The deeper problem, though, is that their very illness--which is what propels them to do these things--puts them at odds with "mainstream" society's moral code.  The addiction itself has been criminalized through the punishment of the actions they take to treat the illness.  

Crack cocaine is incidental, in and of itself.  When you watch this film, imagine the substance of crack cocaine to be more of a process, a physical manifestation of human activity, people doing things to and with each other cooperatively and competitively.  As one of the subjects in the film said to me during production, "crack isn't any one thing; it's a lot of things ... most of all, it's a way of life."