Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1997)

fingers and greasy, and it's similar to when you are sweating in dancing! Filmmaking is very physical, and it's directly connected to your emotions and your body, but mostly the rhythm and the timing. You have to have an incredible sense of timing because one shot too long or too short means something so different. You have to choreograph and orchestrate those tempos, and the timing has to be related to the emotion that the film is talking about. LT: At the School of Visual Arts in '92 you made a film called The Fight. Could you talk about that? NO-B: It's a short film, 8-minutes long, and was picked up right away for distribution by Frameline. It is related to dance because it's a silent film. I believe that silent films and choreography are almost the same-it's another moment in which dance and choreography are completely related to film because you are just using camera movement and bodies moving in the space. I wanted to make a film in which I could explore the connection between dance and film, but I didn't want to do something that was a pure piece of dance. I'm more interested in the human side of movement that you can relate to, which has to do with theater. The idea for The Fight came from the time during which America was in the Gulf War. The turnaround of this film shows how it's so difficult to accept love between two men-it's like everybody prefers them to fight than to love each other. LT: The theme was of two gay men and the conflict about the war? NO-B: When I did it there were two men, but it has many different levels. One theme is [what it means] being a man. We don't know if they are heterosexual or homosexual, and they are fighting. We see how the audience will react when they kiss, whether they will prefer them to keep on fighting, or to keep on kissing. I want the audience to confront that. It was also about how much we have to hurt each other before we can accept and love each other. And yes, it is about the gay world as much as about not accepting love. LT: Is Alicia Was Fainting autobiographical? NO-B: I was a little bit afraid of the work initially, but I'm a storyteller, my life is very rich. I have imagination and ideas. At the beginning, I always work with ideas that come to me in my dance work that I need to express. Then I thought that I didn't ever see films about 14 year-old girls, about that time in which you are not a woman, but not a child, about that time when you feel kind of lonely and scared, and nobody is telling you how things work, and you have to try to find out. I thought that the subject has not been explored that much. I also wanted to frame it in a time in which the prime character will just have questions, and not answers. I remember that for me, that time was full of separation, which was a subject that also interested me. LT: Separation in what sense? By leaving school and going to work, that kind of thing? NO-B: Separation on all levels, and also it's a film about losing the people around you, about losing your own mother. I was 14 when my mother died, very autobiographical. I wasn't going to include it in the film because I didn't want to make a "self-pity" kind of film, something self-indulgent, but then my advisor told me that the idea of being motherless is also universal in the sense that even if still you have a mother, you can also sometimes feel motherless. It was interesting for me to investigate that idea of why sometimes the mother has a hard time passing information to a young girl. I don't think that happens so much with men, it's very clear what they're supposed to do, but a woman is left quite alone. I wonder if somehow we are afraid of telling what we are supposed to be. It's the survival thing, because if you are not what you are supposed to be, then you are going to be hit and very hard. Maybe no mother wants to say anything about this to her daughter. LT: To be a filmmaker and put this information in a recorded form that can be exposed many times to many people is a very powerful statement against that secrecy and that fear. How was it to direct yourself, playing a main character in your film? NO-B: It was great, I like to perform in my films, but there has to be a reason for it, something that I could do; otherwise, if there's not a reason, then I prefer to be out of it. In Alicia, I'm playing the role of my own mother, so it was very interesting when I saw it. It was very beautiful, because when she died, I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, and wanted to hear from her how much she loved me, but she died and I couldn't gratify that. So through this dance in the film, I felt that I was telling her and she was telling me, and we both said that we loved each other. LT: You expressed the dream to do works that speak to many audiences and not just to limited constituencies, such as gay audiences only. What areas are you interested in? NO-B: I am more interested in the things that are kept silent, interested in the inside, individuals, relationships with others, relationships with the world. Nuria Olivé-Bellés can be contacted at 531 Main Street, New York, NY 10044. Phonelfax: (212)-593-1054. Lauri Rose Tanner is a fundraising consultant based in San Francisco, who also is writing her first book, How to Start and Operate Film & Video Festivals. Her interest in Spanish and Latin American film came from living in the 1980s in Central America and Mexico. Tanner can be reached for fundraising and film festival consulting at (415) 550-9445. VOLUME 3 NUMBER2 @ 15