I'm oblique, I hide, I let a few things pass into the frame, a few words; they tell a story but it's also a secret. I have to hide my stories in citations, like I'm telling you to fit the fragments together, make your own story from my hidden story … I've had so much psychotherapy and analysis, imagining it might help me to live better with myself and my trauma … but actually the real work happens when I write and put films together. As if I'm channelling something true, and maybe it isn't even myself, because it's been too hard to tell my story straight up, like some narrative. I can't do chronology, I can only try to make time freer, more pliable, more malleable. When I was a painter I could manipulate the paint and layer it, strike things out, hide. I do the same with film, and I'm culturally Jewish, something I can't escape, and queer, and I used to be ‘lesbian’; now I can be queer and I'm not sure what it is, but I am it. I can't avoid the Jewish thing either, although my supervisor suggested I ditch ‘the Jewish stuff’, and I said ‘but how, why?‘
All anyone wants to know is ‘am I a zionist, am I a terf, am I a feminist, am I queer?’ Also trauma bonding is big, and while I certainly express trauma experience in my work, my films aren't about trauma and I can't afford to feel sorry for myself. My therapist said two memorable things to me: one was ‘You hate yourself’, the other was, ‘But why this crazy fairytale?’ Another was ‘Why bang on doors that are closed in your face?’ All good, all leading to the kind of films and poems I somehow pull out of dark places, but also fun places. If I lose my humour I'm finished.
Maybe the stories hidden in my films are convoluted, or maybe they're quite simple, just cut-ups of everything I like. My films have these shots where things are missing, an oblique view. A gaze that needs to be taken into account. That's what I want: to be considered in the scheme of things. The mise-en-scène in my work contains a lot of empty tables, interiors, there's a sense of absence, abandonment, aftermath.
So why not fairy tales that aren't, or banging on closed doors, or even self hate? … I mean I'm quite old and still trying to find this ‘self’ but the self changes every day, I mean I lost that young self, and now I'm negotiating something else, my madnesses, my ageing, and how different we are as we become ourselves and also how we're not unlike our childhood selves … I said ‘we’, but I mean ‘I‘? Another taboo in avantgarde art: are you speaking for you, or is there an us, and isn't it violent to speak for others? And what kinds of violence have we overlooked? The violence of borders; and since Brexit, we're no longer free, we have to cross the violence of national borders … I.
I like this group, a queer group called Orgullo Loco, mad pride … they refuse normative anything. What if there's method to your madness, what if it isn't madness but a world that sticks you in some depressed margin, where you'll never fit, or make money, or age gracefully as the world seems to burn and a whole bunch of earthlings don't seem to mind that much? I improvise, in performance, in writing, in teaching and in making films; it's a freer way of letting things emerge from nowhere, like meditating, like the void, no thing, ein sof in Hebrew mysticism, divine nothingness that brings forth something … knowledge maybe
And I'm interested in Gen Z and what they're thinking about, the accelerated screen world they grew up with. A world I find hard to engage with … yet I want to engage, and in real life … so my films reflect the engagements I have … and then all the new things younger people talk to me about, and some older people too. Indigenous ceremonial work, Afrofuturism, and sci fi … all the new intersections we can tap, or think about.
I want to talk about the world I grew up in where screens didn't exist, I want younger people to know that there was this different world, and it was ruled by technologies but they were so basic. We took the templates and played around with them to make them our own. I think that's what experimental means in film. How we read the frame, the empty space, the signs and symbols.
We had our experiences, we had free university, we had real-life lives, we experimented with drugs and art and consciousness – we had energy
and stamina and invented things and took risks. I say us, our, but really I speak for myself. What changed our lives as we grew up was love, and connection. One critic wrote that my work is all about ‘love gone wrong’, but it wasn't that. I was exploring the world from my own view, I grew up around hippies and Black Power and music, around traumatised refugees, a second generation survivor. In art school, I learned about being ‘an artist’ and I was fearless, then. I wanted to make a world out of frames, gesture, fragments.
These stories that are oblique, they don't do chronology, they express some kind of commitment to becoming. Vernacular is a wild form, it's improv, it has no pre-ordained outcome, because it's becoming, always … I hope my films convey something of this resistance to stagnation … I don't talk much about queer because my films are queer, about love and all its betrayals and heartbreaks, love gone wrong … or love as Nina Simone called it, the only thing that matters at all. Which introduces a touch of melodrama too. All stories are hidden and they bubble up from some deep place, the way dreams work … cinema is dreaming. Or freeing intrusive thoughts, repressed ideas from their subterranean spaces. Maybe.