GATHER(ED)

RESEARCH STATEMENT

A woman in a fashionable fur coat plays with her young toddler in an urban park, she tosses a ball as her bundled up little one runs after it. In voiceover the woman speaks, “I needed to make this film for myself because I wanted to show really what it’s like having a child. And of course, what happened is that making the film just becomes another imposition – I’m just exhausted and all the film did was make me more exhausted.” 

I am watching Miriam Weinstein’s 1977 14-minute short, Call Me Mama on YouTube. I am sitting on my balcony, it is too windy and too bright to work comfortably on a laptop, but I am hiding from my own toddler who is inside playing with my aunt–trying to squeeze in a few minutes more of writing before his naptime. At one point in the film Miriam’s son makes the exact same whining exclamation of need that Malek is making inside, I turn the volume down so as not to give myself away.

I came across Miriam’s work while paging through Scott MacDonald’s American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (2013, 160-161). Call Me Mama (Weinstein 1977) resonates in the way the filmmaker must adapt her practice and intention to document motherhood to the reality of actually being a mother. Undoubtedly motherhood has affected my approach to filmmaking, but more than anything, I feel like it has crystallised - or made apparent - certain tendencies that were always there. Adaptability, willingness to change course mid-stream, incorporating the what-is versus fighting for what-should-be.

I made Gather(ed) (Piper-Burket 2021) in the three-month period directly after the birth of my first child, Malek. The 12-minute film documents the collection of influences and thoughts that were coming to the surface during that time. The resulting film is an assemblage drawing inspiration from autofiction, the diaristic mode of filmmaking that arose in the late 1960s and 70s, as well as avant-garde and essayistic film practices.

Anthropologist Anna Tsing reflects on her research and writing process in Mushroom at the End of the World:

I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs. I argue that only an appreciation of the current precarity as an earthwide condition allows us to notice this – the situation of our world. 

(2015, 49)

I consciously and unconsciously incorporate this precarity into my work. I am curious how accepting the precarity opens new pathways into dealing with the troubling times we find ourselves in. Embracing  precarity is also a feminine practice (that can be adopted by all)- paralleling the cultural and biological yieldings that follow a woman throughout all phases of her life. Historically, this ability to adapt and make do has been exploited, used to silence or discount feminine perspectives for being too fluid, too based on intuition, but there is strength in adaptability, examples from nature show this to be abundantly true. Messiness can be a superpower as well. There is a dialogue that can occur when you become quieter with your expectations, yield to what is. Essay films, avant-garde, and personal documentary all offer tools to explore this terrain.

MacDonald traces the origins of personal documentary to the Pragmatists, he cites John Dewey’s definition of an experience as something “understood by the experiencer as having a shape: a beginning, middle, and end” (2013, 9). MacDonald goes on to describe the work he defines as American Ethnographic and Personal Documentary as “manifestations of the process of transforming the experiences witnessed and lived by the filmmakers, experiences full of tensions and resistance into particular cinematic experiences that are, if not conclusive… at least fulfilling, in Dewey’s sense of the term” (2013, 9). While I feel connected to this mode of making – incorporating my daily life and encounters into moving image work– I do not necessarily care to reveal or uncover any truth about myself or the subjects of my films. Instead, giving preference towards an open-endedness and exposure to process. This differs from, say, Ed Pincus’ Diaries: 1971-1976 (1982), a film which includes self-reflexivity but still feels like its intention is to document and understand a fixed point in time. Pincus’ self-imposed guidelines – shoot for 5 years, wait 5 years before editing – indicates the belief that there was a cohesive truth (or network of truths) that could be revealed with appropriate distance.

In my work, I try to erase any distance created in the production in favour of including viewers in the mechanisms of the process. I cannot imagine making a film about someone or something– the film is a document of the moment of interaction. In this way, Peter Gidal’s definition of structuralist film, feels more closely aligned with my approach:

Structural/Materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist. The process of the film’s making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process. But by ‘deals with’ I do not mean ‘represents...’ An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that the ‘image’ is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary.

(Gidal 1976, 1)

At the same time, structuralist films are also marked by their own set of internal rules, a process which I still tend to avoid. The subjects of my films are based on what I encounter and think about day to day, inspired by conversations and observations with the world and people around me. The textures and locations are familiar. Moments come from lived experiences, scenes are designed as a collaboration between the idea as written and what is encountered during production. I am usually casual with my camera; pre-production consists of setting the intention to film and then having the necessary equipment on hand. With Gather(ed) I was interested in trying something more “planned.” I started shooting material with a RED Digital Cinema Scarlet, which I had rented for only 5 days. I orchestrated scenes between my mom and her acupuncturist, who is also a musician. Initially the film was only going to be a sort of autofiction centred on my mom who is also an artist. But my headspace in the postpartum period did not allow me to compartmentalise like that. Other parts of our life started sneaking in. A new narrative emerged that incorporated all four generations: my grandmother, my mother, me, and my new baby. In this way the work became a time-capsule of a very specific and tender period in my life. It revealed more to me about my process as a filmmaker than any idea executed as conceived ever could. I am curious how personal documentary filmmaking can be used as tools to expose precarious states of being, to put a pin in a specific moment while at the same time leaving an open-endedness that transcends the personal.

PEER REVIEW 1

Emma Piper-Burket’s film, Gather(ed) (2021), plays with notions of multiple processes playing out at the time. The film was made in response to her lived experience of becoming a mother for the first time. The multiple entanglements of motherhood and motherhood shared across generations are playfully explored through rhizomic associations and coupled with an approach that draws on autofiction and autoethnography to emphasise the intention to include everything and the dilemmas this presents in terms of a filmmaking process.

I enjoy the ways she plays with consciousness and process and the impossibilities of capturing dynamic thought processes in the moments. Threads are drawn between four generations of women – past and present become blurred and form a timeline marked by references to the filmmaking and editing process itself. Theory informs the practice and vice versa. The choice of autofiction is apt as it allows and indeed encourages the filmmaker to be a midwife of their own thoughts, feeling and process, in both a conscious and intuitive way. This way of working according to Piper-Burkit is feminine practice and I wholehearted agree – the subject matter of the film is domestic and connected to feminine life trajectories as well as cross-generational relationships between women and how the birth of a baby – a new generation – opens the portal to many more experiences, feelings, thoughts, and the conversations these inspire between the women.

Gather(ed) invites the viewer into an intimate relation with Piper-Burket. The film opens with an acupuncturist and vision of a keyboard. This is accompanied by the deep notes of singing bowls and we see text expressing hesitation about using the sound to accompany the acupuncturist. Then the viewer is transported to the vision of a colourful and exuberantly messy art studio where plans for an installation about the mother are heard being discussed by a mother and daughter. This established the film as autofiction.

There is a wonderful philosophical conversation between the mother and daughter about whether saving things was a genetic trait – and the need to record the small details through material objects and the way important things are mixed up with “nothingness.” This conversation happens as Piper-Burket is walking and we see the world from the point of view of the pram – the baby has a bit of a cry which is acknowledged, and the mothers continue chatting and laughing about life and the women that came before them.

The film crystallises Piper-Burket’s stated research aim to accept precarity and to explore how this acceptance might present new directions and connections that can inform the making of personal documentaries and essay films. Piper-Burket also states that she seeks to embrace messiness as a filmmaking strategy, and she does this admirably through including editing decisions that are normally erased from the final form and structure of personal documentaries and essay films. Overall, the film is a wonderful example of creative practice research. 

PEER REVIEW 2

Emma Piper-Burket made her short film Gather(ed) (2021) in the months immediately after the birth of her child. The personal documentary, autofiction, and structuralism are strong influences in her creative work, so it is interesting to see how they play out within the realm of her film.

The film, itself, involves four female generations of her family. It seems to be divided roughly into three parts, with the middle and most compelling part for me, being a long tracking shot. In this shot we view sky, clouds, and bare tree branches. I found it very beautiful, and highly reminiscent of the opening and closing shots of the recent feature film Evil Does Not Exist (Hamaguchi 2023). In Piper-Burket’s film, we hear the audio of a phone conversation with her mother. Her mother’s conversational style is garrulous, abundant, and overflowing. The filmmaker jokes that she is worried how she can possibly be edited. This sequence gives us some clues about how the filmmaker’s practice relates to her theoretical concerns. The most obvious way is how the idea of autofiction plays out. We are constantly being reminded of how the film is being constructed. There is the joke about how the above monologue can be edited. Preceding the scene the filmmaker tells us that the conversation did not take place at the same time as the tracking shot, but she chose that shot because she preferred the way it looked.

I think we all know that image and sound are often recorded in different places than each other, without being told. But, there is a playfulness in this which is in line with the filmmaker’s alignment with structuralism in which she works to “erase any distance created in the production in favour of including viewers in the mechanisms of the process.” In this same way, we see a version of emails sent between the filmmaker and her composer discussing the music needed, see the composer at work and then hear the music previously discussed.

Overarching all this is the reality of motherhood, signified by a wailing baby who ends the phone conversation between the filmmaker and her mother. This ties in with Piper-Burket’s determination to make a film with the material conditions she has at hand; probably a necessity with a young  baby. She describes this as dealing with “precarity,” and a “willingness to change course mid-stream, incorporating the what-is vs. fighting for what-should-be.”

The film really examines what it means to create with these sorts of restrictions, and, in fact, to celebrate them. It reminds of the useful aphorism that the obstacle is the path. As such, it is a very interesting, and thought provoking intervention into the messiness of life and filmmaking. 

REFERENCES

Gidal, Peter ed. 1976. Structural Film Anthology. London: British Film Institute.

Hamaguchi, Ryûsuke, dir. 2024. Evil Does Not Exist [Aku Wa Sonzai Shinai]. NEOPA.

MacDonald, Scott. 2013. American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pincus, Ed, dir. 1981. Diaries: 1971-1975. Documentary.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Weinstein, Miriam. 1977. “Call Me Mama.” Added to YouTube by Chris Lamothe in 2018. YouTube video, 14:21. Accessed October 4, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHQbUpIA42w