The films that have been the most inspiring or influential to me are Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Meshes of an Afternoon, and Mulholland Drive. [i] Whether fiction or non-fiction, I am drawn to movies that are, for lack of a better word, weird. The weirder and more stylized, the better. I am reminded of the scene in Beetlejuice where Lydia is explaining to the ghosts why she can see them and no one else can: “Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I, myself, am strange and unusual.”
In a way, that’s what filmmaking, especially documentary filmmaking, is like for me. I like to think I can see the ghosts no one else can see, and I like to watch movies that show me the ghosts I cannot see.
Even though I didn’t see Superstar in its entirety until I was in film school, I saw snippets of it much, much earlier, in the PBS documentary Barbie Nation (1998), which my parents videotaped for my sister and me.[ii] Ever since a well-meaning relative got me my first Barbie for Christmas (which concerned my mother), Barbie has been a huge part of my life. My very first movies were Barbie movies, and I bought my first Barbie Dream House from a local independent filmmaker, who had used it in one of her movies. From a very early age, I connected Barbie with moviemaking and realized that you could buy fun things like Barbie Dream Houses if you were making movies. Right then and there, I knew that I wanted to make Barbie movies for the rest of my life.
Going back to Superstar, when I first saw pieces of it (in Barbie Nation), I didn’t know what I was seeing, but it fascinated me. Here in the middle of this documentary about Barbie, was a more sophisticated version of what I was doing—a Barbie narrative! It featured stop-motion animation, which I didn’t know the first thing about, miniature set pieces that weren’t neon pink, and sparkly costumes from another time (the 1970s)! For years, I would wonder what that movie was and where I could see it. Oddly enough, it came up in a documentary production class (taught by the same person whose Barbie Dream House I had acquired years earlier), and I finally found out the title. It was Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). Barbie made an occasional appearance in some of the short stop-motion narratives I made, but it had never occurred to me that she could be used in a documentary or biopic until I watched Superstar.[iii] Superstar opened up documentary filmmaking for me by making me realize that you could experiment with form and content and still make a non-fiction film. I was so inspired by Superstar that I made a stop-motion short (featuring Barbies), with occasional live action sequences, about Dennis Wilson’s alleged love affair with Charles Manson.
Another movie that inspired my Barbie stop-motion films was Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), because it showed me that you can eschew realism and still tell a compelling story. When I think of Dr. Caligari, I think of the German Expressionist sets and how they are used to convey the psyche rather than be realistic-looking backdrops. Since I was using Barbies, my movies were already not going to be realistic. Trying to make elaborate, photorealistic set pieces was going to be too time-consuming. However, I could use foam core and paint and put together an entire village (in the German Expressionist style) in one sitting!
Of course, not all of my movies have been Barbie movies. In terms of movies that have inspired or influenced everything else I’ve made, I would have to cite Maya Deren’s Meshes of an Afternoon (1943) and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). Both of these films have influenced my imagery and approach. Meshes of an Afternoon is significant to me on two counts: one, it is one of the oldest experimental films I have ever seen, and two, it was made by a woman. Most of the films I admire have been made by men, so it is empowering when I see movies that have been made by other women. I still feel that women are underrepresented in the film industry, particularly as directors, and I would like to help change that. There is a cloaked character in Meshes who has a mirror for a face and glides up staircases in slow or reversed motion, which I found so unsettling that I made a movie in which all of the characters were wearing masks and dancing in slow motion.
I share David Lynch’s fondness of retro imagery, especially of 1950s Americana. The documentaries I want to make are about vanishing aspects of1950s Americana. I love how many of his films feature a lone woman singing into a microphone (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive). She is usually lit fairly harshly, with a follow spot, and is standing against a velvet backdrop. When I made Roger and Betty, a documentary about artistic dance rollerskaters, I knew that I wanted the final scene to “look like something out of a David Lynch movie.” The final scene of Roger and Betty is the only time you see them skate a whole dance, the double-cross waltz. The scene was lit with a follow spot, and we did three takes, with three different camera placements. I layered the three takes in post and adjusted the opacity. The resulting effect is ghostly and somewhat sad—here are these athletes doing this beautiful dance for no one. I use layering a couple of times in Roger and Betty, and that was inspired by the miniature old people who come out of the box in Mulholland Drive.
So, there you have it. These are the movies I have borrowed from shamelessly throughout the years. I hope that this list is at least twice as long by the time I have finished graduate school!
[i] Mulholland Drive is the only one of these that I saw “before” film school, and it is also the only one that I saw in a theater. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I do feel going to film school changed the way I watch movies and thus it is worth making the distinction between movies I saw before, during, and after film school. Since I am once again studying film, perhaps I should change “after” to “in-between” and film school to film schools.
[ii] I am overjoyed to learn that Barbie Nation has finally been released on DVD, and that new material has been added to the DVD, including commentary on some of the newer dolls and follow-up interviews with people featured in the film. For more info, please visit this site: http://www.bernalbeach.com/bn/synopsis.html
[iii] Superstar is not commercially available due to copyright restrictions (Todd Haynes was sued for not getting the rights to the Carpenters’ music, which he used throughout the film) and the fact that this film alleges that Richard Carpenter was homosexual. However, the resourceful viewer can find this film online.
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