AVANT-GARDE FILMS, as Jonas Mekas often explains, are to narrative movies as poetry is to prose. Mekas was a poet before he ever picked up a camera. Now ninety-two, he continues to both write and film. Stephanie Gray, roughly half Mekas’s age, is also both a poet and a filmmaker. Poetry informs the place from which she speaks as a moving-image maker and her camera-eye informs her words. “Super 8mm Poetics: The Films of Stephanie Gray,” a three-evening retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, coincides with the publication by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs of her second poetry collection, Shorthand and Electric Language Stars.
Spanning fifteen years, the retrospective confirms Gray’s commitment not only to celluloid but specifically to the narrow-gauge medium of Super 8. She has mined its particular expressive qualities—graininess, smeary color or low-contrast black-and-white, limited focal range, on-the-fly sync-sound recording, and, especially, the fragility and instability of the film strip itself during shooting, editing, and projection. Like the places and people she has filmed, Super 8 has all but disappeared. Most of the filmmakers who briefly explored it turned decades ago to video and digital technologies. But for Gray, whose work is defined by its stubbornness, Super 8 is the artisanal medium where she celebrates handmade imperfection and mourns its passing.
The third program in the series is devoted almost entirely to short films that memorialize —although that’s too grand a word for Gray’s images—places that made daily life in New York unique until they fell victim to so-called gentrification: More Bread Forever (2004) shot the day before Zito’s Bakery on Bleecker Street closed; I Bought the Last Four Bagels at Jon Vie Pastries, New Year’s Eve 2004 (2004); Magic Couldn’t Save Magic Shoes (2010); You Know They Want to Disappear Hell’s Kitchen as Clinton (2010). The titles are more straightforward—punchier even—than the film images, where Gray’s deliberate refusal to focus her lens except for brief scattered moments makes the places that one took for granted till they were gone look as if they were already misted memories even before they breathed their last. All of Gray’s films suggest the difficulty of focusing on anything—even what we most love or hate.
The paradox is that these extremely fragile films comprise a cinema of personal and political grief and outrage that is unsparing of its audience. Gray speaks from the position of a working-class, lesbian, and severely hearing-impaired woman, a voice from the margins that refuses to be silent, indeed finds no justification for marginalization of any kind. Gray makes no attempt to seduce a potential audience, although several films in this retro are ironically humorous in their wordplay, most notably Close Yr Hearing for the Cap(Shuns) (2000). Her voice-overs are repetitive in pitch and rhythm and reedy in timbre—they reflect the way she hears her own voice and the voices of others, but more crucially they express a struggle to be heard at all. And while Gray’s vision is not disabled, her handheld camera often seems to replicate the seeing of a nearly blind person as it gropes its way toward the object of her attention, circling and zooming until finally for one or two seconds it focuses only to move away and repeat the same movement patterns over and over again.
There is one film that is an exception to the Spartan rules of Gray’s filmmaking. Kristy (2003) consists of clips of the actress Kristy McNichol, her lovely face filmed off a TV screen and “processed” in various ways. The television loses sync so the image is sometimes in vertical roll as Gray films it; the film itself is scratched and torn, the editing splices visible. McNichol, who came out in 2012, twenty years after she retired and nearly a decade after Gray made Kristy, was already a lesbian icon in the 1980s when she played a teenager on Family. Gray’s portrait film collapses the filmmaker’s desire into the desire she projects onto McNichol. Naked in its longing, Kristy takes possession of a beauty that will not be denied.
“Super 8mm Poetics: The Films of Stephanie Gray” runs June 12–14 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Live spoken word and musical performances accompany films in all three programs.
