Even if Lesbian Home Movie Project’s first collection had been a talkie, the only way to have known for sure that at least some of the women in it were lesbian would have been to have known the filmmaker or at least one of the women in the footage. As it happened, I did know one fairly well. Friends knew others better. One’s mother had even slept with the filmmaker. Another, Sheila McLaughlin, had first known the filmmaker when Sheila was a very little girl.  (The Ruth Storm Collection clip below shows Meda on the left,  Sheila in a beret watering a garden,  Sheila’s mother washing a station wagon, soon joined by Ruth Storm.)

The luck of those connections led us to restrict our collections to those with primary sources who could tell about the filmmakers and participants and point the way to others who could also help with documentation. To date only one film donor reneged on that agreement.

The resulting voluminous records would make it easy to create the finding aids and obtain the participant releases to stream that Women Behind the Camera required, we assumed. To a degree that’s proved true. At the same time, an oral history approach has weaknesses that an archival approach quickly brings to glaring light.

Oral histories dive deep fast. They go straight to story: what was going on in a situation, what the speaker made of it, who was important to her. Interrupting the process of recollection to pin down details is counterproductive as a rule, particularly if a witness is older and fears, as almost everyone older does, that memory is failing. To start an interview with detailed questions is almost always to get off on the wrong foot. It’s too formal and intimidating. Ending with specific questions feels rude. It cuts the strong feelings conversation almost always evokes short. It signals that the listener is not a friend, after all. It has been an instrumental exchange not a heart to heart. For these reasons, I usually rely on email and phone follow-up to gather basic facts, sending clips and screen shots by email: Is this Barbara? What was her last name? Address? Phone number? Can you think of anyone who might? It’s laborious and it doesn’t always work.

Following filmmakers’ explicit and implicit wishes can create other shortfalls. If a filmmaker is reluctant for us to follow up on a lead, we usually don’t and there’s almost always reluctance involved in any project that depends on snowball sampling. Everyone knows someone they’d rather not officially opine on their life. One can press. But for Lesbian Home Movie Project respecting the wishes of filmmakers and donors takes precedence, in part out of this pragmatism: We’ll only be trusted with more collections if filmmakers and donors tell friends that we should be, and our primary goal is to save as much relevant footage as possible.

Exacerbating the double bind created by the goals of research, preservation, and accessibility for the CLIR-funded Woman Behind the Camera project was the fact that we used the funding in part to finance digitizing two large new collections — the Corky Culver and Shirley Lasseter collections.   Together these two collections open an extraordinary window on lesbian and feminist political efforts and hijinks in the south. They were profoundly worth saving. But for the most part, they’re tape collections and involve hundreds of participants in events that at first review seemed “public” — i.e., more or less okay to stream — but in fact had restricted attendance by gender — which arguably made them private events.  In addition, some wholly public events in the tapes involved actions not strictly speaking legal; for example, a group going out late at night with spray cans of paint to emblazon a highway wall with feminist and gay slogans and symbols.  Decades later not everyone wanted to flaunt what they’d done.  Nudity raised another issue, especially toplessness. In the feminist context of the time, going topless meant claiming the freedom men had always had. In a streaming context, many filmmakers and participants fear it being read, and used, as pornographic, a repugnant idea to many.  On top of that, many of the hundreds of participants in the new collections had moved on, often changing their names in the process. Appearances, too, had changed, of course. And there was the problem of dating footage. Super 8 and 8mm reels are usually shot on one occasion. VHS and hi 8 tapes are often shot on several occasions, not necessarily in the same year or even decade.

Long story short, we’ve spent more than a year combing through those two collections and going back over our earlier ones, pulling clips & screenshots, and asking filmmakers and donors, who was this? when do you think this was? where? It has not been easy. While home movies and amateur films often function as diaries, and as a rule tape equipment has offered the option of dating footage, that option is often ignored and frequently misapplied. It’s not unusual for a tape collection to show the date of purchase as the date of every tape, for example. One filmmaker actually kept journals as well but she didn’t use dates in those either. What about a chronology of your relationships, I finally asked. Bingo. By return email, she sent the approximate years of her most lasting loves. Not the most precise guide to dating footage but in a pinch . . . . We often found ourselves in the chronological dark, however, and we didn’t always come up with such a neat solution.  Thank heavens for “circa.”

Hoping to venture beyond immediate sources, we attempted a variation on an approach Melissa Dollman presented at a talk at the 2017 Northeast Historic Film Symposium: posting inquiries about clips on the web. Dollman’s approach is website-based and very elegant. http://communityhistories.org/rocky-mount-mills-project/community-input-on-rocky-mount-mills-and-village-home-movie/
Because our website was — still is! — still in construction, our approach has had to rely on social media.

We began to post carefully chosen screen shots and short clips on my personal fb page and on our project page — Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP).  Lesbian and feminist worlds are large, of course, but they are also interconnected, and despite fb’s now notorious flaws, the fb approach has proven a remarkably effective approach to finding participants. It has also created an inevitable amount of uncertainty. If Hillary knew Janet when they were 19, Hillary may not be positive that she’s watching the Janet of age 55, and she may not know anything about Janet’s life between 19 and 55. Similarly if Suzanne knew Hillary at age 55, she may not be sure that’s the 19-year-old Hillary bounding around in that field of bluets. This lesson was twice underscored a few weeks ago.  First example: I came upon a series of interviews that took place in California and was suddenly startled to hear a woman named Sunlight say that she used to live in New York City where she was known as Dot Lane.

Egad, I thought, wasn’t I in a writer’s group with her?  I asked the filmmaker Corky Culver if that was possible, but although Corky had spent time in NYC, she had not known Dot’s NYC avatar. I couldn’t ask Sunlight. She had died a few years earlier.   As I replayed the footage, my memories of Dot multiplied. She’d left New York not long after I joined that writing group.  In fact, several of us had helped her depart.  She’d bought an old junker for the drive.  Tires were no good and we accompanied her to a dicey East Village storefront tire store where she replaced them. We’d all worried the car would break down halfway across the country. We also worried she didn’t know what she’d find in California.  She’d said she was moving to a collective she had never visited.  It raised worms to support itself, she said. Worms, I’d thought. Is that a metaphor? Does she expect to die soon? She was considerably younger than I am now but at the time she seemed venerably aged.  So many years later — over 40! —  I posted the clip on Facebook. A friend or two thought she looked familiar.  Another thought she was featured in the film, “Women on the Land: Creating Conscious Community” by Laurie York and Carmen Goodyear. She was. But so far no one who would have known her as Dot has been sure she was the Dot of the writing group.

Then I came across another Corky Culver shot that really brought the archival home to roost.

I think it’s me, napping at the end of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.  Deep in the vaguest recesses of my memory bank, I faintly recall deciding to take a break while my goddaughter and her mom took another look at the AIDS quilt. When they came back for me, this faint memory continues, they said someone had been filming me. The whole memory is as faded as a snapshot left in the sun. To check it, I sent them the screen shot and asked what they remembered.  Her mom sent a photo from an earlier march. My godchild didn’t think it was me. I never wore clothes like that, she said. In her recollection, my typical march attire involved some kind of costume. (Here we are at a DC abortion rights march, for example.)

I do think it’s me though.  And I think I was in costume: tee shirt, jeans, baseball cap, backpack: ur lesbian-feminist garb.  Of course, I had been lesbian and feminist for decades but it’s true I rarely dressed the part.  Her conviction it’s not me brings home an important and vexing point.  It’s virtually impossible to ascertain the identities of everyone in a large collection. Social history will be greatly enriched by the effort, and there are ethical, intellectual, and  legal reasons to make it. But there will always be some strangers in the crowd. Any case, although releases are probably not required for such a public event, I’m signing one for the file. That file is very thin. Formal releases to stream are harder to come by than names. But that is a tale for the next blog.

Archives grow from what elders preserve and death releases, and winters hit the aged hard.  It’s a plain truth no one can celebrate. This polar-vortex winter has been stringent, even in the south, and as 2017 turned into 2018 three women who appear in Lesbian Home Movie Project collections died — ally Barbara Ann Davis (1952-2017); lesbian musician & wiccan Deborah “Flash Silvermoon” Kotler (1950-2017); and sculptor and filmmaker Jere Van Syoc (1935-2018). Barbara and Flash appear in pieces in the Corky Culver Collection. Jere Van Syoc was the subject of the earlier Woman Behind the Camera blog, “Looking for Lesbisia.” I grieve their deaths as if I knew them well. But I never met them.

As film buffs and psychoanalysts know, repetition strengthens the fervid impressions moving images so often create. Many buffs watch beloved movies over and over to refresh the original pleasure. It’s not that different from eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream. But while ice cream cloys and sugar highs collapse fast, repeatedly watching moving images deepens their effect. Sometimes that’s the goal. In the case of a viewer’s personal home movies, the home movies of her childhood, for example. the intent is often to embed memories her brain was too young initially to write to its hard drive. It works, evidence suggests and experience supports. Sometimes the goal is of a different order: to overwrite painful real-life memories with screen memories.  That works too.

The hallmarks of amateur films — the jiggle, the jerky pan, the grain, the blur, the hues, the grays, the fogs, the static — seem to replicate the effect that the passage of time has on memory and scam the mind into the sense that the other is part of the one’s own world and the moving image that captured the imaginary cinematic world a record of one’s own history and experience.

Archivists bring an instrumental and conscious intention to watching moving images repeatedly as we labor to meld documentation and moving images via viewing logs and catalog entries. All the same, pouring over footage heightens the sense of intimacy.  It doesn’t take long to feel you really know people you’ve never actually met in “real” life.  And so I grieve Barbara, Flash, and Jere.

Barbara Ann Davis is best known for her work as an attorney and mediator. While she practiced traditional public-interest law for some years as a public defender and legal services attorney, she came to put her stronger faith in mediation.  She founded and directed the Mediation Center in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1984, and she later became a pioneer in the field of collaborative law. She was a staunch supporter of the lgbt community. At the bottom of her practice web page, this exclamation appears in bright blue: “An LGBT friendly business!” The Corky Culver Collection documents another role she gave her warmest attention, that of wonderful friend.  It would have been a great pleasure to hum with her as Corky does in this clip.

Deborah “Flash Silvermoon” Kotler, who also died in December, appears many times in the Corky Culver Collection. She grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, and lived in New York City for a number of years, playing music, reading tarot cards, doing astrological charts, and generally hanging out with other wild women — Janis Joplin among them — before she took Corky up on the suggestion to move to northern Florida.  There she became a major force in the women’s music scene as well as “a metaphysical community leader.” The Culver tapes show her playing her heart out for women’s and activist events from just about the day she arrived in Florida until very close to the day she died. Release of most of those performances has to await participant and collective’s permissions. Luckily the clip of the performance below only includes Flash herself, so we can share it.

For me most painful, in the past two weeks the filmmaker Jere Van Syoc whom I wrote about in an earlier blog post, “Looking for Lebisia,” had a massive stroke in a West Virginia nursing home. She died just a few days later. Given that she suffered from dementia for several years and her film “The Brothel, the Temple, and Art” in effect constituted a final memoir, her death shouldn’t have come as a shock. But against all reason, I had harbored a hope that dementia research might suddenly produce a treatment that would bring her memory back and — side effect! — open the chance to interview her about her work. No such luck.

To mark her death, I knuckled down to a job I’d put off — creating viewing logs for her outtakes. As a rule, I love creating viewing logs — identifying strangers from the past, pointing a viewer toward a fact they’d probably never guess — that, for example, the odd looking lobster boat had an extra motor to give it the speed rum-running required or the comic looking fellow in the fedora holding a stick perpendicular to the ground is dowsing for a well. Or that if the viewer keeps her eyes peeled on that party, she’ll glimpse Adrienne Rich having a rollicking good time. But outtakes are also irritating. So many splices, so random. It’s going through a wastebasket.

Jere did the bulk of her filmmaking when there was no easy way for someone who was neither in the film industry nor had big bucks to create a piece out of footage without destroying the original.  She resolved that problem a cheap way.  She projected her original footage, filmed the projection,  and then cut and spliced that to make the film she wanted. Sometime later she loaned her remaining footage to the filmmaker Michelle Citron to use bits of in Citron’s “Mixed Greens.” Citron had the footage transferred to tape and returned the original footage to Jere.

Lesbian Home Movie Project holds Citron’s 2003 tapes.  It was a professional transfer but methods then were not what they are now.We’re looking for  the original Super 8mm footage — there was also said to have been a 16mm transfer — but so far no luck.

By the time I clicked on the last outtakes reel, I was tired of squinting and close to giving up. But a rule of archiving is that patience pays off. It did. The reel opened with a treasure: early Michfest footage in delicious color,  originally Super 8.  I want to share every minute of this footage. Almost did in fact, but since Michfest was for womyn only, tops were optional, Jere’s camera was fearless, confrontational, and bold, and these are nervous times, prudence has ruled and this clip stops at the gates of Eden.  Imagination doesn’t have to, though.

Wild and prolific painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Jere Van Syoc transferred from Moody Bible College to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962 with the modest intention of becoming a high school art teacher.  In her earliest days at SAIC, her roommate the fiber artist Leora Stewart recalls, she still went to church.  By the time she completed her Bachelor’s in Art Education in 1966, SAIC was well on its way to being a hotbed of creative and political ferment and she was a firebrand with an Instamatic.  She spent a couple years teaching school and saving money and then returned for a master’s to SAIC.  She remains a legend among SAIC classmates from those latter days for her spirit and activism.  Her next stop was Thomas Jefferson College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she taught art and was a leading force in the seemingly spontaneous combustion that preceded & followed the first Mich Fest and created the Aradia Collective, a loose assortment of lesbian artists and free spirits whose parties and performances remain the stuff of myth.  Somewhere along the line she acquired a Super 8.  Later, in the 1970s and 80s she was a presence at the Los Angeles Women’s Building where she showed and photographed her “death toys.” By then the habit of filming her life and exploits was second nature.

Chicago Altar Piece, Death Toy

Big Dog, Death Toy

Over the years she took many photos and moving images of her work, friends, and activities. In 1999 she gathered her still and moving images of her life and work and used them to create a 19:55 minute film she entitled “The Brothel, the Temple, and Art.”

Click to play clip.

After Jere committed her memory to dvd, she began to suffer from dementia.  Reportedly she’s now lost most of her short and long term memory.  Fortunately, she gave dvds of “The Brothel, the Temple, and Art” to many friends.  In addition, when filmmaker Michelle Citron asked to use footage for Michelle’s wonderful interactive piece “Mixed Greens,” Jere sent her raw footage.  Michelle Citron made Digibeta and Beta tape copies “off Jere’s footage” and returned the original media to Jere. In 2016 Michelle contributed her dvd copy of “The Brothel” as well as the tapes she copied from Jere’s original footage to Lesbian Home Movie Project. A niece Keli Semelsberger who holds Jere’s power of attorney formalized the donation.  She has also shared rich childhood memories of her aunt.

The hallmark piece in LHMP’s Jere Van Syoc Collection is “The Brothel, the Temple, and Art.” As a fully realized memoir on film, it achieves a promise implicit but rarely achieved in many amateur collections of snapshots and moving-image footage and captures a remarkable period in 20th Century American art and lgbtq history.  But it does not narrate her life before she entered the Art Institute, and that has been very hard to document.  At present, we don’t even have a confirmed date of birth.  Yet there’s a good deal of material that seems to have come from home movies in the Digi-B and Beta tapes Michelle Citron donated.   An earlier film we’ve found a reference to, “Lebisia,” which she created while in Los Angeles on a Lesbian Art Project residency at the Woman’s Building may bridge the gap.

Note, if the reproduction allows, the black & white cameo on the right is a childhood still or screen shot.

We would love to include “Lebisia” in Jere’s collection, but so far we haven’t been able to locate a copy. Perhaps it was the reel a family member discarded because it looked too wrinkled to project.  Perhaps, as Terry Wolverton, longtime director of the Women’s Building and author of Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Women’s Building (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002), has hypothesized, Jere chopped it up and reused the footage for “The Brothel, the Temple, and Art.” After all, as Terry has pointed out, at the time “Lebisia” was created, it was extremely costly and difficult to copy film and Jere never had much money. She only received one small grant in her career, seldom sold work, and primarily supported herself with day jobs. But Jere’s practices of shooting “off the wall” and distributing her work among her friends leaves reason to hope that there’s a copy out there somewhere. It’s even possible that it will turn up on the one tape in Jere’s collection that we have not yet been able to salvage to date.  But since odds of that seem slim — it’s in terrible condition — we’re calling far & wide among Jere’s network of friends, fans, lovers, and family members looking a copy. Anybody?

By Sharon Thompson, Executive Director, Lesbian Home Movie Project

Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) is nosy. We won’t take footage unless the possessor agrees to help us document it. And we don’t just ask for the meat and potatoes of moving-image archives, dates and locations. We ask what was happening when the footage was captured. Who loved whom on that softball team? What is that one whispering? What did that bear hug signify? That wink? That kiss? Who’s still alive? Why the footage on that particular garden? That bridge?

CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO

“Shadblow Tree,” Ruth Storm Collection, Reel 13, Lesbian Home Movie Project from Sharon Thompson on Vimeo.

Ruth Storm (1888-1981), the lesbian schoolteacher whose work led to our project, created her longer reels by splicing.  Those edited reels — Maine I, Maine II, Maine III, and New York — have been the focus of most of our research on her work and circles. We have talked to her last remaining friends. We have talked to their daughters. We have literally read her lips. (“You’re beautiful,” she tenderly whispers to a fawn in one frame.) But her collection also includes miscellaneous footage.  On one 16mm can, she scrawled “Shadbush Tree.”  One shadbush tree is all that appears on the reel.  It bounces a little in a breeze. Hard to date and place but we’re still hoping.  We even have a clue: a poetry book Ruth inscribed to a lover, now in the possession of that lover’s daughter.  Could it possibly include this line from William Cullen Bryant: “the shad-bush, white with flowers, brightened the glen”?

To a degree, this emphasis on unearthing intimate details is a personal tic.  But there is a scholarly point. Detailed recollections are the stuff of social history.   Queer histories of every sort have been assembled out of remnants, the torn letters, the yellowed journals, the audio tapes, the police records, of those who lived before us.   Given how little intimate knowledge was intended to be preserved, social historians to date have done an amazing job of reconstructing those lives, sexualities, perceptions, and experiences out of these precious shreds.  Linking home and amateur movies and tapes to extensive testimony and textual evidence, as The Woman Behind the Camera project does, will enable tomorrow’s lgbtq and feminist historians to take this work even further.

One key to the Lesbian Home Movie Project’s success in collecting closely held personal material has been our willingness to hold the private close. Frequently footage donors have had second thoughts after we have enabled them to see their footage again, often for the first time in many years. The pain of a lost relationship may be reignited or the fear that led an elder donor to hide a passion in her closet for many years. Elder donors also often impute sensitivities to people they’d half forgotten. One woman I hoped to interview called in the wee hours to excoriate me for proposing to screen a lesbian wedding ceremony that took place decades before gay marriage was a legal possibility. The parties involved had split up soon after the occasion, she announced.  Even mentioning that they had once loved each other so much that they ceremonialized their love would be terribly embarrassing.   And no she wouldn’t ask them what they actually felt. That would be horribly improper. And no she wouldn’t give their names or offer any clues to contacting them and asking their actual opinions. And no she would never change her mind.  Moreover, I was the most horrible person she ever heard of for refusing to destroy the evidence we held. If I were not the kind of person who would destroy it, I was not the kind of person to be trusted with contact information.

The fact that I’m telling this story reveals the extent to which she was right. I cannot be trusted to destroy evidence, especially not of the erotic or romantic variety. I want secrets to come out. I believe in testimony. That’s why I love archives even more than memory: their written documents, their oh-so-moving images.  At the same time, I am the kind of person — much more importantly, this is the kind of project — to be trusted with secrets for the present.

Because confidentiality is as much a hallmark of Lesbian Home Movie Project as curiosity, we (our board of three, Kate Horsfield, B. Ruby Rich and I) anticipated that the emphasis of the Council on Libraries and Information Resources Hidden Collections grant on streaming footage might damage more than abet our work and insisted that we would not stream what we were asked not to stream and would make every possible effort to locate the people in front of the camera and obtain their permission to stream or include their names in a finding aid or viewing log. If a piece of footage were already up and someone in it emerged and objected, we would take it down immediately. If it weren’t up yet but just on the list, we would cross it out. Still we feared that bringing so much footage out of our closet might impede future donors from coming forward. That may be happening to a degree. But the project has also proven a lure. We’ve recently accepted two new collections — one large, almost seventy items, one just four short, delicious Super 8 reels. Both seem to have come in partly because the filmmakers appreciated the concept of the project and the idea of their work becoming accessible and a part of history. Dealing with these collections has added extra time pressure to meeting the grant terms. But it is also enriching the project itself and will greatly enlarge the portrait that ultimately emerges of women behind the camera and their partners in crime and art and history, the subjects in front of it, as well as the last near one hundred years of lesbian amateur filmmaking, the movements and the private lives that led to where we are now: a place and time in which more and more women define the boundaries of their work, and share cinematic assertions that include but also aim beyond the domestic, the personal, and the secret.