More than landscape: Brigid McCaffrey

There is an immediate allure of landscape—lush and barren, natural and constructed, urban and remote—in the films of Brigid McCaffrey that visually overwhelm and emote in the grand tradition of landscape paintings. The experience of space and time in them enliven our consciousness of scale; they are imbued with a rare compositional sensibility that betrays a deft grasp of duration, color, and framing. Anteriorly acknowledging these aspects is not to falsely contain the films within formal neutralities; feelings, interactions, care, and politics in its complex manifestation encompassing class, race, gender, and ecology are equally integral to her films; but to point out that the consideration of the latter are not dissociated and hence need not be broadcast with formal abandon. Much rather, the formal awareness sets up the scene for a dialectical tension to materialize between the pictoriality of landscape – the primal fascination with its grandeur, and careful consideration of the Anthropocene undercutting its visual sensuality.

The films are suffused with a persistent search for alternatives — different human relationship to environment, distinct ways of resisting, different ways of existing in the Capitalist epoch. They hint at a form of nuanced anthropology via portraits of people on the social margins who occasionally feel surprisingly familiar, following routines, pursuing dreams, facing hardships, and generally just busy scrambling through life. McCaffrey meets these people on their turf, and in the films, she is constantly weaving both visual and sonic traces of personal and impersonal spaces and landscapes into her portraits, eschewing the descriptive in pursuit of a poetic form. Landscapes are not passive subjects that only inspire visual awe, they are bearers of scars, keepers of history, and active witnesses of violence.

I am now sitting in a café with McCaffrey in June 2024 following a screening of her films, having convinced her for a conversation. It is part of her retrospective at the Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema, curated by Rinaldo Censi.

Arindam Sen: What are your early memories of film watching?

Brigid McCaffrey: Going to the video store as a little kid and renting Flashdance and Splash, feeling the youthful energy and exaggerated femininity of dance and performance. Then there were teenage experiences, seeing Pulp Fiction and some of Jim Jarmusch’s films. I took a film workshop in high school where I saw Italian Neorealist films like Hawks and Sparrows.

AS: And then you went to Bard College?

BM: I went there with an interest in the photography program and then began going to screening classes with friends. I took a film and poetry class on connections between people like Brakhage and Wordsworth. Then I studied with Peggy Ahwesh and Greta Snider, who was teaching there for a year and taught me how to shoot with a Bolex. I found myself spending a lot of time in the library with photo books, which for me was the most exciting formal way to think about images, through series and the intimacy of the pages.

AS. Afterwards you moved to CalArts for your Masters, after how many years in the middle?

BM: I hadn’t planned to go to graduate school, and after Bard I knew I needed to work without being in a school system, so my friend Danielle Lombardi and I made Lay Down Tracks. The process made me crave more community and shared discourse. I thought of staying in New York and going to Hunter College. But then I visited CalArts and happened to see Billy Woodberry’s Bless their little hearts, which was showing that day along with Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Those films really impacted me and I knew I wanted exposure to all different kinds of work and a range of approaches.

AS: When you look back now, what sort of formative influence did the years in CalArts have? I am asking because one notices a certain attitude towards landscapes and portraits coming from there.

BM: I was drawn out there because I liked Deborah Stratman’s work, her particular way of thinking about people navigating landscapes. But also when you get to the place, especially coming from the East Coast, you sense the manipulation that impacts those big, open spaces, especially in Southern California. The presence of design in the landscape becomes obvious and striking. Historical development is not as buried as it is in the Northeast. Land feels sectioned off into different uses, containing activities of leisure or agriculture or wilderness experience or infrastructure, so I became interested in finding different ways of interacting with space physically through filmmaking and showing these constructed boundaries.

AS: Stepping back, let’s talk about Lay Down Tracks for a bit. It feels like a road movie. And I was wondering how much of that feeling can be attributed to actual travel while making the film or is that feeling solely drawn from the fact that the film is about travelers?

BM: I began thinking about this kind of filmmaking when I was at Bard and experimented with rephotographing my grandmother’s old 8mm travel films. Danielle and I also had a surfer friend who was making Super 8 films, so our first thought was to approach the whole project through material that we would invite other people to shoot. I asked my dad to take a Super 8 camera with him to Bolivia where he was working. He asked his office assistant to shoot, and all the heads were cut off. After that we just decided to start filming ourselves and began with the carnival worker, looking for things that were more stationary. This was during the period following 9/11, and we were living in upstate New York in rural places where the national patriotism was strong. We were thinking about travel in our own lives and futures. That was the impetus for making the film, so we looked for subjects that would cause us to move around. The riverboat pilot was introduced to us by a friend who was working on tugboats, a woman who became connected to other women working on tugboats. We travelled to Cincinnati and New Orleans to meet with the riverboat pilot and then encountered the trucker, Tamara [Beard], by going to truckstops and posting flyers that we made. We walked up to her and asked if she would participate and she was like “Sure, let me go take a shower and I will meet you in twenty minutes.”

AS: The way you bring together the recorded interviews along with the ambient sound works very well. Can you say something about the process of bringing the two together?

BM: I think of the early influence of films like Greta Snider’s No-Zone and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania by Jonas Mekas. There’s an intimacy to the audio narrations and their connection to the filmmaker that drives the thought and emotion of these films. I was excited about a way of working which felt new to me coming from photography, especially since my practice had been more solitary up until that point. We wanted to use the interviews to weave things together thematically. In terms of ambient or textural sound development there were a few specific things that were obvious elements to document. There are all the carnivalesque, mechanized sounds that bleed through, bits of music, and Eben [Talmage], the surfer in the film, made some sound recordings of live music in certain places, that we use. So it was what played off the film image.

AS: The film is structured in a way that allows for the interconnectedness to come through. It’s not a series of five portraits of travelers in five acts; their stories are intercut.

BM: I think there are very distinct economic and geographic backgrounds and driving forces behind their choices and their understanding why they do their work and what their struggles are. Seeing those things in relation is part of the film. It seems so much about the movement and the sense of us, as the filmmakers, travelling through these questions, the spaces, and the intermittent and varied relationships with these people.

AS: One intuits that such relationships might have been very differently forged in a film like The Wet Season.

BM: I had a resistance to working with the formal structure we used for that film, but it also seemed like the only form that made sense given our different relationships to this community, me being very much an outsider.

AS: How did the dynamic between staging and reenactment, observing and recording, play out in this film?

BM: It’s not a film I would make today. When I saw it earlier today, I expected to have a more resistant reaction, but I was able to appreciate the layered relationships in the film. I spent very little time there. Ben [Russell] obviously had spent a great deal of time, he speaks the language and he knew the people there. There was an immediate reckoning with our different levels of interpretation and familiarity or knowledge. Overall, the women were the most interactive and responsive to the idea of what this creation of a record could be. They brought an oral storytelling tradition that unfolded through this call and response form of performance. The framing stages whatever activity or form of knowledge is being demonstrated, but with an awareness of what’s excluded from the frame, especially through the sound and the translation or lack thereof. We staged things with some of the men, like the man starting the generator, things that give a sense of the place and the different relationship to time.

AS: Were there ethical considerations while making this film?

BM: There was an immediate questioning of what is this for, of what it means to create this other dialogue, these other ways of interacting and spending time. It was made with a sense that we would be returning to share the film with the people that helped to make it. I don’t know if we were immediately planning on the non-translation/translation aspect of the dialogues. I think that became more apparent during the editing when we were revisiting this question of who the film was for and realized it didn’t make sense to translate.

AS: The Mojave desert, the site of two of your films–AM/PM and Paradise Springs–is a fascinating place that interlocks Hollywood westerns, Military history, and Land Art. What was your point of entry to this landscape?

BM: I had a teenage experience of visiting the desert and falling in love with the space, the sense of time, and the changes in light. That was formative and the desire to return was a part of my motivation to return to California. And then I watched a lot of Westerns at CalArts. Gary Mairs taught a Western class where I studied John Ford, Anthony Mann, and films like Johnny Guitar. In a class on Deleuze, Thom Andersen showed a clip from The Prowler by Joseph Losey which really struck me. There’s a scene at the end where a man falls down a slag heap in Calico, an old mining town, which I heard had later been turned into a tourist attraction staging Western settlement-themed reenactments. I decided to visit it, and that was how AM/PM came about.

AS: In both these films your access to the landscape seems mediated by the individual characters. Did making the films somehow recalibrate your understanding of these spaces?

BM: In pretty significant ways. With AM/PM, I thought a lot about a more manifest destiny and individualism. Meeting Azad [Singh], the protagonist of the film, and hearing his specific reflection on that space and its histories conveys this other sense of vigilante justice and an understanding of why these places are precarious in terms of how they developed economically. That’s the throughline. But the notion of geologic time is also important, perceiving a place through an expansive timescale and sensing what that does to the fragility of human experience or an understanding of climate anxieties and the effects of the Anthropocene.

AS: I guess all your films are portraits in some sense but Bad Mama who cares is attuned more directly to portraiture within Experimental film history.

BM: Each film develops its habits along the way but in this case I wanted to go back to something more textural, and to get away from the long interviews and digital format I used to make Paradise Springs. Kurt Kren’s 31/75 Asyl was generative. Bad Mama who cares was my first experience working with a matte box and recording a shift in time within a single image. I got excited about the idea of applying that in a portraiture sense. I tried to take what came out of interview material and turn that into a more internalized state of mind.

AS: In Castaic Lake you seem to play the lush scenery of this artificially manufactured environment against the somewhat precarious history of its coming into being, the lifeguard’s reference to death is a crucial point in the film.

BM: I had researched the development of the reservoir so there’s the physical aspect of how to show this space that’s been submerged in a huge depth of water. There was a ranch settlement buried at the bottom. I wanted to convey that sense of what was underneath. Drowning is like a parallel to it. I sought out the lifeguard to get some historical background. It turned out he wanted to talk about life and death, and saving lives. That’s his job.

AS: You have a new film, Sanctuary Station, after a period of almost eight years. What were you up to in the meantime?

BM: I decided to start a family, and the need to care for two little people shifted my ability to make things the way I wanted. So did the realities Covid brought about. I was also seeking a shift from the desert. I wanted to build interconnected relationships with more people in one place.

AS: Were you simultaneously shooting for the film in this period?

BM: Basically I would go up to the redwood forests once a year. I then got partial funding that solidified my commitment to the project. Mendocino is far from Los Angeles and hard to get to, so there were breaks. I spent a longer period there in 2019, but I still felt like the element the poet Mary Norbert Körte brings to the film was missing for a while. So when I finally met her, I felt, “Now this is a film.”

AS: How far along were you with the shooting when Mary Norbert Körte passed away?

BM: She passed away in 2022. By then I was done shooting the film.

AS: Though shot in Black and White, it’s hard not to think of the contrast between the lushness of this landscape and the Mojave desert.

BM: I was just excited to work with Hi-Con (high contrast film stock) The film requires a ton of light and the challenge was to film in a dark forest. The film captures very fine detail and then everything just falls away. To approach that landscape with that limitation was interesting to me. There is the feeling in the desert of overexposure which is actually a physical sensation, the sunlight and openness. Here I wanted the idea of hiding or disappearing into this other landscape to be primary, more so than the lush greenery of the forest, so this film brought that out.

AS: We hear Mary’s voice in the film, I guess you had several conversations with her.

BM: I did long interviews with her and they are wonderful actually. There are things that I tried to put in, but they changed the relationship of how the reading of the poetry comes across and how that works in relation to the other voices. It diluted that tension. I learned a lot from our conversations and they did impact the film. She spoke a lot about reckoning with and recommitting to her path as a poet and developing a deep commitment to the forest around her.

AS: One of the things that is particularly moving in your films is the relationship between your protagonists and their environments. Can you talk about your way of weaving things together?

BM: The thing that first drew me up to Mendocino is a story that someone had told me about a musician living in Los Angeles who then disappeared and started living in a remote location, cutting herself off from regular communication. I was searching for that and there’s an element of desire, my own gravitation towards that kind of disappearance, a feeling that I wanted to perceive in these in-between spaces and ways of moving through that landscape. In less direct terms, some of the throughlines in the film are a sense of the movement of bodies in isolation and in conjunction, and how care is expressed through physical movement. It was about trying to relate that to the camera movements. I don’t think there was a conscious decision about how I was going to go between the figure and the space. It was about discovering the space for myself through what I am learning from each person, which requires a lot of navigating what each person is comfortable with, how visible they want to be. Then the work becomes about how to show them through these environments rather than through direct portraiture or through their physical details.

AS: Can you say something about your use of music in the film?

BM: The Kendra Smith album Five Ways of Disappearing was the entry point. She made a few albums after moving to a remote piece of land in Northern California and I listened to them frequently while driving around the area. They incorporate remakes of folk songs, literary references, as well as these interludes that layer instruments like a harmonium or singing bowls with analog synth or maybe howling dogs. I drew a lot from thinking about the collision of these elements and the album structure she created with them. Sara Rose, the young tree sitter in the film, allowed me to record her playing the dulcimer and singing the Richard and Mimi Fariña song that comes at the end. I was also experimenting on my own, recording sounds in the forest and playing around with a simple analogue mixer. A lot of the sounds are very textural. I initially edited the whole film with some of Kendra Smith’s music but then I began working with the musician that also mixed the film, Matteah Baim. She drew upon the tracks I had in there as well as the sound editing overall to compose the new interludes.

AS: The characters in your films tend to live on the edges of civilization, in defiance of a consumerist lifestyle, ecological considerations are central to your work, as are themes of labor and gender. So there are these strong underlying currents. And the films are beautiful, I don’t mean it merely as a compliment, the films are evidently invested into what one would call composition– editing, framing, chromatic sensibilities, temporal scales and so on. How do you coordinate these two things, or to put it differently, is there a point when you think the political aspect is becoming too rhetorical, or the opposite, the landscape is beginning to visually overwhelm?

BM: It’s a good question. There is this constant questioning during the slow process of editing— what kind of information I want to leave in and who or what is it serving, is it just about what I feel I owe the individual I am working with, how is it speaking in relation to other works and dialogues around these topics? I am wrestling with that and then, especially in Sanctuary Station, I felt lost sometimes, going up there and filming beautiful redwood forests, constantly questioning what I was doing there, if there was anything consequential for me in creating images that are about landscape and time. Not that that can’t be a valid way of making a film and experiencing it, and it is a part, I hope of this film too, but I think trying to converse with historical presences there and different aspects of human history that altered the landscape, and the responses of the people to the changes around them, all of that is an important part of my own learning. There is a part of me that’s resistant to completely throw away the narrative aspect even if it sometimes feels limited and reductive. When parts of the narratives collide with the impacts of time and the relationships to the people, these all start interacting to shape my experience of these places and then the land speaks back with its own patterns and points of connection. This happens through editing and I begin to think about ways to restage or use performance to reincorporate that physical bodily experience as a means of sensing these very specific environments though the film.