You Are My Face

RESEARCH STATEMENT 

Summary

You Are My Face is an experimental documentary in which film professors choose an important or memorable scene from film history and re-perform the dialogue. Intercut with these performances is a separate thread documenting my lessons with a music teacher who is teaching me to play and sing the Wilco song, “You Are My Face” (Tweedy and Nels, 2007). Finally, a third layer provides an intersubjective dialogue between myself and a friend and colleague who also balances his role as a film professor with his life as a guitarist and musician. The film centres around my own auto-ethnographic investigation of academic identity and the emotions that motivate me to research, teach and create. These emotions include a distinct mix of pleasure and anxiety that characterises the psychic life of the academic profession. It investigates both teaching and research in the field of film studies while toying with the techniques of performance inherent to the academic profession: What motivates us to watch, analyse and teach about certain films? What role do fantasy, fandom and performance play in our scholarly pursuits? What are the many meanings of “practise” in our fields?  

Background

In the fall of 2021, following a year of remote teaching, I began my first term teaching on campus at Portland State University. I needed to learn a new camera model for a documentary production course I was scheduled to teach. In one of my film studies courses, I had recently taught a pair of (to me) beloved films involving scenes of dialogue replacement – Pedro Almodovar’s Law of Desire (1987) and Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000). In doing so, a simple idea came to light: I could practise my camera work on this model by asking a colleague to join me in a studio. I would ask them to re-perform the dialogue from a scene of their choice while I filmed, thus allowing me to practise a wide range of shot types - from full shots to extreme close-ups - in preparation for my teaching demonstrations. During my review afterwards I became fascinated with watching my colleague’s face moving between contemplation of their chosen scene – the winter romance scene between Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama, All That Heaven Allows. I could see them moving from study and analysis of the scene and their character toward embodiment and presence within. I also noticed an interesting emotional character in these images – the pleasures of film spectatorship mixed with those of analysis and teaching. I found myself thinking seriously about the fantasies that we project upon those texts that we watch and rewatch, study and share with friends, colleagues and students. 

At the same time, I was studying guitar with a local musician and preparing to learn one of my favourite guitar solos – a brief passage of the band Wilco’s track, “You Are My Face” (Tweedy and Nels, 2007). It occurred to me that I could film this process so as to further insert my own act of study, re-performance and fantasy alongside that of my colleagues. Doing so provided me with the opportunity to also bridge my role as a student with my role as a teacher, and connect both with my desire to perform, to be gazed upon and attended to. I also liked that I could use the opportunity to study and experiment with the foundational relationships between music and image – or sound making and filmmaking — that had originally spurred me to study music for the first time since childhood. And of course, the title of this song felt too on the nose to pass up: I was studying my colleague’s face as they studied a cinematic text alongside studying a song titled “You Are My Face” with lyrics including “when everybody is feeling all alone, can’t tell you who I am” (Tweedy and Nels, 2007), raising irresistible themes of performance and identity.

Another reason that this premise intrigued me was the fact that there were multiple motivations and explanations for its meaning. Having previously produced a research-driven documentary essay in dialogue with my dissertation research, I have struggled with issues of over-explanation and didacticism in my filmmaking in ways that I believe detract from the capacity of moving image media to communicate through feeling and experience. When producing scholarly writing for publication we are encouraged by editors and reviewers to be as direct and efficient as possible in conveying complex ideas. We are asked to signpost our ideas throughout the length of the text and to make clear the references, contributions and significance. Yet, my favourite films to teach and study maintain a different character, one of open-endedness, opacity and ineffability. You Are My Face works to combine these communicative impulses making a certain set of ideas and questions transparent while at the same time maintaining a sense of experiential feeling and strangeness through the collaging of sound, image and idea.  

Abstract

This presentation combines background and theoretical context with excerpts of my short film You Are My Face (2015, 15 min, HD Video), an experimental documentary in which film professors choose an important or memorable scene from film history and re-perform the dialogue. Intercut with these performances is a separate thread, documenting my lessons with a music teacher who is teaching me to play and sing the Wilco song, "You Are My Face”. Finally, a third layer provides an intersubjective dialogue between myself and a friend and colleague who also balances his role as a film professor with his life as a guitarist and musician. The film centres around my own auto-ethnographic investigation of academic identity and the emotions that motivate me to research, teach and create. These emotions include a distinct mix of pleasure and anxiety that characterises the psychic life of academia. It investigates both teaching and research in the field of film studies while toying with the techniques of performance inherent to the academic profession. What motivates us to watch, analyse and teach about certain films? What role do fantasy, fandom and performance play in our scholarly pursuits? What are the many meanings of "practice" in our fields?  Having previously produced a research-driven documentary essay in dialogue with my dissertation research, I have struggled with issues of over-explanation and didacticism in my filmmaking in ways that I believe detract from the capacity of moving image media to communicate through feeling and experience. You Are My Face works to combine these communicative impulses, making a certain set of ideas and questions transparent while, at the same time, maintaining a sense of experiential feeling and strangeness through the collaging of sound, image and idea.  

PEER REVIEW 1 

Referring first to the Artist’s Statement, one of the most engaging ideas discussed in this submission was the author’s account of “issues of over-explanation and didacticism in my filmmaking in ways that I believe detract from the capacity of moving image media to communicate through feeling and experience”. This resonated with me on both a popular-culture and academic level, as I find the most interesting and engaging ideas often sit outside what is clearly expressible through didactic discourse and storytelling. 

Discussing the creative work from this perspective, the experimental documentary You Are My Face interestingly communicates through “feeling and experience”. The opening moments provide some provocative questions that speak strongly to the viewer, and the disconnection between sound and image establish the need for the audience to adopt an interpretive mindset in order to piece things together. This sets the tone for the remainder of the film, as additional narrative layers are introduced, and the viewer’s interpretive mind is constantly required. 

The prompting of this interpretive mindset is particularly interesting from an auto-ethnographic standpoint. Just as interpretation informs the making of an ethnographic text, interpretation can also be involved in the reading of an ethnographic text. As such, the fragmented structure of the film – through the disconnected opening sequence and also, in later stages, through lingering shots on subject’s faces while subsequent interviews play on through sound creating impressions of commonality to be found and not explained – form an interesting and effective approach to ethnographic filmmaking. 

There are certainly moments in the film where ideas expressed in the research statement are conveyed through feeling and experience. The scenes that include Kristin, Jungmin and Nancy re-enacting and discussing their recreations in particular convey an entangled sense of spectatorship, fandom and, of course, performance. 

My main critique of the submission is a difficult one to find balance with. While I appreciate and support the collage-based approach to the film, I did wonder if there were ways to more clearly express the rather specific ideas around teaching explored in the Artist’s Statement. There are powerful moments in the film, such as Jungmin’s account of her relationship informing performance at around 8:45, which transitions effectively to Matt’s account of a ‘crisis’, where the value of his craft and identity itself are in question. I think these moments effectively convey in an impressionistic or, at least, interpretable way, interesting ideas about performance and craft and their value, in terms of both film and music. With that said, however, I did not find that final link to teaching and research to be expressed consistently throughout the film, at least as I experienced and interpreted the work. 

The research statement does an excellent job of contextualising the creative work and outlining the practical and conceptual process of making it. As mentioned above, I resonate particularly strongly with the critique of over-explained or didactic creative work and understand the author’s intent and compulsion to work less didactically through “experiential feeling and strangeness”. Although the statement speaks very well to the idea behind the work and some films that the author admires on a broader level, I would have liked to know more about this research project’s practical and theoretical influences. What key theorists or works grounded the auto-ethnographic investigation that underpinned the film? And have any core ideas been engaged or applied to the film to better understand or articulate the notions of performance, teaching, fandom, and mimicry discussed throughout the statement?

PEER REVIEW 2 

Playing, and engaging with different documentary modes is one of my favourite things to do. Therefore, I approached this experimental documentary and its accompanying research statement with a great deal of interest. This emotion became even more pointed when I realised one of the films that Ben works with is All That Heaven Allows (Sirk 1955), one of my favourite films. Melodrama, the genre to which it belongs, is also one of my favourite cinematic genres.

The questions put forward in both the research statement and film are intriguing; especially those pertaining to the intermingling of pedagogy and performance. I was immediately struck by the logo on Ben's t-shirt; "what's in it for me". I assume every wardrobe choice is a statement or a challenge. This statement seemed to echo through the film with its continuing questions about why we teach or research or engage passionately with films as viewers. “Is academia a trauma response?”,  as one character suggests. How does performance during pedagogy relate to the academics' performance of their cinematic roles within Ben's film? Is being possessed by a question really a form of anxiety, as one of the film's subjects contends? 

I very much enjoyed watching the filmmaker grapple cinematically with these questions. However, one issue I had is why the performers/academics chose the films they did. One of them, Jungmin Kwon, explains why her film choice One Fine Spring Day (Hur 2001) has meaning for her. But the other two performers do not discuss why they chose All That Heaven Allows (Sirk 1955) and Adaptation (Jonez 2022), respectively. I think I would have found this sort of discussion really illuminating, especially in a film so taken up with notions of performance.

One of the most intriguing threads running through this for me is the connection between music and melodrama. Melodrama derives from the Greek word "melos" meaning music, or tune. Douglas Sirk is a key director of melodrama, and I would argue that Pedro Almodovar often works in this genre as well. It is stated in Ben's film that "music is the thing that exceeds language". Arguably, melodrama is a form that works best when emotion also exceeds language and is expressed visually, in a vivid and oversaturated manner. Sirk is a master of this. Therefore, I can see the threads running through Ben's film that braid together music, performance and academia. At times I would have liked to have seen these teased out a bit more, with perhaps the performers/academics talking about their acting choices and connecting them to their own pedagogic choices as well as the meaning the films had for them. I also appreciate Ben's desire not to be didactic, but to work with "open-endedness, opacity, and ineffability". I realise I am probably asking for a longer film, one that can tease out these complex questions even more.

In ending, I love the lyric "happenstance has changed my life". I think that somehow ineffably touches on the themes of the film and opens up further questions about why we do what we do in academia and life.

RESPONSE TO PEER REVIEWS

I want to begin by thanking both reviewers for their thoughtful and generative engagement with my film and research statement. I am grateful for their detailed attention to the work and their supportive comments regarding my film’s goals: to communicate less through explanation and more through feeling, to explore various intersections such as performance and pedagogy and to interweave reflections on music, cinema, and academia.

I experienced these reviews as a moment of great relief, as they confirmed that my project and its goals are basically intelligible. It was interesting to have this experience for this particular film, as the project explores ways that academic workers seek various audiences and invest desires into those audiences’ responses: what are we looking for in our students’ faces when we lead a discussion from the front of a classroom? What does it mean for a conference presentation to go well? Perhaps the registration or validation that we seek in these performances is fundamentally similar to the response that a musician craves when they record a practice session on their cell phone and post it to Instagram. Perhaps hearing a student accurately summarise your lecture is similar to the experience of reading a thorough and thoughtful peer review!

Most of the reviewers’ constructive criticism focused on the question of what might be missing in my film, and how these absences link to the film’s clarity of meaning. Are the ideas and goals that I outlined in my research statement fully realized? Are the arguments made fully intelligible to viewers? Both reviewers seem to agree that the film could go further in this regard and I do not dispute their assessment. These comments point toward ways that a longer version of the film might evolve and offer important lessons for future projects that similarly seek to create "impressions of commonality to be found and not explained,” as Reviewer 1 observes about my film’s style. These comments also point toward the core of my intellectual and artistic struggle in this project: why put these particular pieces together in the first place? What does weaving this set of threads into a whole ultimately reveal?

I want to address this big picture question. Reviewer 1 observes that they “did not find the final link between research and teaching to be expressed consistently throughout the film.” Reviewer 2 concurs that they wished the threads of research, teaching and performance were “teased out a bit more.” I greatly appreciate the suggestion from Reviewer 2 that one solution would be to have the performers, my colleagues in Portland State University’s School of Film, reflect on the relationship between their acting choices and their choices at the front of the classroom. I wish I had thought of this during filming! In truth, the work has been structured less as an explicit investigation of such questions and more as an exploratory and process-based experiment based on a hunch: the sort of mimicry that I perform while learning a favourite song in guitar lessons has something fundamental in common with the performances required of me as a professor. But what? I thought about this extensively. The best answer I could come up with is that I connected these dots because they all express the anxieties that I experience in relation to artistic and academic self-image. These anxieties stem from many sources, including the crises of devaluation in the humanities and the prevalence of impostor syndrome among early career academics like myself: academia is an anxiety producing machine (Loveday 2018, Hall and Bowles 2016). How should one perform mastery while still learning? How much practice will it take to match the achievements of my peers, mentors and idols? How can a career so filled with judgment and self-doubt be made to feel joyful? I have worked hard to communicate these questions and connections throughout the film, but it is an important filmmaking lesson that many careful viewers of this piece have desired more clarity. This does not mean making the film more didactic, as is my fear, but enhancing my ability to communicate cinematically.

I also want to address Reviewer 2’s helpful comment that they would like to hear my colleagues explain why they chose to perform the films that they did. This footage generally exists and should make its way back if a longer version of the film emerges. Professor Jungmin Kwon mentions that One Fine Spring Day (Hur 2001) connected with her based on her own experience of romantic rejection when she first saw this film. Professor Nancy Breaux explained that she chose Adaptation (Jonez 2002) because she loves the ridiculousness of Meryl Streep’s performance, but also because its nonlinear story structure is very useful when she teaches narrative design to film students. And Professor Kristin Hole explained, to my surprise, that she did not choose All That Heaven Allows (Sirk 1955) because she was attracted to cosplaying as Jane Wyman. Instead, she chose this film because of its re-imaginings by subsequent filmmakers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002). Taking into account Rock Hudson’s status as a gay icon, these three films constitute a significant queer cinema genealogy that has been relevant to her teaching.

Finally, Reviewer 1 commented that they were curious to better understand some of the influences and references that shaped my approach to this project and I would like to share just a few. I am always working in dialogue with a wide range of essay films, which Nora Alter defines through “their indeterminacy, hybridity, openness, playfulness” and by the way in which these films perform their “own criticism recursively” (4-6). Doing so, she notes, often includes “the inscription of a blatant, soul-searching authorial presence” (10). Beyond the self-reflexive essay form, there are two experimental documentary films about re-performance that influenced You Are My Face early on. The first is Kevin Jerome Everson’s Emergency Needs (2007), in which he presents a split screen between Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes delivering a press conference in 1968, about a standoff between police and Black militants and a word-for-word recreation of his remarks by an actress 30 years later. While the political resonance of this re-performance is quite different than You Are My Face, I share Everson’s commitment to investigating embodied performance through mimicry. The second film is Deborah Stratman’s Hacked Circuit (2014), in which she hires a foley artist to recreate the sound effects for the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). There is a balance of playfulness and serious argument in Hacked Circuit that I have always admired. I also consider Hacked Circuit a love letter to film pedagogy, since the sound designer Walter Murch and his textbook “In the Blink of an Eye” (2001) are a fixture in many film studies and production classrooms.

While my previous video work has been research-driven and undertaken in dialogue with scholarly writing, You Are My Face marks my first attempt to make a film that explicitly investigates the affordances of academic filmmaking. I have, at times, told myself that it is a “practice film,” about the practice of filmmaking in a university context. It is therefore deeply rewarding to publish this work with Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy Journal following a peer review process that offered an insightful audience for my experiment. We should support one another in every attempt to build scholarly arguments, ideas and insights through the moving image!

REFERENCES 

Alter, Nora. 2018. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Almodovar, Pedro. 1987. Law of Desire. Spain: El Deseo. Film. 

Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. 1974. The Conversation. United States: Paramount Pictures. Film.

Everson, Kevin Jerome, dir. 2007. Emergency Needs. United States: Picture Palace Pictures. Short Film. 

Fassbinder, Rainer, dir. 1974. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Munich: Tango Film. Film. 

Hall, Richard, and Kate Bowles. 2016. “Re-Engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the Exploitation of Anxiety.” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28: 30-47.

Haneke, Michael. 2000. Code Unknown. France: Arte France Cinéma. Film

Haynes, Todd, dir. 2002. Far From Heaven. United States: Focus Features. Film. 

Hur, Jin-ho, dir. 2001. One Fine Spring Day. South Korea: Applause Pictures. Film. 

Jonez, Spike, dir. 2002. Adaptation. United States: Columbia Pictures. Film. 

Tweedy, Jeff and Nels Cline. 2007. "You Are My Face." Performed by Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen, Nels Cline, Pat Sansone, and Jim O’Rourke. Recorded January 2007. Track 2 on Sky Blue Sky. Nonesuch Records, compact disc. 

Loveday, Vik. 2018. “The Neurotic Academic: Anxiety, Casualisation, and Governance in the Neoliberalising University.” Journal of Cultural Economy 11, no.2: 154–66.

Murch, Walter. 2001. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. 2nd ed. West Hollywood: Silman-James Press.

Sirk, Douglas, dir. 1955. All That Heaven Allows. United States: Universal International Pictures. Film. 

Stratman, Deborah, dir. 2014. Hacked Circuit. US. Short Film.