Sundance Film Festival

from Darroch Greer

Lynn Hershman Leeson is no stranger to Sundance. A world-renowned avant-garde visual artist working in the mediums of photography, video, film, and interactive and net-based media, she is bringing her third feature to Sundance this year. She has also served on two juries and is the recipient of a 1998 Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellowship - not to mention numerous international awards, tributes, and a retrospective of her films at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

“This will be my sixth visit to Sundance,” Leeson says. “For me it‘s an absolutely tremendous, vital, energizing event. I went there with my first film Conceiving Ada, after which I was invited to go to their screenwriter‘s lab, which was just an incredible experience. I think it was about four days of meeting with very accomplished people who gave you tips, formats, and ideas about how to really write a substantial script, because I had never been to film school. I came out of visual arts, and so this medium was new to me.

“So, that was a tremendous life-shaping experience, and I‘m very grateful and always will be to the Sundance organization for providing me with that. The experience itself leads to meeting all sorts of people and looking at opportunities for the future, for dialogues, friendships, and information. So, it‘s just a great thing for America - for the world, actually.”

Leeson‘s first feature, shot on 35mm in 1998, was Conceiving Ada. She followed up with Teknolust in 2002, shot on 24P video and converted to 35mm. This year she brings Strange Culture to Park City for its debut. Strange Culture is a documentary, and its message was so urgent it was shot on mini-DV, with a Panasonic DVX 100A, for speed and immediacy. The film features Tilda Swinton, who acted in Leeson‘s other two films, along with Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan, Josh Kornbluth, and artist Steve Kurtz, who is the subject of the film.

“I heard about a friend of mine,” Leeson recalls, referring to Kurtz, “whose wife had stopped breathing and he called 911 and the medic came into his house and looked at his art that was there, and it was scheduled to be on exhibition at Mass MOCA, and they called the police, and the police came in and called the FBI who called Homeland Security because he had some petrie dishes in his house, and they became suspicious of that particular installation. And so he was detained, and much of the articles in his house were confiscated, including his wife‘s body, in fact. The charges were later changed to mail and wire fraud because he had some fairly innocuous materials in petrie dishes that he had ordered over the internet as he had for a number of years with his collaborator at the University of Pittsburgh. So, the idea of this film was to let people know about this person and this case - who has the possibility of going to jail for twenty years - and some of the ramifications of the Patriot Act and also what it is doing to individual freedom and freedom of expression particularly and the fear that it has engendered in artists and academics.”

To tell the story, Leeson assembled several different perspectives and formats, including reenactments, animation, documentary footage, and straight-ahead interviews. “I have different perspectives in that I have reenactments, then I have interpretations directly by the artists. I have interviews of the people who were directly involved, including Steve Kurtz, and I have Steve Kurtz commenting on the making of the film and the actors in it. I have a series of comic strips made by somebody in Canada, and a lot of documentary footage that was shot by other people all over the world who went to Buffalo to various press conferences and got material that they may use in the future in another film once this trial has happened. One of the things that is so remarkable about this film is when people found out I was doing it, they would send material. I have material from Germany, from England, from New Jersey, from Canada, from Seattle, from Michigan, from all over the world because people wanted to have this story told.”

The film then had to be vetted by lawyers, which gave new meaning to ‘rights clearance.‘ Kurtz has still not gone to trial, and the attorneys were in damage control mode, not wanting to see anything portrayed that might be inaccurate or misconstrued. “There were a lot of things, because this case has not gone to trial yet, that couldn‘t be talked about. In those cases I used actors to play out particular scenes. When I was shooting it, I found that the actors, who were so intelligent and passionate about their ideas, were really very strong in articulating their ideas. I used a lot of what would normally be considered out-takes as part of the premise of the film - which also deals with displaced identity and how media creates identity and often identities that are actors.”

Strange Culture was shot by veteran cinematographer Hiro Narita, who also shot Leeson‘s other two films. She is very happy with the results. “Initially, I thought I was going to do something for DVD or internet distribution. I didn‘t think it would be a feature film. I just wanted to get the story out there and known, and I enlisted a number of people to help me, and I‘m grateful for all the people that jumped on to this project. It turned out to be better than anybody anticipated. When you make a documentary, you don‘t have all the elements in front of you. It‘s hard. Everybody that joined into this project brought a tremendous amount of information and resources so it kind of grew into something beyond what it was originally anticipated as.”

As such, Strange Culture is the perfect kind of independent film for Sundance, and Leeson has the DIY mindset that is the heritage of American Independent Film. “Basically, you can do these projects in your kitchen. I remember around 1956 talking to Dennis Hopper, and he said, ‘The films of the future will be able to be done on your living room table.‘ Everybody thought he was crazy and didn‘t understand, at that time, how visionary he was. If you have the passion and the interest in an idea that you feel is an important one to bring forward, it is possible under any circumstances.”

Listen in on Hershman Leeson and Greer’s interview.