Helen and the Bear Fourth era Californian Paul McCloskey — aka “Pete” and “Bear” — is a former US Congressman who represented San Mateo County from 1967 (when he trounced Shirley Temple within the Republican major) to 1983; a adorned Korean War vet, who torpedoed Pat Robertson’s ’88 marketing campaign by revealing his lies about having served in fight; and an in the end unsuccessful challenger to President Nixon in ’72, when the maverick Stanford Law grad went on Firing Line to make the case for his anti-Vietnam War platform to an voters probably extra receptive than this system’s extremely condescending, pro-Cambodia-bombing host. That specific clip from the McCloskey political archive is without doubt one of the only a few that the award-winning director-cinematographer Alix Blair (Farmer/Veteran) makes use of in her riveting Helen and the Bear, a superbly crafted portrait of the now-nonagenarian’s almost 40-year marriage starring — and solely from the POV of — his much more fascinating, 26-years-younger spouse (aka the director’s Aunt Helen).
EP’d by one other cinematographer-director, Kirsten Johnson, this completely paced vérité endeavor takes us on a journey again in time (via a trove of Helen’s private pictures and journal entries) and to the current day, the place the stressed protagonist retains a grueling schedule that will exhaust your common teen. Caring for each a declining Bear and their sprawling farm, which features a digital Noah’s Ark of critters, from cats and canines to birds, horses, pigs and extra, Helen appears perpetually in movement, even when merely “relaxing” at a bar having smokes and beers along with her fellow queer mates. And but this unapologetic iconoclast can be in a eternally fluctuating state of emotion as she faces a future with out her longtime love and greatest good friend — and the very actual likelihood that the elusive freedom that’s at all times been her coronary heart’s need would possibly lastly be her final act.
Just previous to the movie’s April twenty eighth debut within the World Showcase part at Hot Docs Filmmaker reached out to the award-winning nonfiction storyteller (and Gotham Doc Feature Lab recipient) to study all about capturing Helen, the Bear, and the beautiful complexities of a relationship based mostly on a love of the land.
Filmmaker: I used to be fairly taken with each the cinematography and sound design, that are equally compelling. So as a longtime DP (and co-founder of the Collective of Documentary Women Cinematographers) who additionally works in audio, how do you consider these two points in relation to 1 one other? Does the picture come first for you?
Blair: Thank you for this pretty query. I definitely consider sound and picture as deeply interconnected. I’m grateful to my a few years of working in audio manufacturing because it skilled me to be a storyteller who didn’t rely solely on my eyes.
In audio after all you can’t depend upon visible descriptions alone to inform your story, it’s a must to have a strategy to see with sound. It feels apparent maybe that the picture is likely to be extra necessary within the hierarchy of sensory data in a movie, however this isn’t true. While I’ve to after all put my coronary heart and a focus into the little rectangular display screen of my digicam as a result of that’s what I owe my viewers, I’m at all times deeply conscious of what my ears are listening to; and lots of occasions it’s my ears that inform me the place to level my digicam.
You reference the sound design, and I used to be blessed to work with the unimaginable editor Katrina Taylor, who, as she meets a mission for the primary time, creates a playlist for every of the characters. It was one of many issues that made me acknowledge that she was the best editor for this collaboration. She is insanely proficient at discovering the best track for the second. And with that basis we partnered with Troy Herion and J.R. Narrows, who collaboratively constructed our rating and our sound design into the gorgeous sonic world you get to expertise on this movie.
Filmmaker: When did your EP Kirsten Johnson turn out to be concerned within the mission? Did she present particular artistic steering?
Blair: If you had advised me initially of this mission that I’d be working with Kirsten Johnson I’d not have believed you. It’s such a cliche assertion, however I nonetheless can’t imagine that I get to work along with her; she’s one in every of my absolute heroes of documentary movie – as a director and as a cinematographer. I believe I’ve watched each workshop she’s ever put on-line, learn each interview, listened to each podcast. She is without doubt one of the most artistic filmmakers on the market and, as I’ve come to study, one of the crucial beneficiant human beings on the planet.
I approached Kirsten about being a artistic advisor on the mission after my co-producer Elise McCave related us. Kirsten did present particular artistic steering and troubled the story with me over many months. She challenged me in all the perfect – and hardest – methods. She requested the questions that I wasn’t able to face and held my work with such real and joyful curiosity: “Try this! What if you told it this way? What if you moved this part to the beginning?” Working with Kirsten made me fall in love with my very own work in a approach I didn’t anticipate. She is that type of a trainer. (Still I used to be so nervous to ask her to be an EP. I believe I wrote and rewrote that e mail so many occasions. And she mentioned sure!)
Filmmaker: In your director’s assertion you write, “I have witnessed how memory lives within us as ghosts of all our former selves and to achieve this emotional truth I have worked with multiple temporalities of footage and with Helen’s diaries kept over decades.” At what level did you make this artistic alternative, and the way did it have an effect on the modifying course of?
Blair: When Helen supplied to share her diaries with me I knew instantly that they’d be a part of the movie. No matter what they’d have a spot. I simply wasn’t certain in what type. Katrina and I went via many iterations of this, even earlier than working with our animator Emily Ann Hoffman.
Helen’s diaries are so very important to the story as a result of they seize her dwelling emotion on the time of writing. In interviewing Helen and Pete within the current in regards to the previous, the depth of their relationship’s wrestle isn’t obvious in the way in which that’s so primal within the diaries. Through her phrases you are feeling her anguish, her confusion, her doubt. It’s simply not attainable to entry that 20, 30, 40 years later in an interview; and so the diaries act as a time portal, as a ghost, to attach with Helen’s previous self.
Filmmaker: Your first function Farmer/Veteran follows an Iraq War vet who finds therapeutic in farming, as does Helen. So what attracts you to those twin topics of trauma and agricultural life as filmmaking materials? How do they join?
Blair: There was a second in making Helen and the Bear once I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m making the same movie! What am I doing?!” Which after all isn’t true, as they’re very completely different movies for a lot of causes. But as you thoughtfully level out in your query, my curiosity about how we course of trauma and the way we discover therapeutic is current in each of them. There is loads of analysis that factors to how human beings discover therapeutic in nature, that connection to the pure world — on this case the agricultural world — which presents a way of belonging and significant relationship.
In the years I labored on farms I felt it completely — the care-taking of rising issues, the accountability to different creatures, the joyful feeling of getting grown one thing that you’re now cooking to eat and share with mates. But there may be hazard in romanticizing the connection between nature and trauma, with farming particularly, and this comes via in each movies. Both the veteran and Helen really feel the great burden of care-taking animals and land with out the assets accessible to them to achieve success. I need to problem the idea that rural life is robotically idyllic. That mentioned, I profoundly imagine that constructing kinship with the pure world is a path in direction of therapeutic.
I’d additionally add {that a} third theme that runs via each movies is how we love and the way love is messy and sophisticated.
Filmmaker: Your bio mentions that you simply’re additionally a “researcher and speaker on vicarious trauma in documentary filmmaking.” What precisely does that entail? What has your analysis uncovered?
Blair: I’ll preface this by saying I’m not a therapist nor a social employee. But my very own lived expertise and analysis has knowledgeable my opinion that each one documentary filmmakers ought to obtain or search out some type of coaching in vicarious trauma in order that they will anticipate it, and know the indicators when it seems in their very own our bodies and lives.
Vicarious trauma, additionally referred to as secondary trauma, is when you find yourself emotionally and bodily impacted by the traumatic experiences of the individuals or locations you’re uncovered to — on this case by documenting their lives. The making of Farmer/Veteran is what led me to be interested by this phenomenon. I didn’t go to highschool for filmmaking and, like many impartial documentary filmmakers, didn’t have readability in regards to the emotional toll that documentary filmmaking can tackle the maker. You are bearing witness to different individuals’s lives. You are seeing them generally at their worst — of their unhappiness, of their rage — and you’re asking them questions that set off trauma and painful reminiscence. I believe the very ability that makes you a superb documentary filmmaker, that honest empathy, can be the very factor that makes you so susceptible to vicarious trauma since you really feel it. Every time I give a lecture on vicarious trauma to documentary filmmakers there are such a lot of reactions of, “Oh my god, that’s my experience!” from the viewers. I’ve discovered to make my Q&A time longer and longer, to create space for individuals processing their vicarious trauma in actual time. “I’ve stopped sleeping” and “I feel guilty that I can leave and my subjects cannot” and “I’m having nightmares based on stories from my interviews” — these sentiments are all components of vicarious trauma, and there are sensible methods to interrupt the injury it will probably do. I believe an important factor is to have the ability to acknowledge it when it’s taking place,quite than assume it’s a traditional a part of documentary work or that one thing is improper with you.
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