Sounding Queer Silence is a work in progress that will consist of four videos, each devoted to a queer filmmaker from the 1920s/30s. Dorothy Arzner, Esther Eng, Leontine Sagan and Tazuko Sakane all worked during the transition from silent film to “talkies.” Across the series I attend to gaps in the archives of these filmmakers, listening to what could not be said at the time and working with the silences in queer film history, as well as working with ways the technological advances in sound and silence changed their work. In the absence of comprehensive biographical archives, I study their camera movements and develop my own movement practice in response, finding an intimacy in moving my camera as they moved theirs. I am exploring ways to dance with queer kin, across time and space, in the silences and gaps of queer archives.
The first of four videos focuses on Dorothy Arzner, with excerpts from that video here. Arzner directed Paramount’s first “talkie” starring Clara Bow, who struggled to make herself heard with the new stationary mics. Arzner asked a prop person to attach a mic to a fishing pole, and invented the first boom pole which allowed Bow to move and be heard, a first in Hollywood. This work revolves around the writing of Joan Lubin, a queer scholar whose text functions as the script, and whose presence in the film echos Arzner’s habit of having her writers on set so she could make changes, often feminist interventions, without needing studio approval.
This work in progress was screened at Union Docs in 2023 and exhibited in 2021 in an exhibition about queer kinship alongside EJ Hill, Ohan Breiding, Joshua Ross and dean erdmann.
Sounding Queer Silence is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
Director - Abigail Raphael Collins
Cinematographer - Vaughn Greve
Writer - Joan Lubin
Actors - Alice Kremelberg, Ames Bessada
Sound Recording - Casey Minatrea
Producer - Emiko Wilks
Editing / Sound Design - Abigail Raphael Collins
Sound Mix - Bruce Chianese