For the longest time, my biggest fear has been forgetting. I started writing a diary at a very young age because I wanted to remember things the way girls in TV shows did - slumped over their desks, dim lamplight spotlighting the page, manic handwriting scratching out the events of the day. I filled endless notebooks with my adventures and, as my feelings became more complex, I wrote about my constant, exhausting feelings. I was fairly convinced I was writing for an audience of the future, who would stumble across my little words and know what it was like to be me.
I've really struggled to think of myself as an artist. Writing poetry or film criticism is not what takes up the bulk of my days and, as a result, does not make up the sum of my life. Shifting into 'art production mode' is not something that comes easy to me simply because most of my day is taken up by trying to stay alive. Much of why I stopped writing a diary and, to a lesser extent, stopped using this blog as a way to vent about my life (yes, that's what this used to be) is because I found my life, my thought patterns, the events going on around me, tedious to write about and nothing about writing them down actually made me feel better about the impact I was having on the world.
Something that has been very grounding for me has been finding female directors and deep diving into their filmographies. Their film output is usually small, confined to shorts and primed for 'rediscovery' long after they've died. Never have I been more depressed discovering a plethora of talented women, knowing how exceptional they were and that they never had any serious money put behind their skills.
 |
| Suzan Pitt at work, Part of the Harvard Film Archive |
Like most people who have encountered her, the first film I watched from Suzan Pitt was Asparagus (1979). It's by far her most well-known movie, having previously been billed as a double feature with Eraserhead (1977) and finding a second life amongst the Criterion Channel/Mubi stalkers, looking to also uncover well-made gems created by weird little freaks from history.
Asparagus is a materialisation of the artistic process through an extremely dynamic and simulataneously mundane depiction of a woman creating her art and then presenting it to an audience. In between fantasy and reality nestles Pitt's depiction of creativity, sexuality and personal image, with the main character finding as much fulfilment from organising her dollhouse as when she attends the theatre to present her art showcase.
Her ideas surpass the physical realm of her home so her external world transforms to match whatever desire she has. The artistic process is therefore shown to be inherently self-reflective, with Pitt refusing to separate out identity, process and the world, merging them in such a way that the symbolic is literal. Emotionality is not relegated to simply heightening the piece - it's the end result. The world we are presented with is the world, and the process of making art permeates every aspect of it. Whilst this is presented as a liberating idea for the subject of the film, it also becomes necessary for this character to shield herself from the outside world, to put on a display for an audience but to not be the display. The woman is not simply the art itself, she is the artist.
 |
| Asparagus (1979) |
There's a particular tactility to animation that Pitt seemed to embrace, choosing not to hide the process and artifice, but relish that her characters, her world was never going to fully represent reality, but an emotive version of it. With animated work, there is an understanding that anything on screen can be imbued with movement and, as a result, the static world can be injected with life.
In Crocus (1971), the body is rendered as a wholly sensual entity that becomes interrupted by domestic duties, and not the other way around. Where women are often defined by their bodies as in service to motherhood and maintaining the home, the body exists here for internal pleasures serviced by an outer shell. The world moulds to this woman's inner fantasies.
This is not wholly unproblematic though as these fantasies are still confined within the heterosexual marriage. The man and the woman are both equally enamored, amused and titilated with the human body, poised and ready for love-making. But it's only the woman who leaves to check on their child. Pitt did not naively pose an egalitarian sexual revolution as women were still expected to adhere to their set roles. This does not hinder pleasure but it does interrupt it, significant in that an interruption is rarely treated as gravely as this.
The body is often not considered as a static object, alienated from the world, but instead as something to be incorporated into the it. Pitt often poked fun at the oddness of bodies and by extension, the oddness of desire. A man getting a massive erection in Crocus is treated as very funny. A mouth fellating asparagus is lingered upon, Pitt fully aware that the innuendo was obvious. Animation becomes something to make the world malleable enough to be interpreted and then laughed at. The literalising of the image is not a flaw. It's a cheeky way to make sure the audience doesn't mistake the work for something moralistic or untouched by human hands and spirit.
The fact that the people in her movies look like dolls is not a
drawback. The absurdity and structured nonsense of gender roles and
human bodies becomes what is compelling about these characters. Pitt was
less concerned with the humanity of them, but rather the parabolic
potential of them, what they could come to represent when a filmmaker is
not limited to human flesh. If there were any kind of filmmaker who
could wholly work on a symbolic level and no other one, it's an
animator.
 |
| Crocus (1971) |
Suzan Pitt was a filmmaker deeply invested in storytelling as a way of conveying an emotional state, and it's with this approach that she was able to produce some immensely humanistic work. For me, Joy Street (1995) is most indicative of this in its attempts to represent the gravity of suicidality without falling into idealising this state of mind. Instead, it illustrates the limitations of whimsy, especially drawing upon childish modes of 'fixing' an emotional problem by simply doing a fun dance or listening to music, singing away your problems, common to see in children's media, an almost certainly conscious parody of a classic Disney movie.
At the same time, it refuses to fall into despair. In fact, it fervently argues that humanity is not free from its animal roots and that the compulsion towards death is a mammalian response to a world that has failed to provide for those who need it most. Where the floppy animation fails to revive a suicidal woman from her depression and literal death, her body being placed amongst the discarded refuse of the world contextualises her death not as an individual tragedy, but rather a result of a similar neglect governments pay to the environment. Her body is transported to be amongst dead animals and rubbish, reminiscent of scaremonger adverts about the impact of climate change and thus, Pitt made it clear this problem is not only systemic but an entirely natural response to an increasingly isolated world.
 |
| Joy Street (1995) |
More and more, though it is very unromantic, I've been thinking about art as a job. Not so much literally as I've made very little money off the art I have put out into the world, but rather as labour. Stuff that is done, that has hours and energy poured into it so that it's the best it could ever be. Pitt described herself in the 2006 documentary Persistence of Vision as a worker rather than an artist and this couldn't be considered more true than of someone who works in animation. To describe animating as painstaking feels like an adjective that barely scratches the surface of what work goes into it.
To a certain extent, time is all I have. Most people reading a blog post or poem or film review are not going to know what energy was put into it. When I would write my diaries as a child, it was because I wanted everything out of my head so I could remember every moment as it happened. I write now because I want to convey a moment in history at its most polished, with the labour in hours known only to me.