Hilary Goldberg brings her new film recLAmation to the National Queer Arts Center

Whether you love it or hate it, you're got to admit that L.A. is one of the most interesting places on earth. It's got wealth, poverty, desert, ocean and mountain. It's got racial divide, a vibrant art scene, and of course, Disneyland and Hollywood. What other city can claim all that? 

Writer and filmmaker Hilary Goldberg, has a new project. recLAmation, is a Super 8 experimental documentary/narrative film in which queer superheroes navigate a future beyond capitalism. recLAmation will screen June 15th, 8pm at The Garage as part of the National Queer Arts Festival 2010. My friend Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore suggested Hilary contact me for an interview. Thank you Mattilda! 

Avakian: Nice trailer for RecLAmation. You’ve got queer superheroes, riot police, palm trees and Amy Goodman. Can you divulge just a bit more? 
Goldberg: The film pairs documentary footage of contemporary Los Angeles with a combination of memoir, historical non-fiction, and imagined narration. My hope was to create a journey about my worldviews around capitalism and how those took shape. Los Angeles was my canvas for reflection -- I took a look at its history as well as its present and future. I also delved into my own history to locate where my radical politics came from and where they are going.

S.A. RecLAmation is a feature length shot in super 8. Not many feature length films are shot in super 8. What that an aesthetic or financial decision?
H.G. Super 8 is associated with memories, emotions, experimental film and the past. While the financial limits existed, it was an aesthetic choice for the project. Los Angeles is a loud, bright, impossible oasis in the desert. I have strong feelings about its unrealized potential, and I wanted a nostalgic medium to convey that internal attraction/repulsion struggle.

S.A. Did you grow up in LA? If not, what was your initial impression the first time you visited?
H.G. I moved to LA when I was 22, and I grew up there in many ways over the next decade, mostly as an artist. I moved throughout the city many times. It is a massive sprawl, and each neighborhood was a world unto itself. I saw gentrification take place, especially in downtown, Silverlake and Echo Park. I watched neighborhoods change, the way it changed and saw people displaced. Since I was not a native, I was part of the problem, and that is something hard to reconcile. When I decided to make a film about the city, part of the creative process was having discussions with artists and activists from Los Angeles who I had collaborated with over recent years. Joy Anderson, Irina Contreras, Jessica Gudiel, and Jessica Hoffmann were later cast as “queer superheroes” featured in recLAmation. They shared histories of the landscapes that preceded my arrival, and I documented those locations. While I handled all the technical aspects of the filmmaking, the documentation of LA was guided by an inter-dependent model, and was facilitated by many native Angelinos. I wanted to see the city through more than one set of eyes.
      One of my first impressions of living there was near disbelief that I had to travel around with a Thomas Guide to navigate the city. Los Angeles is enormous and I guess people now have phones and the Internet for quick directions, so that probably seems ancient. It is how I know what year I moved to LA—my 1999 Thomas Guide. I needed a book of maps to live there, and it just seemed like an impossible city, that many lawns in the desert? Houses that I couldn’t believe were single-family dwellings. If you stand in Griffith Park near the observatory you can tell the neighborhood property value by the concentration of green and trees. The neighborhoods are disparate, divided up by class and race. You can see it from miles away.

S.A. What would you say to someone, presumably a straight someone who didn’t want to see a film about gay people (queer superheroes) no less. What would be in it for them to enjoy or their takeaway?
H.G. The film is about Los Angeles and you see it through the eyes of an outsider. What I hope anyone can find in the film is the way we are all interconnected and the way that certain systems limit our imaginations. I made this film with a certain sense of urgency, it was a film in which I wanted to have an opportunity to share what I consider to be some pretty important stuff and it will take people showing up to complete the art project. I hope all kinds of people will be curious enough to be a part of recLAmation.

S.A. Another queer LA filmmaker I’ve interviewed is Silas Howard. One thing he said about when I asked him about moving to LA from SF was this:

In some ways it was a huge culture shock, but I’d been going down there for film for a while. There is a vibrant art scene in LA. The thing that is evil about L.A. is the film industry. The city has a sneaky collective streak. It’s a city of contrasts: canyons and strip malls, ocean and desert, industry and art. I find it interesting but it never feels like home to me. In New York and LA you go to make a career, but in San Francisco you go to find community.

S.A. Do you agree? Disagree? Have any thoughts to add to his statement?
H.G. I completely agree with Silas Howard, and really enjoy the way he moves through the world. I went in the opposite direction and moved to San Francisco after Los Angeles. I had been visiting San Francisco for years, saying that I left my heart there whenever I returned to LA to get back to the grindstone. I had been trying to be a “part” of the film industry for over a decade, I never found a home in it, and I needed to move on. I decided to move towards love and connection, and take a break from swimming against the current. San Francisco was my first stop on the new journey of making my work look more like my life. I kept trying to make money to make art and that’s the opposite of what I was able to find in LA.

S.A. There’s so much good literature written about LA, City of Quartz by Mike Davis, for example.  It’s hard to believe that book is almost twenty years old. Does it feel dated to you? Do you have any favorites, anything to recommend?
H.G. That Mike Davis book was my first read for this project. The racist and colonial foundation of LA is as relevant as ever. I have a homage shot in the film that’s like the cover of the Davis book (of the prison downtown). The ideas from Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell were also really inspiring, it really demonstrates human capacity in crisis and how the structure of the state defies common sense and I highly recommend that book. I saw Angela Davis speak in Los Angeles about prison abolition and cultural dreaming and that also became a layer of importance (especially the parts of her amazing autobiography that took place in LA). I watch/ed Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! every weekday and that had a huge influence. Right now there is all of this coverage about the BP Oil Spill and you can really see how much power corporations have. The film The Corporation taught me that corporations were an idea, a construct created to build bridges. We have the power to not have that idea anymore. We don’t need corporations, they are bad for us, and it is time for new ideas. I don’t even know how we live in a world where a business model “owns” black goo shooting up from the sea floor. Capitalism doesn’t make sense. That’s my story.

S.A. What do you think would actually have to happen for capitalism to be overthrown?
H.G. I think that people will have to consent to the idea that the structure is flawed in a way that it is detrimental to life on the planet, and decide that is reason enough to move on to better models. I don't even think it will need to be overthrown as much as outgrown. Somehow I'm hoping for a 2012 magnetic pole shift and Age of Aquarius song medley that will shift humanity like a school of fish and the illusion of individualist disconnected living will fade away. In the meantime, I am optimistic that local work will continue to flourish around community building and common resource sharing. We are living on the brink of peak oil and nuclear power, anything could happen, and if people decided they were done with capitalism, it would end.

S.A. And without giving away the storyline of recLAmation--what would you replace it with? And how would you keep that economy from going corrupt?
H.G. Local economies run by the communities and a lack of concentrated power might keep corruption at bay. The storyline of recLAmation is about the way cages, like mental hospitals and jails, really get in the way of us knowing what is possible. When the black panthers and yippies were headed in directions of creating food programs and community building, they were stopped by the state. It is hard to know what is possible while so many people are in prison.

S.A. What film or films did you see growing up that made you want to make films?
H.G. Beetle Juice and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I made playdoh-mation movies when I was twelve.

S.A. Name a few books that were important to your development as an artist.
H.G. As cliche as this sounds On The Road was the book that made me realize I love to read. It lead me to the Beats, which led me to hippie activists like Ken Kesey and Tim Leary, Ram Dass, and eventually to feminism. Perhaps it was all of the queerness in the Beats that was like a call to something I hadn't yet accessed anywhere else.

S.A. How did the idea for In the Spotlight come about? It was released around the same time the JT Leroy story broke. Some people thought it was brilliant. Others felt ripped-off, but come on, it had hoax written all over it from the start. . . .
H.G. I met the person who was playing JT in public and thought she was a rather lovely person and didn't know why she was mixed up in such a thing. She didn't tell me much, only that she worked for a reclusive author, and at some point after the first article about the hoax broke, I Googled images of JT and saw her in a pair of sunglasses and a wig. I felt triggered by the fake memoir thing. I don't know why it was so triggering, but I really do love the art form and the people who write their own memoirs. It should have been labeled fiction, and leave it up to people to project realness onto it if they desired. After traveling with Ani DiFranco for a few years, I saw some aspects of being 'famous' that sucked, in my opinion. And I wondered about the burden of that cultural projection sucky part being put onto someone else where their own identity would be shelved. I imagined what it might have been like to be the face of another writer and then placed it within the noir genre (only a more updated gender queer feminist neo-noir form). After I wrote the first draft and sent it off to memoirists Michelle Tea and Clint Catalyst, and Guinevere Turner, they all said they were up for the project. Then more and more hoaxes hit the news, from Million Little Pieces, to the person collecting PEN awards pretending to be a Native American to some woman pretending she had a history of growing up in gangs). It was a strange time and In the Spotlight was how I chose to respond as an artist. [In the works is a plan to release] In the Spotlight with the composer Emily Wells as a DVD and CD set.

S.A. What is the worst piece of advice you received about filmmaking? That you followed and later found out to be false--or just not in sync with the way you work?
H.G. Buy a high end video camera. Stupid. Technology moves too fast, and it will be outmoded too quickly. The best equipment to purchase is sound equipment.

S.A. And the best piece of advice?
H.G. Penny Arcade told me that her friend Quentin Crisp used to say to her, Time is kind to the non-conformist. It's something I hold tight to in moments of distress. I should tattoo it on my arm because sometimes I forget. Thanks for reminding me.

S.A. In terms of geography and climate, is there anything you miss about LA?
H.G.I really miss hiking at Fern Dell. I miss the vegetable co-op. I miss eating vegan ice cream at Scoops, and friends.

S.A. Is there anything else you’d like to say about the film or the event? You’ll be there in person? And will do a Q&A afterward?
H.G. The world premiere event is in San Francisco on June 15th at 8 pm at The Garage [and] is part of the National Queer Arts Festival; the event is produced by the Queer Cultural Center. I will project the film and sound design, and read the narration live. I’ll be around to answer any questions. Several of the queer superheroes will be present including Clint Catalyst who I worked with on In The Spotlight and also Jessica Hoffmann who plays the investigative journalist. Jessica and I are continuing on with the film and make/shift, the magazine she co-publishes, to the Allied Media Conference and the US Social Forum. We have created a tour called Makeshift Reclamation that will feature an excerpt of my film, along with other radical work.  www.makeshiftreclamation.com.

Tickets for the June 15th screening of recLAmation are twelve to twenty dollars and you can get them here.