Charting the Rise of Trans Filmmaking with Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Maclay

Castration Movie Anthology is a remarkable example of how contemporary trans cinema can be really bold and unapologetic because of the grassroots nature of its making and distribution. Can you say more about that film and its success?

Maclay: Castration’s word-of-mouth reputation has been built almost entirely by trans people discussing it with other trans people. I think it’s important to talk here about Muscle Distribution, a company that trans film archivist and queer historian Elizabeth Purchell started a couple years ago. I think that she is doing a wonderful job centralizing these movies and presenting them to the exact right audience. Through us sharing these films online, whether through Vimeo links or Google docs, or by going to screenings at microcinemas—and Louise has been traveling across North America and Europe getting Castration Movie Anthology out there—a community experience has been created around modern trans films, and it feels not only like Muscle is catering to us but also that it’s being driven by the power that we have as viewers and consumers. Louise just started a Kickstarter for Castration Movie Anthology III—she needed many thousands of dollars and raised it very quickly. This is showing us that this type of circulation, which enables us to use our modest economic means to help get money into the hands of trans filmmakers, can succeed. Maybe we can have an ecosystem of trans films that are on a smaller scale, and it doesn’t matter so much if they break into the mainstream if the trans audience is seeing them—as long as these films are mattering to the community itself.

 

Gardner: This makes me think of the rise of VHS, and the idea that that format created an alternative mode of distribution and an archive for trans images. One of the things that popped up in the VHS landscape were tutorial films about voice-training, makeup, hair, and wardrobe. But it was also common for films of the past—like Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and The Queen (1968)—to circulate on tape. The trans activist Lou Sullivan would have viewing parties that showed movies like Lee Grant’s What Sex Am I? (1985) and also made pirated VHS tapes and sold them in his newsletter. That community energy that was developed by zine culture has been converted to online spaces and the microcinema scene. And in addition to new work being circulated this way, it’s been great to see that the community is looking at our past, including films that have not been very accessible.

 

When it comes to new films, for the last two decades there has been an idea that we still have to be beholden to the studios or the festivals to get a certain type of film seen and distributed. I think, especially in this moment, when arts funding is being gutted, there’s a kind of fearmongering that makes it hard for people to even bother making a film. So it’s great to see crowdfunding for works like Louise’s, and I hope there are other filmmakers who might find this method useful.

There are some fascinating documentary portraits of trans elders and pioneers in this series.

Gardner: Yes, there’s No Ordinary Man (2020), which is a film about Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who was discovered to have been a trans person in the closet and was outed after he died. The story was that he had duped everyone around him, but as the filmmakers go around talking to people who actually knew Tipton, and people who had lived through the fallout of this discovery, you get a sense of how trans people of his time were stuck between a rock and a hard place. They could be outed, putting their reputations and their employment at risk, or they could live stealth and just continue not addressing their trans identity without being able to actively engage with that side of themselves in public.

 

Rupert Remembers (2000) is about Rupert Raj, one of the great trans male activists who was involved in a lot of trans publishing and newsletters that highlighted real people in his native Canada and all over the world. There’s a tendency to want to canonize trans elders into sainthood, but one of the great things about this film is that it allows us to remember that there were regular everyday people in the late twentieth century who took the extraordinary step of being out and advocating for other people. Rupert Raj was a real trailblazer.

Maclay:  With nonfiction work, Caden and I quickly discovered that you could write an entire book on all of the depictions of trans people in documentary. There’s always been a deep fascination with trans people in that form, but usually these films were made with a cis gaze, which could sometimes result in fascinating films, but typically ran into some problems. Of course there’s the controversy surrounding Paris Is Burning, a film that I love, but one whose subjects felt exploited when it became popular and they did not reap the benefits of its success. What we tried to convey with the inclusion of these two documentaries is a new idea of how a trans subject can be approached within the form—what can happen when a trans filmmaker is exploring the history of another trans person’s life. It illuminates new ways that we can interact with our own culture across generations, and allows us to have a better understanding of our history outside of the ways cis people have presented it.

In recent years, we’ve also seen the emergence of some singular auteurist voices within trans cinema, including Jane Schoenbrun and Isabel Sandoval, who both have very distinctive styles.

Maclay: One of the most interesting things that’s happening in the modern trans film movement is that we’re getting a feel for the taste of trans directors and their cinephilia. Some of these filmmakers are working through the context of genre: Jane Schoenbrun is interested in horror and David Lynch; Vera Drew (The People’s Joker) is influenced by the maximalist comic-book movies of the ’90s. And then you have Isabel Sandoval, who is working in the classical mode of melodrama. Sandoval grew up watching pirated films in her native Philippines; she would get DVDs of films by Fassbinder and Sirk and Wong Kar Wai, and that is obviously a part of her film language, as is Chantal Akerman. What’s interesting with her film, Lingua Franca, is that you can spot those influences, but you see them through a new lens of transness, as we follow a trans woman who is in love and is an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S during the first Trump administration.