On Restoration and Repair: A Conversation with Ja’Tovia Gary

Originally the idea of exploring Toni Morrison cinematically was presented to me by a critic who wanted to commission it for a show. I usually don’t do commissions because I don’t like having a boss. But I loved the idea of thinking through Morrison cinematically. We used The Bluest Eye, which is one of my favorite texts, as a point of departure. I wasn’t interested in adapting it. I wanted to be in conversation with it. If Morrison were here, this film would be what I’d say to her about that book from my perspective as a Southern Black millennial queer woman.

Yes. Something shifts when I put on the wig. I’m channeling talk-show culture from the 1990s—Rolonda Watts, Oprah, Phil Donahue, even Ricki Lake. Talk shows were an important cultural commons. I feel talk shows are very much within a documentary tradition. They revealed the desires and anxieties of the collective. So I wanted to think about the various modes that documentary has gone through over the ages. One of those modes is vox populi, voice of the people. You can sometimes get to a really intimate and revelatory moment with a stranger on the street.

Every person who stopped, I included. It wasn’t just about one or two, it was about the chorus. Saidiya Hartman talks about how the chorus can provide a mosaic of the reality that we live in, especially if the chorus is voices that are historically silenced. If anything, the experiment feels incomplete because I didn’t encounter transwomen during filming. If we really want to talk about safety, that’s who we need to be talking to.

I don’t know. I think if we were to go by the amount of screenings and the response, that definitely had the largest response.

I think there are many factors. My goal when I make these films is for someone to see them a hundred years from now and say this is resonant and applicable or restorative for me, but I think the timing was key. And I think it’s so densely layered that even though it does not reflect everyone’s lived experience, there are pieces, moments, and feelings that emerge that people can latch on to. It feels like a poem in a way, and you don’t understand every line of the poem, but maybe there’s this one stanza or this one couplet that does something for you.

So, direct animation is the overarching name of several techniques. Etching is one of the techniques; you are etching directly into the surface of the film, into the emulsion. Sometimes people are painting onto the surface of the film, or you are masking out certain parts of the film. It’s basically hand-processing techniques. Some people, like Stan Brakhage and Len Lye, call this cameraless filmmaking. I had a really interesting professor in graduate school called Michel Negroponte, and he told me that I was going to need to supplement my education, that I was going to need to use New York City as my other classroom. ​​And I found a place in Brooklyn called Mono No Aware. This is where I began to learn about these techniques and incorporate them into my practice. For me, the handmade element is important. I consider the films to be objects as well as experiences. There’s a sculptural element. I am not one of those filmmakers who’s always chasing the latest and greatest gadget, the sharpest camera. I’m absolutely consumed with the archive and small-gauge filmmaking and hand-processing. I think the intimacy that is created while you are making something can be transmitted, so it’s important for me to hold on to that and to spend that time creating that relationship with the material. It takes a really long time to etch, and that’s where the magic is stored.

Yes, the Kuleshov effect. When you place one image next to another, meaning emerges. If you change one image, the meaning changes. They are these psychological landscapes that are being painted. So I find this technique and the various ways that montages can be assembled extremely helpful. When I’m trying to paint an interior picture for a viewer, there’s so much meaning that can be made just by placing images next to one another. John Akomfrah and Arthur Jafa would call this “affective proximity.” What are you feeling emotionally? What are you feeling psychologically? Not just: what happens next in the narrative?

You know how many people say, “Oh, you were inspired by Arthur Jafa”? Everyone wants to make Arthur Jafa my dad, and I love AJ. He hates when I call him Uncle, but this is my southern uncle. We’re from the same region of the country. We come from very similar traditions, so it's no wonder that there are threads that are similar. But I’ve had multiple curators—usually they’re white men, sometimes they are Black people—say “you’re very much in this tradition of Arthur Jafa.” It’s erasure. It’s all love and respect to my uncle. I’ll forever give him his praises. He is my elder. I have learned a lot from him. He’s given me permission to speak very freely about my practice and to be my full self, which is why I don’t feel no type of way saying this: I did not get my ideas around montage editing from his film.

I can’t even tell you how I listen. I just know that it is a listening. Initially, I’m working with ideas and thoughts and feelings that I’m scribbling down, and then I start culling images. If we’re talking about Quiet as It’s Kept, I knew that I wanted Toni Morrison’s voice in there somehow. And again, to shout out Michel Negroponte, he would always say to me, “Just put it on the timeline.” In your editing software, just start putting things there. Beginning is hard, but if you just start putting things down, like a painter would begin to put a stroke down or make a mark, then you begin to see things next to one another. So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making. And this is something that I tell younger filmmakers: “Don’t just go to film school. What do you know about the world?”

We are deeply invested in care. These are restorative gestures. These are healing gestures. Some things are going to be uncomfortable, but we’re not trying to break you. We’re destabilized only in that we have to rip off the veil. We have to tell the truth straight. We’re operating in the Black feminist tradition, and that’s one of restoration and repair.