Betzy Bromberg was born and raised in New York and has been making experimental work since 1976. Her intimate, intense films straddle the threshold between an interior world of deep sensory feeling and an outer world of city lights, uncanny landscapes, human rituals, and the flesh of other life forms. Vera Brunner-Sung has termed the result a “cinema of touch”.1
Alongside her filmmaking, Bromberg worked as a long-time optical effects supervisor to the film industry, on iconic Hollywood pictures including Tremors (Ron Underwood, 1990) Terminator II: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992). She was the Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) from 2002 until 2018.
Another Gaze: Let’s start at the beginning. Did you always want to be an artist? And what drew you to film specifically?
Betzy Bromberg: I don’t remember specifically wanting to be an artist as a child but I do remember spending a lot of time in museums with my mother and sister. My mom became a print artist later in life, when she was in her forties. As a child I especially loved the Guggenheim with its spiral architecture and much of my artistic education came from the MoMA Collection. As a young girl I enjoyed writing creative prose and poetry and then in high school I discovered photography. I can still remember my excitement while agitating photographic paper in a pan of developer and watching the image slowly emerge from the paper’s white surface. Pure magic! Once I discovered this process, I couldn’t get enough. My high school had a wonderful darkroom and because I was close with the headmaster’s daughter we were able to spend unofficial late-night hours there. I shot images with my mother’s old Argus camera. It didn’t have a light meter so I slowly developed an instinct for measuring light and determining optimum exposure for whichever type of film stock I was using. During this time I was shooting a lot of my photographs in Montauk, NY, which was still just a quiet fishing village at the end of Long Island at the time. I shot images of the ocean, the sky, abandoned buildings and reclusive people, and I experimented with painting with light by shooting with long exposures. I loved the analogue photographic process and its ability to freeze moments in time. And this photographic process eventually provided the foundation for my filmmaking as well.
Since I also loved writing, I thought that journalism might provide a suitable path of study that would lead to a practical occupation. After studying it for two years at Northwestern University, I realised that the exciting era of investigative journalism was coming to an end and a certain formula was becoming the norm. I believe it was at this point, a personal crisis really, that I realised my true calling was as an artist and that I needed to re-navigate, push myself towards a more inspired direction. I transferred to Sarah Lawrence College to pursue creative photography. Through an act of serendipity, I was unable to get into the photography class I wanted and instead was enrolled in my alternative choice – an experimental film class. Although I had taken a number of film classes at Northwestern, I hadn’t seen many experimental films. I think I understood that experimental film was my medium during the first hour. It was defined by no formulae and it offered me an exciting, new and radical language for both poetic and political expression. I came of age in a politically charged era and it was part of the reason I was drawn to journalism in the first place. I believed there was much that needed to be said and film seemed to be an ideal medium through which to say it, since it could incorporate words with music, sounds and visuals.
Sadly, studying journalism was detrimental to my writing. I write for my films sometimes, but the words need to come out in a burst, which I rarely edit. I read a lot and I believe literature, photography and music are my biggest inspirations.
AG: Was ‘Petit Mal’ (1977) the start of your journey into making ‘personal’ films?
BB: ‘Petit Mal’ was my first 16 mm effort. I had no idea what the process really entailed until I started making the film. I fell in love with experimental filmmaking in the class I mentioned, with Bill Brand at Sarah Lawrence. It was in that class I woke up to the profound filmic poetry that could be created by taking a spirited approach to the combination of sound and image. The possibilities were endless. I was exploring electronic music at the same time and had access to a great sound studio that housed a Buchla synthesiser and a number of multitrack tape recorders. I was able to compose, record and play into the wee hours of the morning with the studio’s fabulous sound machines. Much of the film’s soundtrack was recorded and edited in this studio, a magical underground space in the basement of an old Tudor style building in the College. The lab procedures, the mix, the optical soundtrack, cutting the negative and timing the colour – all of this required a great deal of expertise and it was Bill who guided me step by step.
Petit Mal (1977)
AG: A strong sense of gender politics comes across in ‘Petit Mal’ and your other early work…
BB: When I began to make ‘Petit Mal’, I was trying to understand my and other women artists’ place in society and in the world. There seemed to be a razor-thin line between female power and female vulnerability. ‘Petit Mal’ addresses this dangerous dynamic directly, but all of the films in the trilogy and many of my subsequent films touch upon this fragile balance. Towards the end of ‘Petit Mal’, there’s an animated sequence alternating between my friend Reynolds’ red painting and her exhausted face. In the shot that follows, her hands streak red paint upon her throat, then there’s a four-screen image of Marilyn Monroe, then a four-screen image of a woman against a wall, looking apprehensive, perhaps even fearful. The soundtrack is the rhythmic breathing of desire, or is it of fright? And then between the serious parts, ‘Petit Mal’ is young, silly, exhilarating and fun.
In terms of a personal filmic language, ‘Petit Mal’ and my early films came naturally, poured out of me. It seemed obvious to me that for my work to be authentic it would have to be about things I know or am getting to know: emotions I feel, thoughts I’m having, ideas I’m contemplating, both exterior and interior places I’m interested in exploring. I wouldn’t know how to make work that is anything but personal. It’s through my own lens and skin that I experience the world. This is the only language I truly know.
Petit Mal
AG: Can you talk a little about what came before ‘Petit Mal’?
BB: I’d made a few films on Super 8 which is of course a completely different process. The first was a feature-length, autobiographical failure called Tachycardia. I’ve honestly never looked at it since I completed and premiered it in 1977. It was personal in terms of the image and soundtrack but I edited it without ever looking at the images – a truly structural film approach and a less than successful experiment. The second was a short, animated horror film called ‘Screaming Susan’ [1977], made up from still photographs. My friend Reynolds – also the painter in ‘Petit Mal’ – purposely cut her leg and we poured her blood onto the celluloid surface of ‘Screaming Susan’ to authenticate its horror status. I imagine the film’s surface must be very sticky now. It might not even be projectable!
The third and final Super 8 I made was in collaboration with Lauren Abrams, the gorgeous redhead who is in the early films. You Can Practically Taste It With Your Eyes [1977] was definitely a precursor to the style and energy of my early 16mm films, which I tend to think of as a trilogy: comprised of ‘Petit Mal’, ‘Ciao Bella or Fuck me Dead’ [1978] and ‘Soothing the Bruise’ [1980].
‘Ciao Bella or Fuck me Dead’ (1978)
AG: What was it like to collaborate with Lauren so closely?
BB: You Can Practically Taste It With Your Eyes was a blast to make. Lauren and I filmed and recorded each other. The soundtrack is completely ludicrous, wacky and fun. Lauren, now sadly deceased, contributed in numerous ways to my early films, both the sound and the image, as well as to my overall approach to filmmaking and art. In many ways she was more sophisticated than me in terms of her art background. But we had a magic and wild energy together. We agreed that, when it came to making art and living one’s life, it was all or nothing. I think this was communicated quite clearly in ‘Petit Mal’ and I still feel that way. Why put in anything less than all you have? The work we made was personal and we jokingly called our production company EFI: Emotional Films Incorporated.
Lauren Abrams and Reynolds with Bromberg (1978)
Lauren also introduced me to the world of Queens’ topless bars, where she worked as a dancer. She asked me to be the main actress and crew in her docudrama Hustle of the Heart [1980]. In preparation I got a job as a bartender at a topless bar called the Fiddle and Bow, which was a dive below the El Train in Elmhurst where I mostly had a lot of fun working and getting wasted. For a so-called ‘liberated woman’ in the late ‘70s, working in the sex industry could be empowering. And it was good money. But I was always aware I was a visitor. Many women who worked in these clubs had no alternative. I worked there by choice and was privileged to have a different set of options.
A number of events, both exhilarating and devastating, happened during the summer of 1978 which changed my life forever. ‘Ciao Bella’ expresses the heat and desire and loss of that summer. The bar and dance scenes in that film were shot at the Fiddle and Bow. The manager of the club was an extraordinary cinematographer who filmed most of the dancers in the film and you can really sense the male gaze. I would have shot the dancers in an entirely different way; my camera would have hugged and panned and moved slowly across their bodies instead of aggressively zooming into their sexual body parts. But for the purpose of the film, the aggressive camera was more apt, the male gaze more appropriate. I’m one of the two bartenders who appear early on in the film, the one dancing towards the camera. I shot all the rest of the images and, like in ‘Petit Mal’ and ‘Soothing the Bruise’, I was filming the people and events in my life at that time.
‘Az Iz’ (1983)
AG: You’ve spoken elsewhere about a hand-held approach to shooting in the early films that is almost analogous to dance. In your more recent films you use a tripod, but I wonder if you could say more about this hand-held technique? In films like ‘Ciao Bella’ and ‘Az Iz’ (1983), there is such a palpable sense of the camera as a proxy for the sensing, feeling body – it’s like an embodied consciousness moving around the world, desiring and alighting on things.
BB: That’s a wonderful and apt description. I love shooting, both hand-held and with a tripod. I guess I’m just a physical person. From the start, my inclination when holding the camera and looking through its lens was to move. I wasn’t ever interested in a static image. When one moves with a camera the perspective changes constantly and I found this more interesting than flat, still shots. Even when I’d shoot something relatively still, I’d use a monopod instead of a tripod so that the viewer would feel the presence of a moving body behind the lens. I just thought it was more interesting. I started to use a tripod when I began to shoot with a macro lens because the shakiness would have been exaggerated in close-up. In the first of my tripod films, ‘a Darkness Swallowed’ [sic], I worked very hard to make the tripod movements feel fluid, as much as possible like my hand-held work. But my most recent film, Glide of Transparency [2016-17], is comprised almost entirely of static camera shots. The film is about colour and stillness and because I was filming the natural world, an incredibly subtle palette of movement emerges from that stillness which interested me a great deal.
When I look through a camera there’s so much I need to learn about the image. I’m seeking to discover exactly what it is I see and what exactly I’m looking for. Gazing and shooting through the camera’s eyepiece or viewfinder is a means to examine what it is to see and feel.
More recently when I shoot, I find that if I’m lucky the image I see through the lens starts to become something else, something more, something beyond reality. If I’m lucky it becomes transitory, magical, hallucinogenic. When I shoot landscapes I often see faces. In the desert, souls are sometimes embedded in the rock. In my garden I’ve seen odd creatures. A subtle change of light can re-define the content of a frame. I’m fascinated by the exquisite energy that becomes palpable when capturing light and time in emulsion.
AG: In January 2020, ‘Az Iz’ will be screened at Tyneside Cinema as part of Sisters of the Extreme, a programme that considers ritual, occultism and altered physical and mental states in experimental films by women. These themes resonate across so much of your work, from ‘Petit Mal’, whose title refers to a gap in consciousness brought on by an epileptic seizure state, to the meditative, dark, and dreamy states explored in the most recent trilogy of films. What draws you to liminal states? Is filmmaking a way of getting there?
BB: I like exalted states and long for finding ways to conjure the mystical and to transcend reality. Life is surely all mystery but filmmaking is indeed a ritual for me. I love getting to a state of transcendence while I’m shooting and it happens a lot. Nothing is more fun for me than losing reality. Looking through a lens brings on an ecstatic state when I’m shooting and instinctively I know that the image is going to be amazing. I can feel with my entire body when a shot is good. Likewise, there’s a flow that happens when the editing starts getting somewhere interesting and there’s a sort of ecstasy when the sound and the image start to work in ways I had hoped for but couldn’t quite define. So I’m surely after the ecstatic state in all stages of shooting and making my films. Of course, there’s an equal amount of the opposite state – the despair and hopelessness when a roll of film comes out miserably, or when a night of editing yields nothing, or when no choice of sound will seem to work for a given image or scene.
It’s also my wish that a viewer, when watching my films, attains an altered state. I want people who watch my films to have had an experience, as a result of watching. I want for them to be swept up and to feel they’ve gone through something both visceral and cerebral. I guess this is what attracted me to experimental film in the first place. Films have the ability to create alternative realities.
As a young and wild woman, I had many experiences with self-induced mind expansion but it’s not only drugs and good sex that give access to liminal states. It’s also a function of some types of art. The right poem at the right time can transport the mind to an altered state and music has the amazing ability to move the mind and body to other realms of consciousness. But honestly, in terms of art forms, I feel there’s nothing as powerful as cinema to provide an alternative experience. I feel strongly that this experience can’t happen watching an iPhone or small monitor. To be experienced fully, cinema must happen in a dark theatre, with a large image and as faithful as possible sound. This is why I feel so strongly that, for a viewer to have the experience that I’m hoping they will have, my films should be seen properly, projected in a theatrical space. And even then, of course, someone watching must decide to go with it.
AG: Could you say more about ‘Az Iz’ and what prompted the making of this film? We are in the desert…
BB: ‘Az Iz’ was shot in Benson, Arizona, which is north of Tombstone. I’d fallen in love with a sculptor who grew psychedelic mushrooms and this was where he lived, in a house in a very remote part of the desert, far from town and with no phone. It was a creepy crawly type of place with enormous spiders and gnarly mesquite trees. The sculptor, who I would later marry, worked with roadkill and memorialised their remains in exquisite resin sculptures. I had never been to a landscape like it and I spent a week shooting the footage that was to become the body of the film. The prologue and epilogue, a type of parentheses to the centre, was shot in Death Valley, a place that is sacred to me and to us and where I have done a lot of shooting.
‘Az Iz’ is a deeply personal film. The desert was so harsh and primeval that I became interested in origin myths, hence the inclusion of readings from different stories and folktales from the Americas, Egypt and the Bible on the soundtrack. But the deeper layer of the film, the more visceral and mystical layer, derives from the fact that I had fallen in love after three years of grieving for a loved one who’d been shot and killed (‘Ciao Bella’). And like a snake shedding a skin, I’d returned to life.
When I showed ‘Az Iz’ at Anthology Film Archives in New York the summer before last, filmmaker and friend Bradley Eros led the Q&A, noting that the film is surely an incantation. He asked me, “Did it work?” I was certainly aware that the film is an incantation of sorts, but the question pushed that idea to its unstated purpose, and I had to answer, yes, it had worked. We are still together.
AG: Your films are exhibited on 16 mm, so seeing them always feels like a rare treat. The retrospective at Anthology Film Archives would have been a great chance to see everything together, but I wonder how your early work circulated closer to the time it was made?
BB: The first time my films were shown anywhere was at the Times Square Show in NYC in 1980. The Times Square Show took place in an abandoned massage parlour in Times Square and is now considered a seminal art exhibition of the NYC underground at that time. I’d already moved to Los Angeles, but I flew back for the screening. Also in 1980, Renée Shafransky curated my first solo film show at the Collective for Living Cinema when I finally completed the trilogy. My films showed at a number of small cinemas and then in 1982 Sheila Whitaker programmed one of my films at the Tyneside Festival in Newcastle. I believe this was the first film festival ever to show one of my films. Later, she programmed Body Politic [1988] in the London Film Festival in 1989, the second festival to screen one of my films. What I recall from the early ‘80s is that most festivals didn’t show shorter work. It wasn’t until I started to make longer films, like Body Politic and Divinity Gratis [1996] in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, that my work was presented at festivals.
AG: I’m curious about exhibition because at least two of your films have screened in women-centric programmes in London recently. What do you think about this kind of framing?
BB: I know many women feel pigeonholed when they are categorised as a ‘female filmmaker’ instead of just a ‘filmmaker’ but I’m happy to have my films show in women-centric programmes. I’m a feminist and I have no problem with the terminology or what it evokes. I’m part of a generation of American women who fought for equal rights and equal pay, who celebrated when abortion was finally legalised and who is still fiercely angry that the equal rights amendment never passed. My films, particularly the early ones, speak loudly and specifically about these issues and I’d hope all my films reflect a female sensibility because this is who I am. I think many female artists and filmmakers find this type of frame limiting but I don’t. I like to be in the company of other capable and talented women. Working in the film industry was a good experience for me largely because there I was working with so many creative and technically brilliant women.
And as a viewer, I seek out films made by women. The canon is exhaustingly male, which is absurd since there are so many excellent women filmmakers. I find that I often understand the editing rhythms of films made by women more readily and viscerally than those made by men whose editing rhythms are sometimes disorienting to me. I sometimes don’t understand their cuts and though my most recent work has been compared to Brakhage, I honestly have never felt the rhythms of his films. Comparatively, when I see a film by Chick Strand, I feel it with my body. I understand her movements and her use of dance viscerally. Chick Strand, a dear friend and mentor to me, was someone I’d certainly consider a feminist. That’s not to say she didn’t love men because she did and she was a flirt even to the end of her old age. But she was someone who rejected the label of ‘female filmmaker’. I think it’s safe to say her work clearly offers a female and even a feminist perspective but Chick was from a different generation. In her time, the label might have been seen as a ploy to set women apart from their male counterparts. It was a label that many found offensive. I think her generation of female filmmakers fought a basic struggle to be recognised at all. Filmmakers like Rose Lowder and Gunvor Nelson were pioneers and established themselves as significant filmmakers, on a par with men. This cracked open a possibility, albeit a slim one, for the female experimental filmmakers who followed. By the time I started making films, these women had already established a place for women in experimental film. So I have no problem being part of women-centric programs. I’m proud of the contributions made by women. I think the female voice is extraordinary.
Chick Strand, Barbara Hammer, Bromberg
AG: You were taught by Chick at CalArts where you have also mentored filmmakers as Head of the Film and Video programme. Can you say something about this context and these relationships?
BB: I stepped down last year but I will say that part of the joy of running that programme was working to make it an equally great experience for female students. When I became Head in 2002, the programme was not so supportive to women nor experimental filmmakers in general. We changed that.
Chick was an amazing mentor. When I was her student, we mostly sat around and smoked cigarettes, drank coffee and gossiped. Whenever I showed her my work she’d say, “keep going, keep working, you’ll get at it.” She never critiqued the work and didn’t really offer her opinion. Chick was so independent and she felt it was her job to make her students equally independent. She screened difficult, important and intense work. She rarely showed her own films and I honestly never understood how extraordinary a filmmaker she was until years after I’d studied with her. She encouraged her students to find their own voices and to dig deep. I guess I admired her way of teaching because to some extent I think I teach in a similar way. Except I voice my opinion a bit more. But I also believe what’s most important is encouragement – it’s so difficult to believe in one’s own abilities when you’re just starting out. And the only way you can make films is to have a blind belief in your ideas and instincts. And to keep working at it, continuously moving forward.
AG: Recently I was reading Maya Deren – she writes about dance as a universal language of feeling common to humanity. This was something she wanted to bring to film. She writes: “My films are for everyone.” Do you think about who your films are for, or what language they are speaking? They go deep with sex, death, birth, grief, decay – themes that perhaps even go beyond humanity to a kind of bare life…
BB: My films are for any individual who finds something in them. Experimental film can be so difficult for an audience. After all, a viewer must first discover and define the film’s language before they can actually take it in and experience the film comfortably. So few people really enjoy experimental film, I think the audience is very small. It’s a challenging medium. But for those who do enjoy it, it can be the most poetic expression of all cinema. I’m fully aware that my films are not for everyone. The earlier films are easier, they talk more clearly about the themes you’ve mentioned and they are very lively. But even with the early films, the language is specifically my own and a viewer has to be willing to work with my poetry. Sometimes I find those who connect most with my films are going through something major in their own lives, like a death or a transition or a crossroads. My more recent films are good for those who need a space to meditate because accessing my films can sometimes mean accessing one’s own psyche. Glide of Transparency, for instance, is a means for someone to have 89 minutes to move freely through their own consciousness and emotions, while being submerged visually and aurally.
I’ve somehow responded with many words to your insightful and thoughtful questions, but honestly I’m not clear what it must be like for someone else to see and experience my films. I know them too well from the purview of my own interior. I’ve made them in the only way I know how and hope that they leave some indelible impression.
1 Vera Brunner-Sung, ‘A Cinema of Touch: the Work of Betzy Bromberg’, Millennium Film Journal, No. 67, Spring 2018.