Feature image of Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face from Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images.
Jenni Olson is one of the most important figures in queer film history. In addition to being a filmmaker (her 2005 film The Joy of Life was voted the 49th best lesbian movie of all time), Jenni is also a historian and archivist who has played a part in preserving and sharing decades of queer cinema. This week, the Harvard Film Archive is doing a series from Jenni’s personal queer film collection now housed at Harvard — and, yes, that includes a 16mm print of Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face.
I talked to Jenni about the series, her own films, and the importance of studying history in times of hardship.
Drew: Hey, how’re you doing this week?
Jenni: I’m alright. How are you?
Drew: I’m okay. You know, it’s weird. I feel mostly numb. There seem to be a lot of people who are so surprised but we did this already. Didn’t we do this already?
Jenni: Yeah. Numb is right. I can’t cope with all of the implications and all of the horror of it. And then just going like well we have work to do and we have to stay calm. And live our lives.
Drew: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been thinking about good things that happened to the world and to me during Trump’s last presidency and bad things that happened to the world and to me to the world and to me during Biden’s presidency and Obama’s presidencies. Not to diminish the harm that’s going to be done, but who is president only changes so much.
Jenni: You don’t want to catastrophize to the point where you’re just destroying yourself by relating to it in this way. It’s hard to not do, but also fuck that. Fuck that.
Drew: It’s part of why I’ve always really valued studying history whether that’s through film to get us on topic or in general. I find comfort in knowing that if we’re going to be perpetual outsiders and experience oppression, we’ve done it. And that’s not to say that circumstances getting worse won’t be awful and that lives won’t be lost. But we’ve done it and we’ll keep doing it. And some of us will get through it and some of us won’t, but we’ll do the best we can for each other.
Jenni: One of the things I’m most excited about in the Harvard series is the first shorts program on Friday, November 15 called We’re Here, We’re Queer. When I was curating this series, I wrote “the brave, fabulous, sexy trailblazers of our past have many valuable and inspiring messages for the queers of today.”
Particularly “Anita Bryant pie in the face” and Halloweenie, these acts of wild creative queer activism and joy. The fighting and saying fuck that. We are not going to stop being amazing.
Chuck and Vince is a gay wedding in San Francisco in ‘78 which is really sweet and one of the guys was in the Imperial Court. Is that a thing outside San Francisco?
Drew: I’m not sure.
Jenni: God I love it so much. It’s a little akin to ballroom in the sense that it’s this structure for gay people. I think of it like the Masons and the Elks. And one of the guys in this wedding was Flame Empress 11. And then, of course, Queens at Heart which we’re showing on 35mm.
Drew: I know Queens at Heart is available on YouTube. How much of what’s screening as part of this series has been digitized and is widely available and how much is truly just in your film collection?
Jenni: Most of it has not been seen in 40 years or more and is completely unavailable. But a note on Queens at Heart. It’s on the UCLA Film and TV archive channel and it’s the restoration that they made from my print.
Drew: Yeah I’m so jealous of anyone who can go to these screenings. It’s such a cool program. Even just this Glen or Glenda trailer. I’ve long been a big defender of that movie. I’m usually hesitant to assign modern language to queer people of the past, but watching that movie and knowing its director preferred the name Shirley, it really does feel explicitly like the work of a trans woman grappling with her own identity.
Jenni: It’s not that trans people didn’t exist in these time periods, it was just in a different way. And it’s interesting that it’s in this exploitation genre, especially alongside Queens at Heart. You watch Queens at Heart and it’s like God the interviewer is so horrible and so lurid and creepy. But part of that is because it was an era where that topic was not okay. So you get this genre of exploitation documentaries masquerading as educational as a way of telling these stories. And, you know, the last line of it is, Who are we to judge? It ends on this point that this is the vehicle it had to happen through for it to get out there. And of course the incredible candor and heroism of the women comes through. Queens at Heart is 1967, two years before Stonewall! And there they are.
Drew: Yeah it really is a whole genre. Thinking also of Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die a Woman, even though I don’t have the same fondness for that one. I mean, it’s interesting, but some of them you feel the individuals come through more than others, even if they were all limited to a similar format.
You’re also showing your films and I wanted to talk about that. I just had a short at Newfest and I’m obviously working in a critical space most of the time. What’s your relationship to the work you do as an archivist and a programmer and a critical theorist and as a filmmaker yourself? Do you think of those as separate practices? Do you see them as intersecting?
Jenni: Throughout my whole career, I have alternated between historical and archival work and then more personal work. And, of course, my personal work also incorporates historical, non-fiction topics. In 2005, I put out The Queer Movie Poster Book and that was also the year The Joy of Life came out. I alternate between types of work. Doing the archival history stuff is a lot easier in a certain way, just because it’s a certain part of my brain, and I love it. But it’s easier because it’s not personally vulnerable. But the filmmaker part is the thing that I live for. And especially the opportunity to show my films to an audience in a physical space and talk to them and have them see it together. Now more than ever, it’s so important to see ourselves on-screen, but it’s even more important to do that together. That’s how our culture is created. We create it by engaging with each other and each other’s work. We’re gathering together and loving each other.
My work is very personal and vulnerable, but it’s also done in this way where that’s not me, it’s a persona of me. So then I can have it say all these intense, vulnerable things.
Drew: When was the last time you saw your films with an audience?
Jenni: I got to show The Joy of Life about two years ago. UCLA Film and TV archive did this great series called San Francisco Plays Itself. You know, they showed Vertigo and all these great San Francisco films and they included The Joy of Life which was amazing. But The Royal Road, I’m not sure. It’s been awhile. I’m really excited.
Drew: Are you working on anything new?
Jenni: Yes. I’m working on a book that’s an essayistic memoir and a film that’s an essayistic memoir. The working title for a long time was The Quiet World for both the book and the film, but I recently changed it to Tell Me Everything Will Be Okay. Presciently. It makes me want to cry, just the title. I always talk about my films as working in a poetic mode. I like an economy of punch and to force people to have feelings. I think that’s what my films are trying to do. Sit down in this room and have your feelings.
But many audiences don’t get my films and don’t like them. When The Joy of Life premiered at Sundance and really throughout the entire festival circuit, every single screening at about the 15 minute mark, a third of the audience walks out. Which is great! It’s an achievement. (laughs)
Drew: (laughs)
Jenni: People come in thinking it’s going to be a normal film, a normal documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge. And then it’s like “I’m fisting her so deep” and people are like what?? (laughs) My films are not for them. But some people are like this is amazing, this speaks to me, I connect to it, and that’s really special. That’s the most incredibly rewarding thing as a filmmaker.
That’s what you’re supposed to do as an artist. Have a vision, people are like you’re crazy, that’s stupid, I don’t get, and you’re like I don’t care this is what I’m doing, and then some people are like wow that was amazing.
Drew: When you’re a queer artist working in a way that’s also queer in form— that might be too vague, but challenging in form, not aligned with mainstream sensibilities, you have these two hurdles to get over. Or these two huge assets you have to embrace. There’s the queerness — and some people will walk out because they don’t want to hear about dykes fisting — and then you have another group that doesn’t want to sit and look at this static image for several minutes. But that’s the work I love most! I love when films are operating on both of those levels. As much as I love certain work that’s just queer and fun and like a regular straight movie except it’s gay — there’s a place for that and I enjoy it — but it’s the work that’s operating on both levels I love most. And that work can be hard to get funded, and hard to get in front of audiences, but that’s the work that’s most special to me.
Jenni: And the work that doesn’t make any money.
Drew: (laughs) Yes.
Jenni: What’s most important to me about my work is that it’s this butch voice and butch perspective. It’s not a sort of conventional representation, but it’s this butchness and that’s important to me, because there’s so little. And it’s important to have work you can see yourself in and feel less alone and be like oh my god you said this thing that I feel and there it is and I get to connect to it. So that’s the most important thing to me. But what I’m most proud of as an artist is I’m working in this form that’s totally unconventional and in fact devoted to breaking convention.
Often the queers are like I don’t like this, I don’t get it. So you need the right combination. But also on the surface my films seem difficult — there are no people, it’s just landscapes and someone blabbing away, no thank you — but it’s actually so friendly! I think it’s really accessible to most audiences. It sounds intimidating but I think you’re right in it. I’m just telling you a story.
Drew: When Jeanne Dielman was named the best movie of all time by Sight & Sound, I wrote an article where I tried to lead people through an exercise. It was really me just wishing my day job could be as a film professor, but even though I couldn’t sit there with people in a classroom, I was like okay let’s watch one of her shorts and talk about it. Just give me ten minutes of staring at your computer without looking at your phone. Because I think so often work that people think of as difficult isn’t actually that difficult. You just maybe have to think about art and filmmaking in a different way. Have you ever shown your work in a gallery space?
Jenni: I have!
Drew: I imagine if someone walks in and sees your movie playing in a gallery space, it would be very accessible. That reframe of being in an art environment instead of a movie environment, makes it suddenly so easy to watch and so engrossing. It just requires people to reassess what it means to watch a movie and what that experience is going to be like. A lot of people have it in them to experience this art that is really magical and could be really important to them.
I understand the impulse from people to want whatever Glenn Powell romcom is happening but with a butch. And I want that for them too. But also they should watch the movies that already exist and are really good. Even if it’s not what someone is used to, I think if they give themselves over to it, they’ll find a lot in it. That’s my soap box.
Jenni: And that’s why we need film critics! Which I say also as a film critic. I love that in my whole career I’ve literally done everything including being a projectionist and selling popcorn. A publicist, a programmer, a distributor, a filmmaker.
Drew: Well, let’s end then with Masc II, the follow up to your blockbuster series Masc.
Jenni: Yes! And some of the first Masc series — which I co-curated with the amazing Caden Mark Gardner whose book is now out — is still up on the Criterion Channel. And now I have Masc II which I’ve titled Mascs and Muchachas because we’re showing the Mexican remake of Mädchen in Uniform. This has been the holy grail for my entire career.
Drew: We talked about this! You mentioned this not being available when we discussed the original.
Jenni: Yeah so I was like even though this isn’t a masc film, I need to show it. We did one screening in LA a couple of years ago at Outfest and other than that it hasn’t been seen since 1951. It’s a wild film.
We’re also screening Vera which is actually on Criterion as part of the first Masc series. You helped me put together this Letterboxd list of all the films with transmasc leads and that’s one of the earliest. It’s a great film even if the title is his deadname.
Oh and we’re doing Stranger Inside and Cheryl lives in Oakland so she’s going to be there. I don’t know why it hasn’t been available online all these years. It came out on DVD.
Drew: Yeah I have the DVD. That’s how I saw it.
Jenni: Yeah it’s never been on digital. Then Something Special is playing both at Harvard and in Masc II. I love that movie so much.
Drew: It’s so good.
Jenni: It’s kind of an imperfect film, but it’s amazing, especially the first half.
And then the last thing I’ll shout out is Summer Vacation 1999.
Drew: I just saw that at the BAM Newfest screening!
Jenni: It came out on VHS and then never on DVD or digital. It finally had a restoration and Japanese release a few years ago. And I’ve been trying to get it here. We worked with the Japan Society in New York for that Newfest screening. And thankfully we secured this other screening. Four boys left at a boarding school but they’re played by girls. It’s gay, it’s lesbian, and it’s t4t.
From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive is now running at the Harvard Film Archive. Masc II will play at BAMPFA in January and February.
