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Sundance 2022: ‘Framing Agnes’ delves into UCLA’s past to challenge viewers’ perceptions

(Courtesy of Sundance Institute)

"Framing Agnes"

Directed by Chase Joynt

The Film Collaborative

Jan. 22

By Vivian Xu

Jan. 22, 2022 6:32 p.m.

This post was updated Jan. 30 at 10:28 p.m.

“Framing Agnes” sprouted roots from a UCLA filing cabinet.

The genre-bending documentary film will premiere in the NEXT category of the Sundance Film Festival and is both directed and written by alumnus Chase Joynt. Inspired by UCLA professor emeritus Harold Garfinkel’s 1950s gender research study featuring Agnes, a transgender woman, the film showcases previously hidden transcripts with other trans subjects from Garfinkel’s study through reenactments and dialogues with trans actors. Collaborating alongside fellow alumnus Kristen Schilt, Joynt said the pair’s – as well as the film’s – history is inextricably tied to UCLA.

“I walked into a class called ‘Sociology of Deviant Behavior’ as a very queer-looking human (and) looked across the room at a very goth punk-looking human,” Joynt said. “(Schilt and I) made eye contact and decided we really needed each other to survive the landscape of UCLA at that time and became fast friends and collaborators.”

Joynt and Schilt’s mutual interest in gender and sexuality led them to Agnes, a case study from Garfinkel’s research and a patient who sought to receive sex reassignment surgery, an infrequently documented action for the time period. While the pair knew about Agnes, further investigation into her case elucidated several other trans subjects of Garfinkel’s research, whose interview transcripts were tucked away in a filing cabinet at UCLA, Joynt said.

Upon finding the transcripts, fellow collaborator Jules Gill-Peterson said there was a sense of urgency to share the complex stories present among Garfinkel’s notes. Though the nature of the information was academic, Gill-Peterson said the team chose to film a documentary rather than publish a paper as means of challenging the gatekeeping of academia.

“There’s this impulse or fantasy of letting people be free posthumously, but of course, part of what’s important about this project is that we all understand that’s a fantasy and it’s not actually our job to set them free,” Gill-Peterson said. “The question becomes, ‘How could you make use of really rare materials without inflating what they are, without also ignoring the conditions which those peoples’ lives are translated to a certain set of words?’”

To let the subjects’ stories tell themselves, Joynt said the film slips in and out of a variety of formats, including verbatim reenactments of Garfinkel’s interviews with the patients, dialogues between Joynt and the trans actors themselves as well as scenes of the actors reflecting on their characters. The fluidity of the film’s structure yields a subtle spatial disorientation, he said, and also grounds the piece in the modern day.

Despite the fact that Garfinkel’s transcripts are from several decades ago, Schilt said the problems encountered by trans people at the time are still relevant in the present. People tend to succumb to the pitfall that modern times have significantly progressed from the past, she said, but this rose-tinted perspective is disrupted by the conversations between Garfinkel and his trans subjects.

“People in the ’50s and ’60s are talking about not being able to change their driver’s license or not being able to be employed because they can’t change the gender marker of their driver’s license,” Schilt said. “To think, ‘Wow, we’re still figuring that out,’ … it really brings to light how we relate to history.”

The past serves as somewhat of a cautionary tale in the film, since Garfinkel’s problematic portrayal and perception of his trans patients reduced them to one-dimensional figures, Gill-Peterson said. However, the film does not pretend to direct viewers toward a correct path of representation, she said, and instead displays the shades of gray in between.

“There’s been so much pressure in recent years to replace problematic with unproblematic representation,” Gill-Peterson said. “That impulse is really good, but it’s so impossible – it’s really disingenuous. Every time people try to do that and get things right, it doesn’t work because trans peoples’ lives are too interesting, too complicated, too varied and too diverse.”

Similarly, the balance between visibility and invisibility for the trans community is far more multifaceted than black and white, Gill-Peterson said. Though the film will inherently shine a spotlight on the trans community, the cultural misconception that visibility automatically catalyzes social progress gives the film’s premiere a more complex significance, she said.

American culture often associates visibility with liberation, Gill-Peterson said, but the trans community’s hypervisibility in the past few decades has resulted in increasing political attacks and violence against it. In featuring a trans cast that has chosen to be upfront and willing participants in the film, Joynt said the actors have purposefully volunteered to be hypervisible, provoking viewers to reckon with what it means to be vulnerable.

By providing more questions than answers, the film intends to give those who watch it a chance to reconsider their perceptions about the trans community, Joynt said. Rather than pigeonholing them, Gill-Peterson said the film can plainly display trans peoples’ lives in all their complexity.

“Among the many things I want people to take away from (the film) is just a desire to think more complexly, a desire to treat trans people not as exceptional, not as confusing, not as riddles – but as people,” Gill-Peterson said.

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Vivian Xu | Daily Bruin senior staff
Xu is a senior staff writer for Arts & Entertainment. She previously served as the Arts editor from 2021-2022, the Music | Fine Arts editor from 2020-2021 and an Arts reporter from 2019-2020. She is a fourth-year neuroscience and anthropology student from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Xu is a senior staff writer for Arts & Entertainment. She previously served as the Arts editor from 2021-2022, the Music | Fine Arts editor from 2020-2021 and an Arts reporter from 2019-2020. She is a fourth-year neuroscience and anthropology student from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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