Desire Lines For me, watching Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, which won this month’s Sundance Special Jury Award in the NEXT competitors, was a visual breath of fresh air. No holds barred interviews with transgender people of all hues and genders who find themselves drawn to men are combined with a hypothetical plot involving a real archive ( including cruelly buried history, like the tale of author/activist Lou Sullivan, who was the first transgender man to openly identify as gay ). The result is a thrilling look back in time, and to the existing and possible prospect, to show how, in the words of the chairman, “gender and sexuality animate each another”.
Post-Sundance Filmmaker spoke with Rosskam, a lifelong actor and tutor, to find out everything about how to examine queer background through a trans lens. After playing the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival and BFI Flare, Desire Lines will display at the approaching Wicked Queer, Cleveland International, Milwaukee, Dallas International and Maryland movie events.
Filmmaker: In your author’s speech, you claim that your movies “use complex and nonnormative buildings exactly because I use complex and nonnormative buildings to understand myself and the earth around me.” Is this why it was important for you to include the fictional element in what could otherwise have been a more” straightforward” archival history doc, or even a ( much- needed ) Lou Sullivan biopic?
Rosskam: The short answer is yes. Another solution is that I tend not to find” easy” sheets — including films — especially powerful. I think they lean toward providing some kind of complete “answer” about a historical figure or subject, and I find questions far more engaging than ( singular ) answers.
The most intriguing movie is a riddle I’m not sure I’ll be able to piece together until the very last second when I say it’s finished. Additionally, with Desire Lines as well as with some of my previous films, I did n’t think the story could, or should, be told through one genre, different filmic modes of address ask different things from the audience. I wanted to approach this issue with a lot of scope because I felt like it had a lot to ask of all of us.
Filmmaker: You even say in your speech,” Things I think about often when I turn the camera on someone other than myself is,’ What kind of energy active exists there. What danger might the questions I ask actually cause for the viewer to be in front of the camera? I believe non-cisgender people are particularly sensitive to power dynamics because many of us are drawn to the gender-free space of BDSM, which makes me curious to learn how you approach or frame the contentious questions and difficult subjects. What does that actually look like?
Rosskam: This is a very hard question to answer. It brings up a conversation I was just having with my partner about moderating conversations and “holding space.” How hard it seems to describe what qualities make someone good at this while also acknowledging that we both identify as people who do those things well.
I think what makes someone good at this, in part, is the ability to actually be present to all of the dynamics, which are largely unspoken, happening in a space. There is very little in our culture that prepares us to be present and attentive to the micro-movements and meta-communications that are constantly happening.
But that’s what I try to do when I show up to interview someone. I spend time speaking with the person in advance about what they can anticipate and what they might need from me in order to appear as their true selves. In order to minimize dynamics and ensure that the crew’s identities are as small as possible, I try to keep the crew as small as possible. In the case of Desire Lines, we used crews that reflected our participants ‘ identities whenever possible.
I really try to check as much of what an interviewee might say as possible and be present for what is actually happening in the space between us, which would be disingenuous to say. This also implies that I am aware that people may be responding to what they believe I want to hear, or what feels appropriate and safe for them to share with me given our respective identity positions and access to power, whether intentionally or not.
Filmmaker: I think this is the first movie I’ve seen that actually addresses this issue from the perspective of transmasculine, despite trans women having been criticizing cis gays and lesbians for misogyny and transphobia since at least Sylvia Rivera’s” Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech. Did you, however, hesitate at all to include anything that might be perceived as blatantly smoking a negative light on the LGBTQIA + community in light of the current anti-trans and anti-queer backlash from the conservative components of straight cisgender society?
Rosskam: Yes. Sincerely speaking, it could have been a movie that was much more critical of cis gay men and their misogyny, but I did n’t want to foster further divisions between cis and trans men, and I also did n’t want to pretend these relationships are n’t so difficult.
And not just that; I also thought a lot about what people said in a room with other trans people and what really needed to be said in front of the general public. A number of things people revealed on camera shocked me and undoubtedly made for” good cinema” but I feared that right-wing conservatives might interpret their statements in their seemingly endless and utterly moral pursuit of legalizing our existence.
Filmmaker: I’m also curious if you have any best practices for preventing the perilous backlash caused by the transgender and nonbinary framing. If we merely uplift trans people who adhere to the cisgender POV ( i .e., the Caitlyn Jenners of the world ), and provide visibility without significantly altering the status quo, then nothing will change.
Rosskam: Sadly, I do n’t believe I have a best way to stop trans and nonbinary people from framing them as inherently flawed and choose not to engage. The best option, in my opinion, is to not respond to a question at all when someone asks you a question and the framework on which it rests is utterly false. Perhaps a better way of putting it is: I simply operate from a trans lens, or frame, as though it is the only choice available. Otherwise, you’re correct that the status quo wo n’t change much.
Filmmaker:” Desire” is such a radical, anti- puritan word, and a feeling that needs to be reclaimed since, as you’ve noted, we’ve been taught to separate gender from sexuality when the reality is that “gender and sexuality animate each other”. ( Indeed, a lot of us only came to our gender realization through our sexual desire. ) Is this separation just another example of society’s steadfast belief in the binary? The inevitable outcome of so many cis gay and lesbian people saying “it’s who we love not how we fuck” in order to gain widespread acceptance? What’s your relationship to your film’s title?
Rosskam: Yes, this is just another false binary that people are helplessly attached to. Not just a binary, however, but a myth that these categories of identity are somehow separate from one another. This includes not just gender and sexuality, but also race, class, and nationality. All of these things co-consistent with one another in intricate but largely traceable ways. However, to name that is to truly acknowledge the” White- Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” as the organizing logic of our culture, which of course it is.
My feelings toward the movie’s title are similar to those in the movie. When I came out as trans, I experienced a shift in my desires. This was scary and, in some ways, undesirable. I did n’t want to be drawn to men in the first place. The truth is that I’ve always been drawn to all different kinds of people and bodies. However, the desire experience when occupying one body type versus another not only feels different, but it also has different social implications.
In a psychoanalytic sense, I also consider desire to exist as the driving force behind why we do anything. Not just in a sexual realm, but also in a psychoanalytic sense. Perhaps more than anything else, I desire to know]everything].
Filmmaker: Finally, I’m interested to hear what you think about XR, which many trans creators believe is novel enough to prevent our hetero-cis-sustaining society from being sucked into as much as cinema has. Could this be a better way to break free of the binary than simply stifling a format that is over a century old?
Rosskam: I think for now the answer is probably yes, it’s just not a medium I feel compelled to work in, for better or worse. But I am not an optimist, and so I think it’s just a matter of time before this space is also co- opted by the mainstream. Capitalism is a fervent beast that will eventually end everything.
