Lucy Kerr
BY
NICHOLAS RUSSELL
The dancer-turned-filmmaker discusses how choreography, experimental cinema, and her Southern upbringing shaped her debut feature Family Portrait.
Family Portrait opens at Metrograph from Friday, June 28 and screens At Home from Friday, July 5, accompanied by a selection of her shorts, Five from Lucy Kerr. Lucy Kerr Selects opens at Metrograph on Saturday, June 29.
Interdependence recurs through Lucy Kerr’s steadily accumulating body of work. Traversing dance, choreography, film, and art installation, Kerr mines the relationship between people existing in a shared space and their respective behaviors. In her 2018 video installation Sensible Ecstasy, the communal experience of a theme park ride, with participants lashed together on a long train, is cut into individual slivers of subjectivity. Kerr juxtaposes three separate streams of footage on three walls, each a close-up of her subjects’ faces captured in slow motion as they ride down a rollercoaster. If cinema is an art of manipulated time, it’s also necessarily an art of atomization. What one rider feels and expresses is both intensely intimate and affected by the reactions of those around her.
Kerr is keenly interested in exploring the limits of collective experience, the varied paths to a powerful encounter that might feel far different than anticipated. As such, the strictures of ritual tend to play a large role in her work. Kerr’s 2019 performance piece Four Girl Trick derived its choreography of intertwined, load-bearing limbs from the YouTube game “Four Girl Chair Trick,” wherein four young women sit on four chairs and lean their torsos against one another’s knees while a fifth participant slowly removes each chair. What’s left, much like the afterglow of experiencing one of Kerr’s pieces, is a seemingly paradoxical freestanding structure: one that maintains the shape of its underlying conceptual architecture while leaving room for the audience’s interpretation.
In her stunning feature debut Family Portrait, Kerr brings a large Texas family together for an annual retreat where ritual and civility hide unkempt surfaces. Covid has just crossed into the cultural consciousness, the sometimes unreasonable paranoia it induces seeping into otherwise mundane, yet idiosyncratic conversations. Kerr’s Texas is a visual intervention into a staid cinematic history: rather than dusty plains, craggy mountains, and the implication of desolation, Family Portrait takes place on a lush property that opens onto a forest and skirts a flowing river. This verdant setting plays against an increasingly unsettling mood, first occasioned by daughter Katy (Deragh Campbell) in her desperation to corral her family for the titular portrait, second by mention of a family death due to a mysterious illness, and finally by the unremarked-upon disappearance of Katy’s mother. Humming beneath the cake-and-watermelon politeness of a strained familial gathering is something stranger, darker, and palpably askew, an intangible force that, in Family Portrait’s most unsettling moments, might destabilize time itself.
Over Zoom, I spoke with Kerr about her artistic career leading up to Family Portrait, how dance and experimental film continue to play out in her work, the influence of Lucretia Martel and Marguerite Duras, and the importance of fluid collaboration. —Nicholas Russell
Family Portrait (2023)
NICHOLAS RUSSELL: I want to start with a bit of your journey to directing a feature. I know you’ve done performance, installation, choreography. How does Family Portrait situate itself within your body of work?
LUCY KERR: Since making the film, I’ve really loved getting into writing. I’m working with fiction because I can incorporate my practice in performance and the body and gesture into it, and also into creating characters. I came to Family Portrait from an experimental film background and from a little bit of a documentary background, which was short-lived because I don’t think that’s my realm so much. Before coming to CalArts, I was dancing in New York, and I was doing experimental performance, choreographing bodies in space for art galleries and performance spaces in ways that were very sculptural, like large groups of people moving as a landscape.
While I was in New York, I started to go to the cinemas that the city has to offer, and was introduced to essay films and experimental films. I was really excited by how I saw these filmmakers incorporate research into their work because dance is so abstract. And I guess I was getting a little tired of the limitations of dance, of the body, and space. Film has sound and image, and you can also work with bodies and space. But you can involve text in a different way.
NR: In a key scene, a father is talking about a photograph of his father. But the audience never sees the picture. That scene serves as a microcosm of the cinematography of the movie: these long shots that allow the actors to occupy the frame in ways that draw your eye from one area to another and allow a sense of momentum to build, even though not a lot is physically happening on the screen. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.
LK: I think it came from Crashing Waves (2021), my short, because I had filmed a stunt. They had a test shoot, where they burned one of the stunt performer’s shoulders. But I didn't end up using that shot because it was just more powerful, what the image creates in your mind, what you think about and what’s off screen. I didn’t even film the photograph when we were on location, because I just knew it wasn’t going to be there. In the end, I’m happy we didn’t get it. The actor, when we were shooting that scene, was thinking about his own dad. And in the background, his son-in-law is trying to watch football. The other son-in-law is on his phone. People are in the kitchen not really listening. Creating all of that in the background behind him, life just continuing on and not listening to his own loss is part of that.
I was inspired by the film India Song by Marguerite Duras. It is more radical than Family Portrait, but the way so much is happening off screen in India Song and what we see on screen is almost like this alienation from it or this emptiness. With Family Portrait, I wanted to create these worlds in people’s minds so that they also make up what isn’t shown. I feel like, with Netflix and things that people binge, it’s so flat. There’s nothing suggested off screen. It’s boring.
Family Portrait (2023)
NR: That’s reified by the title. You don’t see the family portrait. The visual language of the film sets up this expectation that you’re never actually going to see the thing that you think you’re going to see. It says something, too, about the way that you’re doling out information throughout the movie both textually and with these little details. I could not get over that painting that’s like, “If I had some money, I’d know how to spend it.”
LK: [Kerr’s grandparents’ house] had great production design already there. That tapestry has always been there. There’s a lot of Bush and Churchill books. It’s a very bizarre mise-en-scène. And then, that tapestry, as a kid, I always looked at it and was just confused, because our family has money. On the tapestry, there are servers and people carrying things. Like, “These are the house workers that I would spend money on if I had money.” It sets up the space they’re about to walk into. There’s also some weird pillows in the main house. There’s one that was my grandmother’s that she loves that says, “I hate people who hate people.”
NR: I’m curious about your conception of the real versus the fictional, and how they play together.
LK: That was something I was constantly navigating. I wanted to make sure that people were portrayed in a nuanced way, that other characters aren’t stereotypical Texas characters. I have three sisters, like the protagonist Katy does. But all three sisters have different characteristics from all three of my sisters. And I think “my” character [Katy], too, a bit. It came from a more autobiographical place because I didn’t have a lot of experience with narrative filmmaking or screenwriting. The script was very bare bones, like 50 pages. It included mostly just the group dialogue scenes and the big choreographed scenes. But when we were on location, we would walk around with the cinematographer and with my friend Rob [Rice], who was directorial advisor and co-writer. We kind of directed the actors together. We would walk around and observe people and see what they would do in their hours off from set—maybe they would sit on the hammock or this or that?—just see what that environment with the river created, what behaviors people would do. And then we would write down ideas for scenes.
NR: As the film goes on, there’s a gradual breakdown of time and image. Can you talk about that?
LK: A lot of that second section is not so much in the script. We would do these ensemble scenes, maybe one or two a day. And then we would have some time to work with one or two people, especially if they were living there on the property. We just put it into the schedule to play around and to experiment. About halfway through the shoot, Lidia [Nikonova, the cinematographer] was like, “I think we should try some underwater.” And then these two birds were on this rock. And we were like, “Oh, that’s amazing. Let’s bring the camera.”
I really wanted to make something about Covid, but never mention it at all. The first thing I thought about when I was thinking about how to make a narrative was something that Lucrecia Martel said to me when she came to CalArts. We were talking about this film, and she was saying, “The family portrait represents a lack of conflict, so if something disturbs the creation of the image, it undermines what it represents.” It’s like what happened with Covid, disavowing our loss, disavowing all the death happening in order to keep trying to live life or keep trying to go about things as normal. But also being encouraged to go back to work so quickly without ever really being able to grieve together.
Family Portrait (2023)
