The essay film, as a genre, is at once one of the most celebrated and one of the most overlooked species of film. Great essay filmmakers like Dziga Vertov, Jonas Mekas and Chantal Akerman have been lauded by critics, academics and filmmakers throughout film history, all the way up to the present day, as Sight & Sound’s most recent Greatest Films poll reminds us. And yet essay filmmaking has, by and large, remained a niche, distinctly uncommercial interest, rarely informing styles and modes of filmmaking in other genres, never crossing over into mainstream popularity.
With Framing Agnes, Chase Joynt reconfigures the essay film, albeit in an attempt to reconfigure other materials, specifically the talk show and the recorded history of trans people in America. Rather than exhibit the fruits of his evidently extensive labors, his provocative new documentary exhibits the labors themselves, alongside nakedly artificial reconstructions of the histories he uncovers and unpicks herein. It’s less an essay film, more a scrapbook of musings from across a spectrum of contemporary trans lives, seen through the prism of trans histories.
It’s an intriguing experiment. It’s also a failed experiment. Framing Agnes is a shallow film, undoubtedly inquisitive yet strangely unexploratory. Joynt’s objective is multi-stranded: to parse through the archives of the UCLA Gender Clinic from the 1950s; to use transcripts and recordings of trans subjects in a deeply flawed study from the time to construct re-enactments starring prominent trans actors from today; to wax, along with fellow participants in this exercise, about what their findings illuminate about trans lives both then and now; and, throughout, to document this process, to make Framing Agnes its own making-of. It’s an ambitious work but its ambition is undercut, not by its brief running time but by a decision to fill that running time with vapid rumination and lazy theorizing.
There’s bountiful potential in turning one’s camera on oneself to comment upon the nature and quality of one’s work, but Joynt isn’t apparently interested in this. Indeed, his metatextual concerns seek to comment upon very little at all, instead offering an opportunity for him and his collaborators to muse on their personal feelings about their own lives. In this, they’re at least enlightening but, when the focus turns to the subjects in the UCLA study, their level of insight is rarely any deeper than the average viewer might themselves glean upon a mere cursory glance at the re-enactment footage. Framing Agnes thus repeats itself frequently during its limited duration and, rather than add emphasis, the perspectives of present-day trans persons upon the lives of their forebears only serves to allow them to eclipse their subjects, rendering their stories secondary in a film that purportedly strives to center them.
And everything’s just so banal! Any filmic potential in all of this material is wasted on pretty costumes and winsome cinematography, while the meat of the material is simply laid out in front of us and explained in minimal detail. It’s all abstract and theoretic rather than vibrant and cinematic, the ideas explored not made part of the text of Framing Agnes so much as they’re plainly read aloud to the audience. To add insult to injury, the re-enactments are painfully poor – even if their staginess is intentional, the standard of performance from the cast, Joynt particularly, is embarrassingly low.
If there’s something to be made of that staginess – and there is, from the inherent incapacity of re-enactors to fully reconstruct the truth of events they witness to the expressive potential of fictionalization, from the connection between their performative quality and the perceived performativeness of living as trans to a heteronormative society (indeed, this is even discussed in the film but this link is never explored) to the validity of artifice as an artistic and communicative tool – it’s certainly not made here. Joynt is engaging in utter earnestness in a vacuous, rudimentary academic exercise, lacking in rigor and high on its own fumes, its various quirks and layers lacking in purpose and high in triviality. At one point, his producer and co-writer asks of one of their actors, following an observation on the life of his character, “What do you think about that?” It’s a blunt, basic inquiry, absent of any substantial academic purpose or awareness of artistic shaping and it’s characteristic of this film as a whole.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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