On Monday, April 14th, Ursinus students were welcomed to join the Women Authors class to make their own experimental film with guest filmmaker Jen Proctor. The event included two parts, including a hand-painted film workshop and a screening later in the day of the films made in the workshop, as well as of some of Jen Proctor’s works.
Professor and Coordinator of Film Studies Jennifer Fleeger started this iteration of her Women Authors class “with an idea to create an event that would be meaningful for the campus community and that could arise from our own interests.” Fleeger continued, “The class brainstormed a number of possibilities, beginning by considering what we cared about in the world. From this, we decided that right now, making art together would be good for our souls.”
One of the class members of Women Authors is an art major who was in particular drawn to Proctor’s wok. In deciding to invite Proctor to campus, Fleeger stated, “We so rarely consider handmade film as a form, even within film studies, so we thought it would be good for the community to have a chance not only to learn about it from a practitioner, but to experience doing it ourselves.”
Student and participant in the workshop Miara Truog Sebouhian ’25 described the workshop. During the hand-painted film workshop, there were two set-ups on either side of a table, with one side of the table featuring “a blank film where people would paint on it, do sharpie, do stencils, you were also allowed to cut into it using like an x-acto knife, and then put like ink on top of it and it would lay more of an impression.” According to Truog Sebouhian, students did little drawings of hearts and stars, and “one person did a really cool face which showed up in this like disappearing way when we actually saw the film.” On the other side of the table, students worked over top of an existing film about cowboys. Truog Sebouhian worked on the cowboy film, stating, “I’m kind of jealous that I didn’t get to do the other one because that was like completely original, but it was also fun doing rainbows over cowboys.”
During the screening portion of this event, students watched the films they worked on during the workshop, adding music in the background. Truog Sebouhian stated, “It was so fun to do it with music because we did like this classical music where it was like this romantic one and this one guy, he drew a bunch of hearts and then it got to the point with the song where it was like kind of building up and then right when it rolled over the hearts, it was like this romantic crescendo of music with the hearts and we did it completely accidentally, and it was so cool.” This portion of the event also included the screening of some of guest filmmaker Jen Proctor’s works.
“Jen is known for her experimental films, both her handmade stuff and her digital works that reveal uncomfortable truths about how our society functions. In the decades she’s been practicing as a professor, Jen has also become respected for her pedagogy and her work as Principal Investigator with EDIT Media, an organization that promotes best practices for inclusive teaching,” stated Fleeger.
“My most recent films are largely driven by an argument I want to make about how Hollywood treats certain kinds of characters – like women – or by the desire to raise awareness of a topic or issue in a creative way. I like ideas that give me a challenge, like a puzzle, whether it’s making a remix or mashup film or a documentary,” stated Proctor. “I’m also drawn to issues related to social change, such as improving the diversity of representation in film or drawing attention to historical harms of marginalized people.”
One of Proctor’s works that was screened was “Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix,” an experimental found footage work. According to Proctor’s website, “In films, as in life, the bathtub is considered a private space for women – a place not only to groom, but to relax, to think, to grieve, to be alone, to find sanctuary. For Hollywood, though, it’s also a place of naked vulnerability, where women narratively placed in harm’s way have no escape. Using appropriated movies, this experimental found footage work deconstructs the representations of women in this domestic space as historically framed in popular film.”
Truog Sebouhian found “Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix” to be an especially fascinating work, stating, “The way that she cut it, it was a totally differ- ent story than if anyone just watched those scenes separately, like she made a whole new story out of it, and it showed how the male gaze is completely manipulating these scenes.” Not only did Truog Sebouhian learn about physical forms of creating experimental film in this workshop, but she stated, “I really feel like Jen showed me really cool ways that you can take content from the world and put it into your own craft to form a new message or maybe a message that isn’t being told about media that’s already existing.”
Regarding the workshop with Ursinus students, Proctor stated, “I was impressed with how creative they were in making their hand-painted films, and they didn’t hold back in experimenting with the materials they had to work with.” Proctor hopes that the workshop inspired students to think about different ways of seeing the world and different ways of using everyday objects around them, stating, “We can create rich and provocative art with few resources, and in this case, even a whole film with some ink, paintbrushes, and an old film and cheap projector found on eBay. Importantly, though, for me, it’s all about coming up with ways to use what you have around you in a way that wasn’t intended.”
Proctor emphasized this viewpoint, stating, “Film wasn’t designed to be scratched and painted on and manipulated, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done – and indeed, it should be embraced! Seeing things from a new perspective is how innovation happens.”