Interview with Zanne Aglio, Director of Livealoner Feeding
Interview by Sharieka Botex
Copy Edited and Posted by Iliana Cosme-Brooks
Your short film Livealoner Feeding seems to be a story focused on the performance of mundane activities like washing dishes and essential practices like eating and drinking. Can you tell us about how you see those as themes audiences will particularly relate to right now?
Looking at the piece a year out, now with the virus also a year old, I’d still think it’s about a moment in the day of a life of a Livealoner. I made it just before the virus captured our attention, so I’d too be curious how today’s audiences would receive it. I feel somewhat removed from the notion of “audiences” more generally—I don’t really know what that term refers to.
The film is part of a series called LiveAloner shorts in which I use a feminist lens to question the things we do every day. Here’s the artistic statement of the series:
This series of shorts is a feminist manifesto of liberation*, depicting everyday acts
as defining gestures of emancipation. The series challenges stereotypes of aging women and heteronormative coupling, ubiquitous even in the LGBTQ community.
It defies the obligation to be and appear busy and rejects the 24/7 hyper-productive flow of neoliberalism, in which woman is captive to a system dominated by labor exchanged for ever-inferior goods and designed to harm human health and the environment.
Time is felt in opposition to the delusion of having no time; a state which inevitably isolates and insulates the livealoner.
“Livealoner,” coined by American author Marjorie Hillis in “How to Live Alone and Like It” (1936), is a moniker for the lived experience of 21st century women in late-capitalist society.
*Liberation feminism (as compared with equality feminism) is about self-determination and self-definition—the freedom of women “to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate” Germaine Greer (The Whole Woman, 1999).
The thing with this piece, and hopefully all of them, is that the audience views them in the Livealoner context gained from the artistic statement. Without that the pieces are probably meaningless, which is part and parcel of the decontextualizing world we inhabit in 2021, a world I’m critical towards—critical in the sense of Critical Theory.
In your film’s synopsis on Vimeo, you state that “Livealoner Feeding depicts an act of being in an infinite gesture of becoming: being as a gestural activity.Making and eating one’s own bread expresses more than caring for self. It defies the obligation to be busy, to multitask. It rejects the 24/7 hyper-productive flow of neoliberalism in which women are captive in a system of working to purchase ever inferior goods, which ever more damage human health and the environment.” How did those ideas affect the way in which you shot and edited the film?
The project grew out of my personal situation and my reflections on it. That was the initial gesture or “act”—deciding to make an everyday activity of mine the subject. I have to say the impetus came after seeing Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. I was enthralled with that film, and from her I took the long takes and uninterrupted focus on the doing in real time and space. Though, I didn’t have the courage to leave the piece longer; I tried but I myself got bored watching it. As it is, the washing up shot is about 17% of the entire film. Was my boredom authentically mine or a concern about the viewer’s? A little of both. But I don’t juxtapose boredom with being entertained—interesting or engaging are words I might use.
Getting back to the premise, I didn’t want the shooting and editing to become laborious, like work or something I didn’t want to do and thus “suffered” over, which again is about rejecting the social context we’re confined to in word and deed.
What was your filmmaking process for Livealoner Feeding? How did you go about finding and directing your crew, and how did you edit the film in order to get as close as possible to the film’s message?
This was a one-person show from start to finish. The concept for the film series came from Marjorie Hillis’ 1936 book How to Live Alone and Like It. Up until then I was making “micro” films of random experiences and things I find interesting and amusing. I call them Particulari della vita (Life’s particulars), and they are collected here. The Livealoner pieces were the first for which I began with a premise, so the entire process was new to me. I didn’t really know what I was doing, which in some ways is better, and I’m satisfied with how it turned out.
How long did it take you to film and create the film? Is there any symbolism behind putting applesauce on the bread, or drinking what appears to be both a hot and cold beverage?
I think it was less than an hour total to film; once I got the camera set up I pressed the button and let it roll. Editing, of course, took longer and was a matter of trimming back and cutting out pieces. In watching the film now, I can see how those elements could be perceived as symbolic, but in all honesty they were simply part of the experience. I suppose a viewer could deduce that this woman is not poor, that she eats healthfully. But, on the other hand, I’d want the viewer to find their own symbolisms.
In the film, there is no dialogue, but the character expresses satisfaction through an “Mmm” and by continuing to eat the slice of bread until it is finished. That made me think about how satisfying it is to eat something that we ourselves created. Was that part of your intention for Livealoner Feeding?
Yes, I wanted to convey in the piece an overall sense of satisfaction with living alone and to destigmatize it a bit. I could get into a lengthy polemic about self-care and women as primary caregivers in a society that pays lip service to what it means to care—to be caring. Those are the subtexts and backdrops of the series.
There is an explicit focus on the hands of the character in the film without the face being explicitly visible, with the exception of an instance where there is a glimpse of the character’s face. Can you tell us about your choice to film the story that way, and how you hope audiences will engage with it?
I love the work of Robert Bresson for the way he exploits the limitations and magic of the medium, capturing what the human eye can’t, and in doing so, creating a compelling cinematic experience. That’s what I aspire towards. And in this film, the hands and their doing are the subject, not the person like you’d expect. The title “Livealoner” sets that expectation up. But why do what’s expected? The focus on the hands and the doing derives from this premise. There’s also the creativity and hopefully artistry inherent in the limitations you have, you know, with the practicalities of a project. I filmed this project with an iPad, I’m not an actor, and my cinematography and editing skills are what they are.
The film’s title alludes to our current isolation and to the experiences so many of us are undergoing as we live alone right now. What has your pandemic experience been like and how has it influenced this film and other aspects of your creative life?
It’s strange looking at the film now from within the pandemic. I don’t think I’m suffering anywhere near as much as I hear other people are. I’m quite content being home and connected with the world as I am. I’ve been working on a number of projects—music mostly—and appreciate the relative silence all around, the absence of the frenzy of life. I did a short video and musical piece related to the virus. Both are on my Vimeo and Soundcloud channels.
Do you have any other projects you’re working on right now that you can share with us?
I’m working on a piece about my surroundings here in southern California. Even though I’ve lived here on and off for the better part of 43 years, I’m still utterly fascinated with the particulars of my surroundings and want to create a “cinematic experience” with what I come up with. We’ll see what it becomes—it feels like an insurmountable task.
My first love is music; I was performing as a singer/songwriter in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’ve returned to music making recently and that occupies a good deal of space in my life. I’ve got a Soundcloud channel and will probably create a Bandcamp channel soon.
You can view Zanne’s work on Vimeo and YouTube. Connect with Sharieka by visiting her profile.