Mary-Jane Doherty <maryjane@bu.edu>
A LITTLE DANCE
Mayara, a sixteen-year-old ballet student, lived with her mother and brother in a two-room crumbling concrete bunker in the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. One cool, bright December day in 2008 she returned from the annual Cuban National Ballet Competition, where she'd just performed miserably, and flung herself facedown onto her bed. Her mother, Natividad, plopped down beside her, stroked her back. It was quiet, so quiet you could hear the tiny scrabblings of termites in the beams overhead. A tender, private, familial moment. Well, private except for the lady propped in the corner behind a big black camera. I knew it was OK to be there though when Natividad looked up at me once and smiled.
I filmed this moment, and many such more, following Mayara, and several other high-schoolers, over four years, as they worked their way through Cuba's National High School of Ballet - famous for both its merciless regimen and for producing world-class principal dancers. My camera latched onto Mayara early on; she was the shy one, the one who hung out along the back rail, but she nevertheless had an uncanny presence.
The idea was to tell Mayara's story through a series of intimate vignettes: life at school - her classmates planting lipstick kisses on the grimy greenroom walls; her dance partner's sweaty forearms as he lifts her high; her normally austere teachers, suddenly breaking into song in the bathroom - and life at home: Natividad scrubbing leotards; kids playing baseball with a wadded up ball of masking tape and a broomstick. No politics, no interviews - nothing, in short, for the head, but something might stir in the viewer's heart, a sense perhaps of what it feels like growing up in Cuba where your family's economic viability depends on your dancing success.
And eventually, after sneaking in and out of Cuba an ungodly number of times, I had enough footage to assemble what could be called, at best, a 'Lyrical Portrait' - fun to look at but there was no story. In a plot-driven story the viewer leans forward, tense with anticipation for what might happen next. My lyrical portrait, on the other hand, felt more like a soft blanket, draped around the viewer, slumped comfortably back in her chaise. I could live with that. But, like any story that unrolls in linear fashion, whether in words or pictures, my serene portrait needed an ending, something enchanting to requite all that came before. This meant one more trip to Havana.
* * *
Mayara's story, eventually to be called Secundaria (the title means 'High School', a quiet nod to Fred Wiseman) wouldn’t break weekend box office records, but it did occasion a serious shift in my sense of self: with this film I called myself a Filmmaker for the first time. (I had to whisper it though. In third grade my art-teaching Mom told me my job was to put my head down, work hard, let others bestow appellations. 'Your worth might be evident only posthumously Dear, but don't worry, that's not the point. Now get busy.')
But to claim the filmmaking title for myself meant learning from those already entitled. I got my first chance at the copy machine of my local PBS station. This is where I was parked one day, xeroxing endlessly, grousing maybe just a little bit too audibly. What am I, the intern? Well, in fact, yes. But I was also a film graduate student at the time, which meant that, like most graduate students, I knew more than anyone else in the world, especially these world-wise PBS producers.
Six months later I got a phone call. Jeanne Jordan, heralded local editor, asked, 'Were you the intern making a fuss at the WGBH copy machine last spring?' 'Maybe,' I answered nervously. Jeanne said, "Good. I need an assistant editor for a multi-year project coming up and that person has to be fun to hang out with in the edit suite. You're it." Thus began my first job, and, ultimately, the source for every job since.
At Blackside Inc., the company producing the landmark documentary series Eyes On The Prize, I got to do important things like label rolls of film with neat block letters and splice unused scenes together. Once I even got to cut a scene. Best of all, I became an expert, albeit a temporary one, on the Civil Rights Movement. I loved being bossed around, having a structure, feeling I was part of something bigger than any one of us individually.
My Blackside job gave me confidence, more commissioned work and, eventually, a teaching job. There was no reason to leave this world except for one tiny gnawing detail - it wasn't me. My training in the arts was too deep and had been for too long. (My aforementioned Mom used to critique my childhood drawings, very few of which made it to the fridge. 'You're not looking Dear. And you have not addressed the page.' Right. Whatever that means. She was strict but she also made sure I was loved.) Consequently I saw films, whether fiction or nonfiction, the same way I saw paintings: as a lovely tense flip flop between form and content. I appreciate incisive groundbreaking journalism but, when it comes to making a film, content alone is not enough: the composition, the light, the rhythm of the scene - the formal elements of film must tell the story in equal measure.
With paintings I understood the form/content relationship intrinsically and from the get-go. With films I learned it through many trials and one particularly enlightening error. Early on I had made a series of fun and frothy short films - they were naive and so inherently honest; they held a certain charm for this reason. ('Work,' said my Mom. Ok, Ok, I'm on it.) And I made Gravity, about several MIT astrophysics grad students dashing around, looking for gravitational waves, chased by the curmudgeonly Lab Director, Rainer “Rai” Weiss. Gravity wove together intimate moments of lab camaraderie, a couple cartoons, a cow, a silly argument between Einstein and Newton - the film was an irreverent, but somehow scientifically accurate, portrait of life in an astrophysics lab. Fortunately for my audience I didn't know to make a proper science documentary. This might explain why they chuckled throughout the film.
Then I made a mistake. It turns out your ego, sometimes in cahoots with your brain, can dull the eyes and the ears, clog up the works. You see and hear what you want to see and hear, not what is actually there. My next film, Oh My God,was, yes, about God. (Why not throw in the history of the universe while you're at it?) I filmed fascinating people - a comedian, a radical female priest, a young Black gospel singer, an itinerant Buddhist - then strung them all together according to their words. Brilliant! But I had to sit among the audience at its theatrical premier, watch the film through their eyes, squirm during the awkward silence following the final credit roll, before my head could accept what my heart already knew: my film was a dud. Oh My God had some poetic visual and aural moments, but they were just that - moments, stepping-stones
meandering through a swamp with no clear view of a way out. Not to worry. I'll figure it out with my next project.
By that point, though, I was busy, too absorbed in teaching, child-rearing, house renovating to spend time stewing about my crummy film, or contemplating the next. I was, in other words, perfectly positioned to be knocked sideways by an epiphany. One day I snapped open the New York Times, caught a tiny blurb about a group of Cuban ballet dancers defecting to the states. Wait. What are classical ballet dancers doing in Cuba in the first place? Suddenly I saw the whole thing: the dancers' limbs carving up the frame into tantalizing patterns, tons of movement - giving the camera, therefore, something to do - and, of course there's the seductive pull of Cuba itself, as an 'illegal' destination. Now thisis a movie. I considered dress options for the Oscars, then folded up my newspaper and got to work.
An epiphany, the soul-shifting kind, frees you up to enjoy the process of filmmaking. (If you don't find joy in the process then you're stuck with finding joy in outreach and marketing. Not so easy.) My Cuba filming trips were filled with moments of elation (dancing on the seawall,) moments of terror (two muggings,) moments of great tedium (nine hours trapped in the Cancun airport) but, in the end, the bumps and valleys leveled out beneath the overarching calm of knowing I had the long game well in hand.
When you sink into the moment, revel in the process, you can then work open-endedly, flounder about in time and space. This freedom encourages curiosity, the courage to toss agenda aside and explore and, even more critically, perceive the complexities of human nature, the precise sensibility you need when making a film about real people. George Saunders says of the writer Grace Paley, "She loves what she sees, just as it is, and is in favor of it being even more itself. How do we know she loves it? By how precisely she describes it."[1] The more I filmed in Cuba, the more I began to identify with my film subjects, see things through their eyes; they became my partners in the filmmaking process. Instead of 'capturing' shots, I 'received' them - like gifts. Maybe I can relay this sensibility to my viewers, so they too connect with my film subjects? I'll find out once I actually finish the film, shoot that final scene.
* * *
After four years of training, Mayara, much to everyone's surprise, had emerged as the most accomplished dancer in her class. Upon graduation she, along with several others, was sent out to the world - to Italy, South Africa, and Canada - to showcase the Cuban ballet program. In Toronto, I filmed the star students at the National Ballet School, gave Mayara a big hug, then flew down to Havana several days ahead of the students' expected return. My plan was to film Mayara's triumphant arrival, her mother's warm embrace, an endearing emotional moment to close out my lyrical portrait.
I set up in the arrivals lobby of the Havana airport. My back and neck ached with dread, waiting for a security guard to tap me politely on the shoulder, then snatch my equipment. But I concentrated on my frame, filling it with a tight shot of Mayara's mother, Natividad, as she stood silently behind the barrier, her eyes locked with anticipation. The glass arrival doors finally whispered open, the teenage dancers filed through, then the doors closed. No Mayara. Sudden quiet as the realization struck home, then sudden chaos - a Robert Altman-esque scene, with teachers, parents and students all yelling at the same time. It seems the students had taken a field trip to Niagara Falls one day prior; Mayara had slipped away unseen and walked across the International Bridge to the US side, receiving asylum forthwith. Later I learned that although professional Cuban ballet dancers defect almost as a matter of routine, so far no high school student had done the same: Mayara was the first.
I filmed Mayara's devastated family in Havana, I filmed her teachers, some of whom accused me of being Mayara's accomplice, and, finally, I flew to Miami, to film Mayara herself. I worried about how I'd find her - surely traumatized, isolated, lost. Not quite. "I've been planning this escape for years," she told me calmly, while brushing her hair. "You grow up the way I did, you'd find a way out too." Shy, sweet Mayara it seems, had another side, a shrewd confidence she'd kept hidden from her teachers, her friends and yes, me, her devoted (and maybe not so perceptive after all) filmmaker.
And suddenly I had a story. My erstwhile lyrical portrait, with its target audience of about twelve people, had turned into a dramatic tale, shaped around a complicated central character, that unfurled now almost effortlessly. And, sure enough, eventually I found myself on stage at Lincoln Center, having just screened Secundaria, waiting for the Q and A to begin. I listened to the applause during the final credit roll: this time it was genuine and warm.
* * *
Secundaria landed in my lap with its essential cinematic elements already built in: the story told itself. If you have to conjure up plot points, wedge artificial devices into your otherwise fluid tale, you risk exposing your presence as director and the magic of the film poofs away. Your audience doesn't want to notice how they've become immersed into this new world, they just want to be there.
[Start Text Box]
Secundaria's essential cinematic ingredients:
Location. Havana's pastel colors come in a range of hues, but all are uniformly low- valued, muted to the same degree. (Martha Stewart built her empire on this simple production design formulation.) Also, the afternoon light, deflecting from the harbor, slants into the narrow streets, extending golden hour by several hours. Finally, the architecture - neo-classical decaying mansions with archways, balconies, laundrY lapping across tall narrow windows - these graphically strong lines locate your frame edges for you. The way to capture a great shot in Cuba is to find the Record button on your camera and push 'On.' Or so it seemed.
Characters. Mayara is shy, but wait a minute, is she really? Her hidden persona, her identity shifts, transform her from being simply a lovely teenage ballerina, one of many in fact, into a complex human being. Your audience can't get attached to a one- dimensional person - there's nothing to hold onto - but if they're locked in, they'll go along for the ride, no matter how long. This is our job as filmmakers, to unpeel the layers, let the idiosyncrasies wriggle forward, reveal the details of what makes one person be this person.
Time. Give any project enough time and something will happen. In Secundaria's case, this 'something' happened, but only after four years of filming. And it doesn't matter how dramatic the 'something' is as long as you jigger the audience's expectations accordingly - build the set up, that is, in proportion to the payoff. With too much set-up the audience feels let down at the climax; with too little, the audience feels blindsided (sometimes insulted) by the sudden, and thus gratuitous, arrival of the turning point.
An Engine. This is the element I forgot to install in my erstwhile dudd-ish God film. Ideally you tuck your audience into the draft created by your forward moving story, pulling them helplessly along. Doesn't have to be much, a big roaring thing, but it has to be there, a central dilemma pushing against a constraint in either time or space.
Even when Secundaria was in its Lyrical Portrait stage, before its eleventh-hour story shift, it nevertheless chugged along, hanging on the question: who will make it through four grueling years of high school? Mayara's defection merely served to up the ante, sharpen the film's narrative contours.
With an engine quietly rumbling underneath, your story can then digress, wander into side alleys, where you've stored delicious character-enhancing details, without your viewers feeling lost. We rarely the notice the engine, in other words - except when it’s not there.
[End Text Box]
These days I'm filming Rai Weiss, the lab director featured in my ancient film, Gravity. Back in 1985, the idea of actually detecting a gravitational wave was unimaginable, a mere twinkle in Rai's eye. But the story was never about scientific discoveries; the idea was simply to immerse the audience into the arcane and insular world of an astrophysics lab. I finished the film, screened it several times, happily accepted an award, then put it to bed: this story was over.
Except it wasn't. In 2015, Rai found one, a bona fide gravitational wave, for the very first time. Then he won the Nobel Prize. As mentioned earlier, if you let enough time pass something's bound to happen. In this case, that meant thirty years. That's OK, I had things to do in the interim. I dashed back to MIT to film an update to the original story.
Rai is ninety years old now; spry, sharp, shows up to his lab everyday, mostly to yell at science funding foundations and to nurture the next generation of scientists. During my most recent shoot I poked him a little, hoping he'd share his feelings on his sudden worldwide fame. He frowned, said, "Nobel, Schnobel. This is not the point. Let me tell you, many people have wondered how we stuck with this experiment for so long." Then he smiled. "Of course we never would have if it hadn't been any fun." He's got that right.
[1] George Saunders, “Grace Paley, The Saint of Seeing,” The New Yorker (March 3, 2017)
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/grace-paley-the-saint-of-seeing