Framing Agnes

This documentary has great source material and therefore great potential, it's really too bad that whoever is in charge of this mess decide to ruin it with some sort of artistic vision. I wanted to like it, but it's impossible. The fundamental problem is that the documentary flips between real footage, reenactments, and interviews with the actors doing the reenactments. It's this last part that really caused confusion, because it becomes difficult to determine who we're talking about or who's really doing the talking. Is it an actress in character? Out of character? A researcher? After a while I had to give up. It's a shame.

So, I was assigned this documentary for a class. The documentary is a dive into a part of American transgender history. It focused on six individuals from the 1950s, whose stories were buried within the UCLA Gender Clinic archives.

Now, the movie has a unique approach where actors reenact moments from the archives, and they've got real trans actors playing these characters, which is pretty cool. The actors would then get to talk about their own lives and experinces. But here's the thing - while we get these fascinating glimpses into the archive, it remains only that... just glimpses. The documentary focuses on the actors and the scholar commenting on the archive A LOT instead of the 6 figures from 1950s. Take Agnes, for example. She's interviewed for a whopping two years, yet we only hear a fraction of what she said. And that's where the documentary falls a bit short.

Don't get me wrong, the documentary does touch on a lot of crucial issues from the era. For instance, Georgia's story sheds light on the harsh realities faced by black trans women, who struggle with systematic harrasment on the streets and have a hard time finding employment. But also how people like her can be turned into icons and how that can be problomatic.

The best part of the documentary is the ability to hear how people from the 1950s could talk back to the dominant narrative. Barbra talked of a network of trans women and Jimmy came into the clinic as only a teen (his humor was just something else) These were great examples of what we don't understand about the 1950s. That there were trans networks back then and that trans kids existed.

There were however some missed opportunities to explore certain themes further. Religion, for example, is briefly mentioned through Georgia's evangelical background and her comment that she reads the bibile but was again completely unexplored.

Anyway, throughout the documentary, The main thing that struck me was how it handled the validity of these archival interviews. What about the discussion of the limitations of the archive?! The scholar commenting in this documentary barely scratches the surface, hinting at the amount of lies in the recorded trascript without fully delving into it. Since we know that these charachters needed to package themselves for the intreviews in a way that pass into the white heteronormative scholarly discourse, and in the case of Agnes, lie your way to get surgery. I would have enjoyed more critical analysis on this point.

Overall, the documentary is not all action-packed. Some parts drag a bit, and it's not the kind of thing I'd watch for fun. And let's talk about the pacing. There were moments where the scholarly commentary felt disconnected. The constant abstract musings on visibility versus invisibility started to feel repetitive, and I found myself longing for more focus on the archival interviews.

This was my least favorite film I saw at Sundance (Fire of Love was probably my favorite). I'm guessing the source material was interesting enough, so it's too bad it turned out this way. I can understand why the topic would impress festival critics. I'm also really glad to see more trans films coming out over the last few years (all the other ones I've seen were better than this one).

I have to be honest though, I mostly agree with the other review that says this could have been a much better film than the one that was screened. The problem is the way that Framing Agnes tells its story is confusing, and not in a way that pays back interpretation beyond what the film already tells you about itself. The pacing was off too. And it wasn't visually exciting. Somehow a 75-minute feature felt like it dragged for over 2 hours. At parts, this felt like a student film, its heart is in the right place but it fails -- and not in an interesting way.

Also I'm also a fan of reenactments and experimental fiction elements in documentaries. For a couple of decades I've seen many films blur history and fiction. Maybe the most creative and stunning and well known example was The Act of Killing. Framing Agnes tries to use reenactment to produce a counternarrative to the representation of trans people in history, on TV, and other contexts. In theory that's a promising idea. In practice it doesn't work well. What the film does just isn't as new as at least one of the reviews I read claimed. A couple of the performances are really strong, which is why I'm higher on this than the other reviewer even though I agree about the director's awkward performance. Still, the reenacted segments are both poorly integrated and the writing is mostly flat. The takeaways about trans people might have been more surprising or meaningful 10 years ago than they are now. I'm sure this film will win festival awards but I can't see it finding an audience beyond a smaller group of people who want to see a film that unfortunately isn't there.

Framing Agnes is history, a film made from archive footage that was never filmed. But acted in this way are no less believable - one of the actors points out that it is interesting that it is not known in what tone the test subjects uttered the written sentences, but no matter how a word is interpreted, one thing is important - each one was uttered by a trans woman, or some trans man at a time when the world didn't even know they existed. So limited, spoken in an office and locked in archives, they are still a revolution, because the rebellion starts from the first spoken syllable. We repeat once again - Framing Agnes is history and a very important film.

This is being shown as part of the Seattle International Film Festival.

I found this a heart-tugging dialog on gender experience, focusing on the experience of trans-gender "now" and in the past. The past experience comes from academic interviews conducted by academic researchers at UCLA, brought to life by modern trans actors. These interviews of course are limited to the questions asked in the room, and further limited by what was shared in this presentation, and thus the nature of the actual lives lived is two-dimensional. I found the interplay with the modern insights that the trans actors and academics drew from these interviews compelling and moving. In some ways, In some ways, I found the documentary to be more about them than the actual interviewees.

I watched this production with an open heart and mind. I had no known preconceptions - documentaries by far are often opinion pieces based on collected facts. They related what is seen in the eye of the "producers."

Various people have been negative on this title for various reasons. I still would recommend it being watched.

For me, "Framing Agnes" compellingly reiterates the humanity of all members of our species. People trying to live, and trying to live in their truth.