Brooklyn/The Making Of: Sometimes a song can break a curse (or two)

Moving forward on my next film, a longer documentary, I want to thank everyone for supporting my short film Brooklyn. You’ve given me energy to continue. Brooklyn has been honored at numerous festivals (see below) and won awards for Best Narrative Short, Best Editing and Best Music Video. I’ve learned so much.

People have asked for more information about the process, so here is The Making Of…

The film, if you haven’t seen it yet:

Pictured above: my grandmother Roxie with her father, Walter, taken early in the 20th century.

Maybe if I had really looked at this picture as a child, I would have understood her better. Unfortunately, we weren’t close when she was alive. Literally “straight-laced” in a corset until her dying day, she seemed out of touch with her own body and modern life, a relic of the past, everything I rebelled against as a teenager. It didn’t help that I had to share a bedroom with her for five years when I was a pre-teen and teen, which was torture (for both of us). She passed away when I was 17 and honestly, I was too busy living to miss her then, but life has a strange way of taking us around in spirals until we learn what we’re supposed to learn. Or we don’t, and the next generations inherit the mysteries.

I never really thought much about Roxie until I ran into a wall as a younger woman. I had made several of my dreams come true, exploring the world and making a living as a singer in Paris, but my relationships were a mess and it looked like I’d never have a family. Lying down on a psychiatrist’s couch would have felt like submitting to antiquated patriarchy, so to clean up my act, I turned to more holistic forms of self-exploration based on body work, imagery, and story telling. This led me to research my birth and family tree as a way to reconstruct myself from scratch, the idea being that old secrets are like short circuits in our aliveness and unlocking them glues our broken pieces back together so we can become our truer selves. I realized there were blanks in our family history, especially on the female side. Was that why I didn’t feel fulfilled as a woman?

I’d always heard that grandmother Roxie was an orphan. Her mother had died when she was born. Her father took her to be fostered by her childless aunt Emma, who pushed little Roxie aside when she unexpectedly had a daughter of her own. Roxie’s father died when she was 12. Because Roxie had not felt loved, she was not affectionate herself. She looked stern in all her pictures as a mature woman and had confided to her daughters that marriage meant “conjugal duties,” endless childbearing and household chores. In my eyes, Roxie was the epitome of downtrodden, unhappy womanhood.

But was there more to the story? I needed to find out.

When I interviewed my mother about my birth, it opened a floodgate of details about herself and all the other women in our family tree, things no one ever talked about, taboo subjects for those times, limiting them and their self-worth, casting what people used to call “a curse.”

I found out my mother Ruth was stillborn and my grandmother Roxie almost bled to death giving birth to her. It was a case of placenta previa, a death sentence back in the days of home birth, with a doctor in attendance if you were lucky. My grandmother started haemorrhaging before my mother was even delivered and when she did emerge she was pronounced dead and placed on the floor wrapped in newspaper while the physician tried to save my grandmother. A female relative in the room saw my mother kicking off the newspapers, said “That’s the livest dead baby I ever saw!” and scooped her up. Miraculously, baby and mother both survived, but what a way to come into the world! As an adult, my mother then had a fraught relationship with her body and many difficulties getting pregnant, which resulted in a diagnosis of sterility. In this context, my arrival was very complicated, a long story for another time. Let’s just say I knew when I heard the details that I had work to do if I wanted to have a family myself. Among other things I had to go back in time and reframe my grandmother’s story, view her as a survivor rather than a victim, so I could do the same for myself.

My mom showed me an old clipping she’d kept in the attic, it was Roxie’s mother’s obituary. “Miss Blanche Johnson left her job… for Brooklyn, where Mr. Walter Crossthwaite’s position indicated a happy prosperous fate…” Somewhere in our home there had always been a beautiful picture of my grandmother as a little girl, in a long white dress, but I had never been curious before. I found it and engraved the image along with the words from the clipping in my heart. They turned into my song Brooklyn, about that beautiful little girl appearing and setting me free.

I was able to find my partner and have our Valentine (with help from the medical establishment). This was an amazing victory and a blessing. The curse was unlocked, at least on one level: I became pregnant again but had a miscarriage and couldn’t conceive. Another wall. A deeper level to the curse? More research needed.

I put out the word on the family grapevine. My aunt Peggy got in touch to say she had an old family album to show me, but she lived hundreds of miles away from the rest of my East Coast family, in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania (a real place). So my partner and I arranged a road trip there with Valentine and for the first time, I saw vintage photographs of my grandmother Roxie as a tiny baby, pictures of her parents Blanche and Walter as newlyweds, and all their relatives. During our visit, I found out that my aunt Peggy’s daughter, my cousin Kim, was adopting a little boy in Russia. That connection led to finding our son Ivan there three and a half years, and many bureaucratic battles, later.

All this kept me very busy, leaving little energy for music.

My song, Brooklyn, was not a hit with my record company, but got picked up for a popular French TV series, Sous le Soleil. Thanks to years of reruns, the song title kept popping up on my royalty statements like a wink from my grandmother.

I uploaded the track to a music platform in 2012 and it has been my most streamed and downloaded song on the internet (sometimes without crediting me). More and more pictures and stories of Roxie kept surfacing, especially when my parents downsized: Roxie as a yeomanette during WWI, among the first women to ever serve in the military. Living on her own, away from family, she met her future husband who had also just joined the Navy. The war ended before they were mobilized. They married and Roxie became a housewife, but she had been an independent working girl for a time, then had five children and pulled them through the Depression and WWII to adulthood. I began to imagine her in a different light, as a hero rather than a martyr, and I could do the same for myself with love and thanks to my beautiful grandmother and all the women in our line. I understand her remarks about marriage and childbearing as a reflection of her time. She was right to want more!

Meanwhile, recording came back into my life when some British musician friends invited me to sing “Margaritas at Midnight”. Rethinking the lyrics from a female perspective, it made it a playful vignette I turned into a music video in 2019. Casting my partner, Lewis, as Margarita God and working with audiovisual genie Krysed was a blast. Selected at music festivals in Paris and the UK, it got thousands of Youtube views, whetting my appetite for more filmmaking. With time on my hands during confinement, I taught myself how to use Final Cut Pro and drew a storyboard for “Brooklyn,” which had been in the back of my mind for a long time.

Recipe for a video:

Through the musician grapevine, I heard about websites that generate images to music. You could upload your MP3 along with keywords and technical options such as speed, lighting, lenses, filters, atmosphere… and you’d get visuals. Of course I jumped in and experimented. The first results were a mish-mash of random snippets completely unrelated to my song: Tex Avery animation, a gymnast moon-walking, someone falling into a pool, etc. I deleted those and tried again, focusing on key lyrics: moon, 1900, Brooklyn, love, little girl. This is when things got interesting. There was still a lot of irrelevant stuff, obviously selected by an algorithm: from a Beyoncé concert to guys playing basketball, to an Adam Sandler press conference, to a girl removing her bikini on a beach, to 70’s concert footage, to Leonardo di Caprio in Wolf on Wall St, to a kid falling off a skateboard…But along with it were eclipses, Apollo 11 shots and vintage re-colored films that were vaguely familiar, but unidentified… I repeated the experiment and got more test videos with weird and wonderful stuff. Hours on Final Cut allowed me to weed out the garbage and keep the pearls, intertwining visual threads.

I researched stock photo databases and selected shots of 1900’s Brooklyn, Gibson girls, and my grandmother’s hometown, Bellefonte, PA.

I scanned and inserted old family photos.

On my iPhone, I shot an antique candlestick on a midnight blue-sequined background, with and without family portraits.

On a hunch, I researched French magician and film pioneer Georges Méliès and confirmed that the vintage sequences selected by the algorithm were excerpts from his films, A Trip to the Moon, Fairyland, or the Kingdom of the Fairies, The Spider and the Butterfly, The Vanishing Lady, The Astronomer’s Dream, or the Man in the

They all related poetically to the scenario and gave me a fascinating initiation into cinema history as a bonus. However the clips provided by the algorithm were so pixellated I couldn’t use them. Instead, I downloaded better copies from YouTube, enhanced the resolution and cut them in.

To make the different threads more coherent, I used a video effects tool to add sepia tones to all the vintage family and stock photos, saturated and color matched the Apollo and Meliès footage.

Weeks of editing, synchronizing and adding titles later, Brooklyn the film was ready.

This song broke 2 curses for me, won awards and set me on the road to making my next film, a documentary entitled A Man and a Million Trees.

Festival honors…more to come…

Originally published at http://thankyouparis.wordpress.com on June 16, 2022.