Thinking About Fairies

When we all play together we feel like superheroes and we can conquer anything.
—Lizzie, Kick Like a Girl

“I don’t like making films. It’s too boring.” Just four years old, Ella Rosenblatt is facing fundamental questions that sooner or later face every artist. How dedicated is she to her art? What is her art? How is her identity wrapped up in her art? And what the heck was she thinking when she embarked on this project anyway?

Ella happens to be the daughter of innovative independent filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose work frequently takes up questions of identity and art. Thus her participation in his new project, Beginning Filmmaking, is not entirely unexpected. Neither is her erratic interest in it, as she is just four, and has better things to do, for instance, “thinking about fairies.” Still, he has reason for imagining her investment, however fleeting. As the opening images reveal, at just 18 months old, she not only expressed interest in daddy’s work, but also declared her desire to be a filmmaker: “Yeah,” she smiles when he asks if this is so, “Oh, yeah!” When she receives a camera as a birthday present two and a half years later, she hopes it’s the “magic wand” she’s asked for. “Not quite,” says daddy. But, the film goes on to show, just maybe.

Beginning Filmmaking is the first of three short documentaries about girls premiering on HBO on 28 May at 5:30pm. Along with Jenny Mackenzie’s Kick Like a Girl, about a Salt Lake City soccer team, and Amy Schatz’s Hard Times for an American Girl, about kids’ efforts to understand the Great Depression, it explores the delights, concerns, and complexities of girls’ lives. All three films feature lively subjects deeply engaged in their worlds, sometimes struggling, sometimes thrilled, always learning.

Ella Rosenblatt’s story covers a year in her incipient “career,” as she patiently puts up with her father’s investments. “What did I say was the most important thing about making a film?” he asks near the start of Beginning Filmmaking. To have an idea, she answers dutifully, even writing the word on a whiteboard. Her ideas change over the course of his film, from sucking a lollipop (when he wonders, “Is that because you want to suck a lollipop and you’re using the movie as an excuse?”, she readily admits this is it exactly, thus demonstrating how many filmmakers come to their ideas) to a complicated set-up where she’s watching a movie on TV about someone else watching a movie on TV about someone else watching a movie on TV, etc. “I like that idea,” says Jay. She stretches and smiles.

Ella’s perception of the connections between watching and making have to do with her own multiple roles—in her daddy’s life (and idea) as well as her own. “Do you understand what focus is?” he prompts her, meaning both the clarity of an image and concentration on her “idea.” She sighs, yes. “I’m out of focus,” she says. Ella develops a fascinating and aptly changeable relationship with her camera, speaking to it variously like a confidante and a frustratingly silent observer (“Why don’t you listen to me? Please say hello”). When, a year later, she begins to film herself anticipating her fifth birthday, Ella’s attitude changes. “In five days,” she says, leaning close to the lens. “That’s when I’m gonna be five.” She loves that anticipation and, she tells her camera, “I love you too.” At least until she comes up another creative hurdle and has to think and feel her way through another set of questions about her wonderful, challenging, and utterly enthralling art. 

The art of the Mighty Cheetahs is something else. A girls’ soccer team so good they beat all their intra-league rivals for two years, they decide one season to play against the boys’ teams. As Lizzie describes it, her mom, Coach Jenny, “wanted us to have real competition.” The girls, their new opponents, and various parents all offer opinions on the experience. “Sophie’s mom” admits, “My immediate reaction was, ‘These poor boys: if they win, they’re supposed to, if they don’t, it’s really embarrassing’.” Indeed. As the kids and their parents soon learn, cultural investments in gender expectations are hard to shake.

The film tracks the season in more or less chronological order, with game montages and voiceover observations on the action. While it includes some obvious commentary from sports psychologist Dan Freigang (“Boys are encouraged to take risks and girls have traditionally been protected more. Girls want to be able to cooperate communicate and they value the emotional component. Boys like that as well, but some of the cultural things come true… that’s squashed out of the boys and reinforced in the girls”), the film offers a galvanizing focus on the girls and boys’ own descriptions of their experiences. As the girls come to see themselves as teammates, their commitment to each other overtakes their focus on winning. “When I’m on the field,” says Ally, “it just flushes all the grumpiness and madness out of my body.”

Hard Times for an American Girl is structured by its tie-in with the character and franchise product “Kit Kittredge,” opening on girls in party dresses with cake and candles and “All American” dolls. Aside from this rather intrusive point of reference, however, the documentary is both instructional and expressive, as kids interview grandparents and artists (like Pete Seeger and Faith Ringgold) about their experiences in the Great Depression. “It was a time,” offers one little boy, “when everything in the U.S. just went completely wrong.” Though the documentary was made before today’s “recession” became so acute, it highlights relevant, if reductive, “lessons.” “I think it must have affected my life to see people suffer that way,” says 85-year-old Betty Teslenko, “And know that’s not the way the world should be”; “Be happy while you can,” submits Evelyn Pillinger. 

The kids conducting the interviews come with pads and pencils and good questions. “Do you think the Depression affected the way you are today?” asks 10-year-old Cora. Six-year-old Kason wonders, “Did you eat nachos and dip them in the salsa?”, before he offers to bring Ringgold some 21st century foods so she can see how tasty they are. She thanks her interviewer warmly. Filmmaking, like life, is a process and set of exchanges, sharing times and ideas.