Well, I would never have interviewed any nuns on film or on tape and then have used the material without their knowing the complete context of the film. All the nuns I shot were in the public domain; they were out in the world. And I wasn't making a direct connection between any of those particular nuns and specific material in the film. I think it would be very different and completely unacceptable for me to interview nuns and then reveal their private lives, the way van der Keuken revealed the people in his film, without their permission. I gave my mother final approval of
. I certainly could have thought, 'Fuck her, she's my mother; I can do whatever I want with the material.' But if she had said that any part of that film was not permissible to use, I would have removed it. When I filmed at the convent, I very deliberately didn't show the name. I tried not to create a context by which people could identify the convent. I wanted the material to be anonymous.
I would argue that were van der Keuken to explain his politics to the people he films, they would be comfortable about appearing in his film. On the other hand, if the nuns whose images you use knew what the politics of your film were, I'd guess they would be quite horrified.
Again, this may be splitting hairs, and the nuns definitely wouldn't be interested in my hair splitting, but I made a conscious choice not to use any images of them over any explicit sexual material. I thought that would be going too far. I'm sure you're right that they would all be incensed to find themselves in the film, but what can I do? There
nuns who have either come out or have gotten involved with men and left the convent, so the issue in the film is legitimate. I don't think it's sacrilegious or vulgar to suggest that some nuns might be sexually frustrated by their vows and might go to certain extremes to break away from their past beliefs and practices.
seems related to the tradition of psychodrama and trance filmwhat P. Adams Sitney has called 'visionary film'where an entranced character (a dreamer, a 'seer'in any case, a representative of the film artist) is pursuing Beauty, Vision, whatever. The Troyano character's pursuit of the nun strikes me as an emblem of your pursuing the subject of nuns as a filmmaker.
I haven't really thought about it that way. I had already shot a fair amount of footage about nuns during the spring and summer of 1986, but it wasn't narrative material. And then in the fall I went to London and was staying with someone who had a tape of
. That film pushed me into thinking about my film more in terms of a sexual confrontation between this nun and another woman, rather than as a personal documentary about my experiences growing up Catholic.
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So in a way it is true that
functioned for me the way I had it function for Ela in the film.
I guess I thought when I was doing
that it was really about my finally coming to terms with my own fear of sex and of dealing with people about sex. The film was going to be a celebration of sex. I guess I did identify with Ela as the aggressor, the one who represented sexual freedom. And I was a little bit scornful of the nun because she embodied my fear. I think that as I went along I felt more and more for the nun, and when I was finished with the film and some time had passed, I realized the film was very much about that fear. My fear must have been pretty great for me to make a film about it.
You know, both characters look a bit like you, but like different parts of you. It's almost like one part of you is being pursued by another part, and the goal of the film is to help you bring the two parts back together, to put them in balance. At first it looks like the sensual person is following the spiritual person, although as the film develops, you realize that if the nun weren't sensual, she wouldn't be having a conflict about sex, and if the Troyano character weren't spiritual, she wouldn't be putting dozens of candles around her bed before they have sex.
I think this kind of psychoanalyzing is a problem in public discourse. Audiences don't know that much about my character and shouldn't need to. The way I would talk about these issues is to focus on one abiding problem within Catholicism, the split between the spiritual and the sexual. One of the really profound lessons I learned as a Catholicand I don't mean 'lesson' in a good sensewas that on the one hand there's a general love for the world, a love that leads one to serve the world, to serve people and God. And then there's another kind of love, a sexual love for someone. The church always splits those two things. Within the context of loving an individual in a marriage with children you are expected to serve your community, but still there is married love and, distinct from it, the love that a person within the churcha nun or a priesthas with God and toward the world. I find that terribly schizophrenic. I think it really fucks people up. I chose Peggy Healey to play the nun character because she has a very sensual face, and I wanted someone who would embody a certain sensuality within a supposedly unsensual context.
It's interesting that you introduce the Other Woman alone, not as part of a community, whereas the nun implicitly does have a community.
That's true. Toward the end of the film, when Ela gets dressed up to go out to the party, I'd planned to show her within a community, and at one point, I thought of her having a friend or a lover.
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But that sort of fell by the wayside. It is funny to have her be such a lone wolf. A very powerful thing about being a nun is that you're part of a community of like-minded souls.
To come back to the issue of sex for a moment, in a lot of public discourse sex is defined as something anarchistic and divisive. The sex drive is what ideally unites two people in a very intense way, but it creates a great
