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.

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.

Saw this back at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival

This documentary is directed by Chase Joynt (Cool name) and it is about the media's ongoing fascination with trans people. With the film being shown through a talk show kind of format, it breathes into the life of six previously unknown stories from the archives of the UCLA Gender Clinic in the 1950s. The documentary is presented with reenactments and experimental fiction elements from actors to try and portray the exact moments that happened in the past. The make up from the trans actors all looked really good and feels almost like they were the real person at times. While I do appreciate Joynt doing his best to make this documentary artistically and engaging, but the movie becomes quite rough on the edges and it didn't feel really informative. It almost felt like if the participants were just best friends having conversations with no little to the main themes and purpose of the story.

Some of the interviews didn't feel like interviews but more like a conversation from a movie. Some of the things Joynt is trying to discuss kind of doesn't make any sense. It's a shame because there were some really good discussions and people being interviewed about the trans community and how media is alway interested about the topics of trans. But it's really doesn't do much and becomes kind of misinformed at times and boring. There are some good production and technical moments.

I honestly believe that if Joynt gave a more meaningful approach about this movie, then it would have been more interesting.

Rating: C+

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.

Academic filmmaking, not in a good way. I wanted to like it and am the right audience, so am more disappointed. The best thing about it is getting trans actors on screen (Gil-Peterson is great on screen, wish there was way more Angelica, less of the director who shows up in almost every scene for some reason). But there are better ways to do that. The storytelling is confusing. The editing is all over the place. This could have been a very good movie. But what we get is pretentious and rushed. Lotsa jargon. Lotsa postmodern meta stuff that would have made more sense, and been more original, 10-20 years ago. This content could have been interesting but it's mishandled. Not sure anyone outside of the festival crowd and certain kinds of critics will find things to like here if they're being honest. Maybe if the core story was clearer and more thought was put into putting it together, the "experimental" departures would be more meaningful, and this could actually reach beyond elite insiders.