Framing Agnes

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 a weak documentary and an even worse experimental film. The focus on 1960s sociological cases of transgender people had lots of potential and could have potentially served as a powerful response to terrible representations of trans people in media. The problem is that the documentary mostly engages in ponderous, clumsy, and self-congratulatory naval gazing without yielding real insights or lessons that couldn't be gained from other, more engaging viewing. Sadly, this film doesn't work well either as an educational or experimental film. It takes a fairly familiar critical approach to archives and documentary through reflexive reenactments. But those reenactments are mostly awkward, especially in the writing and also because of some flat performances -- with the exception of successful acting from Angelica Ross and Zackary Drucker. The editing throughout the movie is also confusing and doesn't even give us stylistically meaningful confusion. This is a movie that works much better in the description than it does in its execution. I went to the opening weekend of the movie and had high hopes, but came away more bored than I expected given the topic.

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.

Anyone who believes that he/she has a good handle on understanding transgender culture and sensibilities is bound to have his/her eyes thrust wide open by this thoughtful, inventive documentary from writer-director Chase Joynt. In creating this offering, the filmmaker seeks to enliven the little-known life experiences of mid-20th Century transgender pioneers like the title character and how they blazed trails for those who followed, particularly in terms of their challenges related to acceptance and often having to trade one set of unfulfilling circumstances for another, in both cases as a result of society's rigid gender role expectations. The film also addresses how these questions were often compounded by other significant considerations, especially for minorities, such as the pervasive and persistent existence of racial inequities in the days before the Civil Rights Movement, conditions that rendered these transgender individuals virtually invisible. And the picture also shows how many of those issues have lingered to this day, with change only now beginning to emerge in some regards. This is all accomplished through an intriguing juxtaposition of the observations of contemporary transgender historians and re-created actor-portrayed interviews of community pioneers by a fictional TV talk show host who's based on UCLA sociologist Harold Garfinkel, an early researcher of this subject. Both of the foregoing elements are further intercut with interviews of the transgender performers who portray these community trailblazers, dialogues in which they provide their insights into the characters they play, as well as descriptions of events from their own life experiences. This mix of narrative components makes for an intriguing, enlightening watch, one that moves along at a refreshingly brisk pace thanks to its astute observations and economical 1:15.00 runtime. To be honest, though, as informative as the talk show sequences are (presented in a 1950-ish black-and-white format a la The Mike Wallace Interview), the use of this storytelling device feels somewhat contrived (if not more than a little precious), despite the depth of the revelations to come out of them. Still, there's ample food for thought packed into this 2022 Sundance Film Festival award winner, much of it illuminating about both this diverse community and the notion of gender itself, regardless of one's leanings.