Films and Videos | Eighty Layers of Me | Director's Statement



After working for many years as a community organizer on violence against women and girls, I decided to go to film school. The summer before I started my MFA program, my mother sold the house I grew up in. As I cleaned out my closet in my childhood bedroom, I rediscovered my high school cheerleading uniforms in an old chest. What would my feminist activist friends say about that paradox?

With Eighty Layers of Me (that you’ll have to survive), I set out to make a film that would celebrate the fact that women contain multitudes. I decided to reexamine one of the most stereotypical icons in American culture: the cheerleader. As a first-time filmmaker, I decided that I should try to learn as many technical skills as possible, without letting myself become paralyzed by the fear of mistakes. I put together a crew of mostly women, and trained folks who didn’t know how to use the 16 mm film equipment. This attitude proved useful when two crew members dropped out the day before I left to Los Angeles to film my first interview. I taught my stepdad how to record sound on a Nagra and hired the fourteen-year old neighbor, Carl, to boom. I paid him 5$ an hour (the rate he charges my parents for yard work assistance), so Carl was the only paid crew member on my set. He was so skinny he couldn’t hold the boom in the air for very long, so we fitted him in a fishing harness and had him sit on a ladder. Problem solved.

I needed to fly to New York to film the X-Cheerleaders’ performance, but my film school colleagues were too poor to accompany me. My best friend is a lawyer, who could afford the trip and said she’d learn whatever I could teach her. She shot footage with a Super-8 camera, while I used the 16 mm CP-16. I hand processed the Super-8 footage, and it turned out to be beautiful, surreal imagery that provides many layers of texture in the film.

During my second year of film school, I wrote a manifesto that embodies the lessons I learned while making Eighty Layers of Me (that you’ll have to survive):

Celebrate Accomplishments! Emotions Matter. Let go. Energy ebbs and flows. Accept this. Build on people’s ideas. Resist the obvious and embrace it. Always stay true to my politics. Team work. Experiment. More women behind the camera and on screen. I can contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Surprise my audience. Technical difficulties lead to innovation. Ask people I respect for their opinions. Keep laughing. Encourage risk taking. Strive for subtle rhythms