Postcards is a long-running series of short documentaries from Pioneer Public TV in southern Minnesota, featuring the art, history and cultural heritage of western Minnesota and beyond. Recently the series featured three segments on weavers in very different settings: Christine Novotny from Grand Marais, Minnesota, in the north woods; Laura Demuth from Decorah, Iowa, on a farm; and me, in the city. This post is about my first-time experience as a documentary film subject, and some teasers for the other great films about my friends.
Dana Conroy, Kristofor Gieske, and Ben Dempcy of Pioneer Public TV came to my Minneapolis studio in February for a full six-hour photo shoot. My “star for a day” filming experience was so fun because the team was cohesive and experienced. Many of the conventions of filming a biographical documentary were certainly new to me. There’s the “beauty walk,” in which I walked down the sidewalk with a camera person walking at my side, taking footage of me sideways. Then I was instructed to stand at the end of the sidewalk and change my expression. They would choose bits of this film to use when they didn’t have other images to exactly match my words — “You know, you looking thoughtful,” Dana explained. We have all seen videos of supermodels changing their expressions for camera shoots, but when you are asked to do something similar, it’s remarkably difficult! (Plus, adding come-hither seductive looks like supermodels do wouldn’t exactly match with the whole tapestry weaving theme.)
https://video.pioneer.org/video/robbie-lafleur-cx8gwt
I talked for at least two solid hours, between the main interview and other shorter sessions in my studio and at the Weavers Guild of Minnesota. It was baffling and nerve-wracking after the filming ended — what would they choose to use? What did I even say?
The 12-minute film debuted last week. Many of my friends and family watched it before me. I was scared to watch it by myself, so we had a pizza night with family, including three young grandchildren. They found it interesting that places in our house were on TV. “Hey! That’s upstairs!” The adults were all impressed at the quality of the film, and we were able to cry out, “Beauty walk!,” when there was a still shot of me interspersed. The photographers documented my studio space well, and it was interesting to see shots of my bookcases, or rolled-up weavings on a bed.
Everyone reserved their most riotous reactions for the Lutefisk Eating Contest segment that followed. So Minnesota. It made us queasy to watch the experienced contestants eating plates-full of lutefisk, one pound each, covered with butter that was slurped up at the end — up to EIGHT TIMES. The children were perplexed. “WHAT IS THAT?”
Thank you so much to Dana, Ben, and Kris! I feel honored that they clearly spent much time and creativity on this segment. And they couldn’t do anything about the aspect that bothered me most — who was that old person?
Christine Novotny lives in Grand Marais, Minnesota, and recently studied rug weaving with a master weaver in Sweden. (Read about her experience in the Norwegian Textile Letter, “Rölakan Rug Weaving in Sweden.”)
She began as a painter, but found her calling in weaving. She noted in the video, “I took a weaving course, and I’ve been chasing it in some form ever since. In painting you can just, whenever you want, in oil and acrylic — you can just paint over it, you can smear the last thing you did…there’s almost too much freedom, and creativity is bolstered by some parameters.”
https://video.pioneer.org/video/christine-novotny-hkolez
This summer Christine Novotny will be an artist in residence and exhibiting a new body of work at the American Swedish Institute. Details here.
I claim a little credit for this wonderful video. When the producers asked Laura to participate in this series, she was hesitant. I called her and told her she had to do it; she is such a great weaver and lives in the perfect photogenic location. With sheep! A while back we talked about the odd experience of having a film crew show up. “And they even brought a drone,” Laura told me. It turned out that the drone scared the sheep and they spent some time rounding them up. So when you see the sheep frolicking from above, they are really more startled than anything.
https://video.pioneer.org/video/laura-demuth-zkkkhk
Laura has a deep knowledge of fiber as a long-time knitter, spinner, and weaver. She spoke so eloquently in the video about the value of handcraft and the issues of contemporary fast fashion that I found myself compelled to transcribe these paragraphs.
Our textiles are quite removed from any understanding of where they came from and they don’t have a lot of meaning for use either because they’re fairly abstracted from us. We’re fairly alienated from that process. I don’t want to be in the position in my life where I have to make all the textiles my family needs. I’m really glad, grateful to be liberated from that kind of intense labor that women used to face, but I think it’s too bad we’ve taken this out our hands, literally out of our hands so that we don’t even know so that we don’t even know what goes into providing our clothing. So it’s a way of developing a relationship with the animals or the plants or the dye materials that provide us with these things. If we have at least the opportunity to know some of that and keep that knowledge in human hands, that seems to me to be a valid thing. A lot of the natural fibers are being replace by polyesters or synthetic materials that are made essentially from oil. The difficulty with that is that they’re petroleum products and they don’t biodegrade any more than our plastics than the containers we buy our milk in, or anything. They don’t biodegrade. It comes pretty cheaply, it’s made pretty cheaply…I’ve read that the actual time a person wears a piece of clothing is five to seven times before it’s landfilled.
I think making your own clothing, or at least some aspect of your own clothing, can foster an appreciation for clothing itself and to gain some idea of the amount of labor and care and also intelligence that goes into clothing. That was where women could really think and could really be creative. We see it there and we’ve lost that, and I think that if we an come back to an understanding that that is a actually a platform on which we can find expressions and we can find joy. I think that it is perhaps an act of rebellion, but I also hope that it’s an act of joy.
I’m grateful to Pioneer Public TV for putting looms in the limelight in these three weaver segments.