Why we love...director Jane Schoenbrun
Dundead programmer Michael Coull takes us through Schoenbrun's filmography
Jane Schoenbrun's third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, hits DCA Cinema screens on Fri 21 August. Following buzz from festival screenings and a whole host of five star reviews, anticipation is high. And none more so than with our Dundead programmer Michael Coull.
On the film's opening day, he'll be introducing a special Dundead screening. Ahead of that, he takes us through Schoenbrun's small (but mighty) back catalogue and what makes them one of his top three filmmakers. Read on below...
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Any time anybody has asked me for my favourite filmmakers working today, my answer has always been three (in no particular order): Jordan Peele, Julia Ducournau and Jane Schoenbrun. These are filmmakers who have taken the tropes, the imagery and the moods of horror and seared through them, diving deeper and pushing the genre into new territories; filmmakers whose influence I think we are already feeling on subsequent generations.
We're All Going to the World's Fair
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair presented a bracingly, jarringly modern look at the horrors of being a teenager online. I found the film to be cleverly horror-literate; the opening scene sees teenage protagonist Casey (Anna Cobb) prick her finger and repeat a mantra “We’re all going to the world’s fair” three times. The stuff of horror. The kind of rumour that permeates the playground or teen party. But Schoenbrun’s camera in this scene is a webcam. The playgrounds are the message boards. And so begins a strange, quiet, discomfiting film that asks us to define horror for ourselves.
It can be wilfully, and excitingly, unclear at times what exactly is happening to Casey, as she documents herself and consumes other strange, frightening imagery in a kind of online hall of mirrors. Schoenbrun never loses sight of the young woman at the heart of it and perhaps the most subversive element of the film, and a defining feature of Schoenbrun’s cinema in general, is its tenderness.
I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow was a step beyond. While World’s Fair trades in almost painful intimacy and immediacy, TV Glow is more of a “traditional” film. I saw it three times in just over a week. I found it just as goosebump-inducing in its softness as in its horrors.
Again, screen technology is utilised as a tool to explode identity. Perhaps more “explicitly queer” than World’s Fair, it contains a confronting and upsetting final sequence which will remain lodged in the brain, and heart, of many who watch it. With a bigger budget came a chance for Schoenbrun to cultivate a whole world; not just visually, but with one of the best soundtrack albums of the last twenty years.
Moments of “respectable” filmmaking rub shoulders with daring scenes of disruption and Schoenbrun pushes through notions of good taste to something more.
Schoenbrun is a filmmaker who makes films which are films. The films exist as they are. We can scratch and scour and dive for meaning and answers, but the answers and meanings are an intangible part of the form.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
It’s been lovely seeing the anticipation for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma grow. I knew Schoenbrun had been working on it for a while and had been hoping it would be ready for this year.
At the time of writing this, I haven’t seen it, and I’ve been deliberately keeping my exposure to reviews and interviews limited to try maintain the mystery. I have vague ideas about a revisit to the meta-ness of I Saw the TV Glow, and of course the promotional imagery has all been great, so I can’t wait to dig in.
Thanks Michael! Hear more from him at our Dundead screening on Fri 21 August at 20:00 or catch the film in DCA Cinema until Thu 27 August.
