Interview with Shona Auerbach

When I first saw Dear Frankie, I threw myself a little party. (Just saw Scott's Off The Map and inspired a similar reaction) It is a beautiful, character-driven piece of film-making created by first time feature director Shona Auerbach, a consummate filmmaker. Hah. Yesterday Ms. Auerbach was nice enough to grant BotP a phone interview.

Now all I have to do is transcribe it, and I hate transcribing. So you guys be patient with me.
But yay team!

VI -- Bluebeard by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are perfect. One of my favorites begins "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines/ And keep him there; and let him thence escape/ If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape"

She was past master of sonnetry. Discovering that which is great and petty in the human heart...the chaos of the human condition and defining it--confining it to fourteen lines, beautifully spare, weighted with meaning, infused with passion. Perfection. Bluebeard is Millay's take on the old legend and also describes my mood tonight.

VI -- Bluebeard

THIS door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed. . . . Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see. . . . Look yet again --
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.

Reading Jane Eyre...

again. It's something I used to do regularly, every couple of years. The first time I read it I was 14. The story of this lost young girl had affected me deeply, changed me, I believe. Childhood was something less than idyllic for me and while I was far from rebellious or difficult, I found it impossible to knuckle under to the concept of being oppressed. My innate sense of justice forbade it, an innate sense I found I shared with Bronte's heroine.

She was a lost young girl but lost in the world-- orphaned, rootless, subsisting on crumbs of affection-- not lost within herself. She governed herself by certain laws and principles independent of popular opinion. She was able to submit without subjugation, to assert her will without dominating.

Jane Eyre was something new for the time, and she is unique still. As we look around at women in fiction, the complexity of her character and strength of her will put her up there where the air is very rare indeed.

These are my thoughts on reading her story again, for the first time in eight years.
Tags: artistic activism, nonprofit, philanthropy, zine, artists, bakery of the poets, jane eyre, reading, literature