Jessica Bardsley's Fictional Take on Autobiography
Jessica Bardsley is an artist and scholar currently based in New York. Her multifaceted practice spans across research, writing, sculpture, drawing, and video. Her work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista, and numerous Harvard Film Study Center fellowships. Bardsley has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and Ox Bow School of Art. Her first feature film, The Cave Without a Name, was a finalist for the 2023 Venice Biennale's Cinema College.
In the following essay series, we'll look at Bardsley's fictional take on autobiography in her works The Blazing World (2013), Goodbye Thelma (2018), and Life Without Dreams (2021).
THE BLAZING WORLD (2013)
Earlier this year I came across the work of moving image artist, Jessica Bardsley. I got in contact with her and she was generous enough to share several of her works with me. Each video had its own distinct purpose and left me with its own separate emotional response. However, they all seemed to approach their topics with the same aesthetic intentions. Bardsley and I eventually had a conversation to discuss the work and in an attempt to know why that might be, I asked about her process. “I begin with something that's personal; an experience, an inclination, a conversation,” she replied. “Then I just, I’m not sure how to explain I- start gleaning? I research. I cast my net as wide as possible and try to think expansively about whatever the topic is.” As Bardsley conceptually gleans through the internet and different film archives, she interacts with fictions held in imagery and absorbs those that connect to her initial motivating concept. Through the use of montage, visual distortion, and the insertion of the first person, Jessica Bardsley marries fiction and autobiography in films that explore topics like mental health, the female psyche, and late stage capitalism.
The Blazing World (2013) is an early example of how Bardsley takes from the visual universe, remixes contexts, and creates blurred realities with a video that connects kleptomania and depression. The 19-minute video begins with Simon and Garfunkels Bookends Theme playing in the background while footage from the 1960’s shows a young girl in her room begrudgingly hanging her clothes. The screen cuts to a text that reads:
“In 2001, Winona Ryder walked out of a Saks Fifth avenue with over $5,000
in unpaid merchandise.”
A montage using the footage of the girl with her clothes and a series of text explaining Ryder's shoplifting incident show as the melancholic tune continues. A short flash of light shimmering on a surface shifts the scene to another girl sadly standing alone in a school hallway. A voiceover begins:
“Have you ever confused a dream with life?
Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue?
Or thought your train was moving while sitting still?
Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60s.
Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.”
The voiceover is a direct lift from the film adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted. The film stars Winona Ryder who plays Susanna, a teenage girl who is sent
to a psychiatric institution after a suicide attempt. As the audio intensifies, the footage of the isolated girl cuts to a close up of her face which shifts between confused, anxious, and somber expressions.
The next scene is a television interview with Winona Ryder reading from the book Girl, Interrupted. The camera zooms in towards Ryder who grins as she speaks, agreeing with the book's sentiment that it's not that hard to slip and find yourself in a psychiatric hospital. The shot pans to a surveillance camera and then to two monitored television sets. Again, the text is interspersed with early surveillance footage:
“In high school Girl, Interrupted was
one of my favorite films."
"I was depressed like Susanna, Winona Ryder‘s character in the film,
And like the real Winona
I had just been caught shoplifting.”
Within these first three minutes of The Blazing World, the narrative slides through three different perspectives and stories. The first is the montaged text about Winona Ryder’s shoplifting incident and the 1960’s footage of the young girl and her wardrobe. Then there is the audio taken from Girl, Interrupted in which Susanna (Ryder’s voice) talks about her mental state while footage of the lonely girl plays.
Finally, there is the first person text that recounts a personal history of movie taste, depression, and shoplifting placed between Ryder’s interview and the surveillance footage.
Bardsley guides the viewer through these abrupt shifts and aids in creating connections between them. The whole video is in black and white, which creates visual synchronization between the 1960’s archival footage, Girl, Interrupted (which was filmed in the 90’s but is set in the ‘60s), and the 1999 interview with Winona Ryder. Further, Bardsley creates character consistency by using clips of Winona as Sussana, Winona as herself, and Susanna and Winona individually as people the first person narrator likens themself to. Her use of montage creates flux between time and place, between fictional and real events which conceptually link and emphasize the topics at hand: mental health (depression) and kleptomania. Once the topics are discernable, Bardsley uses the first person to insert herself: as soon as the viewer reads “I”, the discussion of kleptomania and depression is lifted beyond Sussanna and Winona and recontextualized through Bardsley’s experiences. Through her use of the first person, Bardsley takes us on a conceptual journey as she self-mediates her inner thoughts to Girl, Interrupted and Winona Ryder. She relates with the two personally and on a broader scale.
But Bardsley’s use of the first person is far from simplistic. When an audience is presented with the use of “I” in a visual or literary work, they tend to assume the work is autobiographical – that the events, places, people, memories or thoughts are real reflections of the author's life. Bardsley’s use of the first person investigates how fictions inform our lived experiences; she uses the term “autofiction” to describe her approach. We see this in The Blazing World as she links imagery, events, and themes from the outside, fictional world to her inner thoughts and questions. Next, we’ll look at how Bardsley develops this process in her work Goodbye, Thelma, (2018).
The Blazing World Trailer (2013):
GOODBYE THELMA (2019)
When I talked to Jessica Bardsley about her work Goodbye Thelma, she began by telling me that the popular 1990’s film Thelma & Louise (1991) had a haunting effect on her. Not so much that she was scared by it, but that she thought about it often in specific scenarios. Her work, Goodbye Thelma (2019) questions why that is by examining the subliminal relationship between her lived experiences and Thelma & Louise.
Goodbye Thelma opens with a clip from Ridley Scott’s film Thelma & Louise. There is a visual effect imposed on the footage that saturates and inverts light and dark, making the iconic film almost unrecognizable. The opening scene shows Thelma and Louise driving through a distorted desert landscape. As they drive through a tunnel the viewer enters another visual narrative: a woman in a hoodie walking through the woods. The sounds of fast-paced breathing, footsteps, and vacant white noise create an anxious, eerie mood. The screen cuts to text that reads:
“Goodbye, Thelma” my dad says as we hang up the phone.
“I suspect he doesn’t remember what happens to Thelma or why she and Louise end up on the run.”
“but I think about the film each day while traveling alone.”
This first person text is an introduction that places the viewer in the mind of the narrator and hints at what is to come. The video continues with montaged scenes from Thelma & Louise, clips of animals, plants, vacant landscapes, and first person text.
There are three main anecdotes in Goodbye Thelma that act like open ended chapters. They each tell a brief story with a common theme of the narrator traveling and/or being alone. These suspenseful stories are interwoven with audio-visual reminders of the insidious storyline of Thelma & Louise. An analysis of the second story in Goodbye Thelma will show how Bardsley’s thoughts, feelings, and actions were informed by this haunting fiction.
“Is that your friend waiting for you up there? A woman asked hiking in the other direction.”
“I’m alone, I say. Be careful then she replies.”
The film cuts to a lizard crawling on the ground and then back to text that reads:
“Hours later I find myself in a puddle of a river with a man I don’t know.
“The trail leads to the base of a waterfall but I turn suddenly and head back.”
The footage cuts from a shot of a desert landscape to Thelma and Louise standing silently with shocked expressions.
The mood of the video quickly intensifies. Clips of an anonymous woman alone in a room are montaged with the scene from Thelma & Louise where Louise is holding a gun to the head of the man as he sexually assaults Thelma. The audio from Thelma and Louise continues to play but the visuals switch between the anonymous woman and Bardsley’s text that recounts the thoughts of the narrator as she turned back toward safety:
“I never thought ‘it was for this that I should have brought a gun.’
“I could count the reasons this was so.”
“And the reasons this could have been different.”
The mood is anxious, suspenseful, and mysterious. The story tells us that the narrator is ok, but we see what happened to Thelma. The shift between the different storylines leaves the viewer frantically trying to figure out who is okay and who is in danger.
Bardsley uses the same compositional tools applied in The Blazing World (2013) to here emphasize the shared themes between Bardsley’s experience and Thelma & Louise: the threat toward women who are alone. Bardsley uses montage, visual distortion, and appropriated audio clips to tie storylines together. When the gun is presented visually (footage from Thelma & Louise), audibly (the gunshot), and textually (the first person narration) the viewer experiences the narrator’s perspective on the film, and understands that this is the threat that has been there all along. In this moment the viewer realizes that the rape scene in Thelma & Louise is the scene that the narrator’s dad doesn’t remember but that she thinks about often when alone; this is the scene that left a haunting affect on Bardsley.
At the end of the film, the visual distortion is lifted and the viewer sees Thelma looking in her rearview mirror. As Thelma and Louise drive through the colorful desert landscape, the viewer snaps into a reality where the narrative is not based on what happened to Thelma or what could’ve happened to the narrator. The narrative, or rather the topic of this video, is how the two are intertwined personally for Bardsley and, on broader scale, how rape culture affects the female psyche.
The next film we’ll look at, Life Without Dreams, further distorts its compositional elements to explore mental health, insomnia, and late stage capitalism.