IN THE HEAVENLY CUTTING ROOM

How do we understand the problem of our pain and meanings of our suffering? I made In the Heavenly Cutting Room as an interrogation of this question from the perspective of an “everywoman.” On her deathbed, in my telling, the everywoman dares to confront her creator, to accuse him of malfeasance. Why, she asks, did you make my life such as this: routinely painful, perhaps even degrading. Yet, when we see her life, as she recollects it, we also see beauty. I sought visual contronyms for the film, taking a camcorder about San Francisco and my cameras to the Hunters’ Point abandoned naval shipyard, a place of literal toxicity that yields visual beauty. I made stop motion animation sequences and pixelation animation that marry images of visceral horror (saturating blood, syringes) or body exploitation with the inherent beauty of those images’ colors, textures, and form. One of my actors is my exquisite grandmother, who passed away soon after the footage was shot, and I show the effects of her aging. Paradox is at the center of this film: ugliness and beauty, pain and redemption, are they separate and different from each other? In the end, the everywoman’s creator answers.