Award-winning Cambridge-based filmmaker Jane Gillooly has been a part of the Boston area’s arts community for over twenty years. While she’s most well-known for her work on the powerful documentaries LEONA’S SISTER GERRI and Martha Swetzoff’s THEME: MURDER, Jane has also had a rich and varied artistic life which has contributed to her unique vision as a filmmaker.
Jane ended up in Boston in the late 1970’s after having moved here from St. Louis to finish up her undergraduate arts degree at Mass. College of Art. Once here, she immersed herself in the local arts scene. Her early interests revolved around photography and the graphic arts. She was also intrigued and interested in the interplay between words and images and narrative storytelling. Jane’s interest in photography led her to meet her future husband, Ken Winokur, who was working at the time as a photographer and photo critic. He would later go on to found The Alloy Orchestra, the Boston area’s renown musical ensemble that composes and performs scores for silent films. They have been cited in the New York Times as "the country’s leading avant garde interpreter of silent films." Jane and Ken have had an interesting creative partnership over the years. Jane designs all the artwork for the group and even performed with them early on once or twice. However, it’s not an experience she remembers fondly. She says, "It was very, very cold, and they had me hitting the keyboard and my hands were frozen and I said to myself, ‘this is not for me.’"
Jane’s early work involved the use of photos and images with text that eventually evolved into presentations with multiple projectors and screens. Over time this would lead her to working in video. Long interested in social issues, in the late 1980’s Jane began volunteering at Framingham State Prison for Women. During the course of her volunteering, she got to know a number of the women prisoners and was moved to tell their stories to a larger audience. She says, "I realized my expectations and perceptions of the women prisoners was different from what I had originally thought." SO SAD, SO SORRY, SO WHAT tells the story of Joanne, a woman inmate and her tragic, yet common story. It addresses issues of drug addiction, crime, and AIDS. "During the process of producing SO SAD, SO SORRY, SO WHAT I learned that it was far more compelling for an audience to focus on one person in trying to tell a story," Jane says. "SO SAD… was initially produced a multi-image show and very difficult to stage, so when Steve Marx of Continental CableVision in Cambridge offered me a residency and an opportunity to produce the show on videotape, I jumped at the chance." The finished film received NEA funding and was purchased by several states for use in their correctional systems as an educational tool.
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Cambridge based filmmaker Jane Gillooly on the set of DRAGONFLIES, THE BABY CRIES, which will have its New England premiere (with live accompaniment by The Alloy Orchestra) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on November 11. |
Jane’s next film project was the critically acclaimed documentary LEONA’S SISTER GERRI, which painted a portrait of Gerri Santoro, who had died of an illegal abortion in 1964. The film, which was produced for PBS through the Independent Television Service, was innovative in its use of photographs and still images in helping to tell Gerri’s story. Jane was deliberate in not having her film be overtly political or rhetorical. As she recalled in an earlier interview, "I really wanted to tell a story about how complex people’s lives are, and that you can’t put every decision someone makes into a nutshell." Among other awards, LEONA’S SISTER GERRI was selected to screen at the "New Directors, New Films" series at the Museum of Modern Art. It was also nationally broadcast on the PBS Series P.O.V. in 1995. In 1997 Jane collaborated with director Martha Swetzoff on her film, THEME: MURDER, which was a first-person account examining the effects of violence and secrecy on a daughter’s life after her father is murdered. The film won a number of national and international awards and was selected to represent the USA at INPUT International Public Television Conference. While Jane’s artistic interests have never changed—"it’s always been about telling the story", she says,–the mediums she has used to convey those stories have evolved as Jane has explored and embraced new techniques to convey the stories she’s trying to tell. In a departure from her more recent documentaries, Jane’s latest work is a ten-minute b/w pseudo-silent fiction film, DRAGONFLIES, THE BABY CRIES. The initial inspiration for DRAGONFLIES… came to Jane while she was an Artist-in Residence at the MacDowell Art Colony in 1996. She had received a Fellowship to work on a screenplay for a fiction/non-fiction film she was developing called TRUTH BE TOLD which included four separate, yet related stories about children and secrecy. While Jane was disappointed that TRUTH BE TOLD didn’t get made, the script did get Jane thinking more about the issue of children and secrecy and how it could be interpreted as a good or a bad thing. That idea eventually evolved into a story about the power of children’s imaginations. At the same time, Jane and Ken had been talking about how difficult it was to gain access to the silent films The Alloy Orchestra uses in its composing and performing work. A fairy tale series they had been planned on doing was not going to be ready for some time. And Jane was looking to do something different from her previous work. "While my main interest continues to be social issues, I need to remind people that that’s not all I am. I have to regain balance from time to time and also have a sense of humor," she says. The more Jane thought about it, the more intrigued she became with the idea of collaborating on a project with The Alloy Orchestra. As she says, "I knew there’d be an opportunity to do something different here." Early on, Jane decided she would make a film that children could relate to without it being a "children’s film." The end result, as directed by Jane, shot by Vilma Gregoropoulos, and scored by The Alloy Orchestra, is a film that has a lyrical, almost haunting quality to it, while also having a sense of innocence and playfulness. The film marked the first time Jane had worked with actors. "I love directing and I loved working with the kids. It’s interesting," she notes, "It was so easy to pull people together for this project because it involved kids. So many people wanted to be involved." Among those helping out was animator Julie Zammarchi, who lent her "perfect fairy-tale house" as a location for the film. DRAGONFLIES, THE BABY CRIES got a big boost when Jane and The Alloy Orchestra were asked to premiere it Halloween night at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center in New York. The Boston area premiere will take place a few weeks later on November 11th, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. Reflecting on her body of work, Jane says simply, "I’ve never done the same thing twice. I sometimes see myself as a guinea pig, learning and maybe sometimes failing as I try something new. But each new project has been a challenge–and that’s helped form my artistic personality. Challenge is good... it helps keep life intersting." |
