The Time We Killed and Darling International (thanks to London's Club des Femmes for screening this deliciously dark short in their Kathy Acker programme) are two of my favourite films from the last decade: witty, moody, sexy, ravishing lesbian noir with an undercurrent of radical politics and a liberal overlay of goofy humour. Maybe only Abigail Child and Sally Potter are comparable to Jennifer Reeves' in their combination of femme fatale feminism and avant-garde aesthetics. But queering Hitchcock is only one of the strings in Reeves' bow (although she says she's planning a return to "themes of lesbian romance, so I feel that I'm in touch with that part of myself through my work"): she's also made a number of abstract films, most recently her gloriously ambitious (and yet movingly humble and craftsy) feature-length 16 mm dual projection, When It Was Blue, which was supported by a Wexner Center Residency.

The film, with a live score by New York based Icelandic musician Skúli Sverrisson, got an additional score when it screened in the Wavelengths program at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival: a welcome wave of standing ovation, and a welter of technical and aesthetic questions. I was lucky enough to grab an interview with Reeves, tired from partying all night with a pregnant belly but surfing the audience's excitement the culmination of an incredible four years of effort that went into creating a feature-length 16 mm dual projection.

She even took her Bolex to Costa Rica on her honeymoon. "I worked during it," she laughs, "that's my style. I was trying to create a composite of the world through hitting different corners." It wasn't just images that she found as she travelled round the world. "I started collecting sounds in different places, including the jungle in Costa Rica and Yakushima Island in Japan, which was also Miyazaki's inspiration. I have done lots of sound work before; usually my sound work is more radical, but here it was about natural sound being interesting, mismatched and mixed as counterpoint."

But don't think "natural sound" as being a muzak of birdsong and pan pipes. This is nature in all its drama and vividness. Not all the dramatic volcanic eruptions and exotic fauna were captured by Reeves' Bolex. She dug up a lot of found material, both audio and visual. "There are things in the film that don't exist anymore. It was a conscious eco-impulse. People are out of touch with the natural world, they can't go to it, so the Green movement has become abstracted to statistics. I just wanted to bring the nature back."

And to bring film back, as well; she started a blog called Not Dead Yet (I love 16mm) after the two 16 mm labs that she used in New York closed in 2008. For Reeves, film is an organic medium: "I think it actually has this connection to the human body - the skin, the aging, the imperfection, the colour, the beauty. It's more surprising, organic, imperfect."

A longer version of this interview appears in Vertigo 4:2, January 2009.

Links:

Jenn's website
Time We Killed review
Darling International at Club des Femmes
Wexner blog with review of Blue
Skuli's iLike page
When it Was Blue at Wavelengths
Wavelengths home
Yakushima Island
Jenn's blog
Vertigo