No Joke: A Feature-Length Film of Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack, Starring Hélène Cixous

At Weird Sister, Megan Milks interviews Daviel Shy, a Chicago filmmaker who is adapting Djuna Barnes's roman à clef, Ladies Almanack, into a feature-length experimental film.

First! Check out this interview between the filmmaker and Hélène Cixous, which took place in Paris this past September.

Hélène Cixous: I think there are only first persons. Particularly, you. You is a first person.

Daviel Shy: So the question is how to speak of or from or with a “we,” not about inclusion or exclusion, but how to speak with others and yet not for others…

We do speak in affirmations when we have to. OK, back to this transformative film project:

Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, first published in 1928 (full title: Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion), is a sly roman à clef chronicling Barnes’s (mostly lesbian) circle of friends and lovers, and their HQ in Natalie Clifford Barney’s long-running Parisian salon. In reinventing it as a film, Shy is creating a hybrid Chicago-Paris setting and what she calls a “triple time” zone where three distinct periods collide. The film follows characters based not only on Barney (played by Brie Roland) and other thinly veiled figures in the book, including Mina Loy (Brenna Kail) and Radclyffe Hall (Deborah Bright), anchored by narration from French feminists of a later time: Luce Irigaray (Elesa Rosasco), Monique Wittig (Eileen Myles), and Hélène Cixous (as herself) [shown in photo at top]. All of these characters blur into the present as they find form in the bodies of contemporary artists and writers. I spoke with Shy about the genesis of the project, her relationship to the book and the community to which it pays homage, and what it was like to work with the great Cixous.

Milks and Shy discuss her extensive research, the book's illustrations, effecting different time zones and senses of temporality, looking for Paris in Chicago, and more. An excerpt:

[Daviel Shy:] ...What I want for the audience to know, learn, or experience is not prescribed. But there are so many things I learn daily from this particular heritage. I’ve mentioned the importance of difference within a given “we.” Another aspect is the non-existence of the closet. Not one of these women was secretly homosexual. From Colette and Missy’s on-stage kiss that got them kicked out of the Moulin Rouge, to Natalie’s very public 1901 seduction of Liane de Pougy, to her lifelong non-monogamous partnerships with Lily Gramont and Romaine Brooks, and it could go on: Not only were these women completely “out” (a very inappropriate word in this context) but looking at this sliver of time in Paris, you’ll find they were not even the only lesbian power clique in town. One mindset I am always trying to combat is the “we’ll take what we can get” scarcity attitude when it comes to Lesbian culture, then or now. Barney and friends show us you can be choosy, that there is no shortage of “us.” There have always been a myriad of ways to be a homo. Claude Cahun and Gertrude Stein, for instance, contemporaries of Barney, each chose very different ways. I choose this particular group for their unrelenting female-centricity, and the common thread of writing among almost all of them.

[Megan Milks]: We’ll see Cixous, Wittig, and Irigaray in the film–who else? What other authors and texts are you working with? What was it like working with Cixous?

DS: Yes, you will hear the voices of Cixous, Wittig (played by Eileen Myles), and Irigaray (Elesa Rosasco), but you will not see them since they are the film’s narrators. These writers enter the text of the film very directly. When I first described the project to Cixous, she replied, “I can see what you are trying to do but you are going to have to do it perfectly.” At that point, she agreed to narrate, but only if she spoke her own words. This was better that I anticipated, here I had the author’s permission to insert her text unchanged. But as I went through her parts, there were some places I felt I needed to keep my own words. Once we were there with her in her home, almost six months after my initial contact, she had no problem reading both my text and hers interchangeably. She did, however, ask (suggest? demand?) we change one word together. One of the “We’s” was made a “They” while the rest in the sentence remained. This created a delightfully slippery “Who” and also taught me to be braver within syntax and say to hell with pronoun agreement.

This is all very exciting. Read on at Weird Sister.