A Trans with a Movie Camera - the Directors of Contemporary Trans Cinema

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Willow Maclay (@willowcatelyn) and Caden Mark Gardner (@corpsesfoolsandmonsters) are the Authors of Corpses, Fools and Monsters — available for purchase now. This article was originally published in WUSSY Vol.13, available now in our online shop.

Transgender rock and roll announced itself with anthemic fury and waves of incredible distortion when Sadie Switchblade of trans-feminist hardcore punk band G.L.O.S.S.(Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit) proclaimed, “Lined lips, spiked bats, gonna take femininity back.” The punk rock ethos encourages every listener to pick up a guitar and make their own noise, and this sense of ingenuity has logically extended to DIY filmmaking, for anyone with access to a phone. In her short film A Trans with a Movie Camera (2018), trans filmmaker Frances Arpaia used “Lined Lips and Spiked Bats” by G.L.O.S.S. across a montage of images liberated from the cis gaze, in which “eggs crack” (a widely used metaphor for the realization of trans identity), trans dykes make-out with one another, and a trans woman swallows gasoline and spits fire like Gene Simmons from KISS. When Francis Ford Coppola argued that someday a Mozart of film might announce themselves by the product of young girls with easier access to cameras, he probably didn’t have this in mind, but trans directors everywhere are now making their own music to the beat of their own drum. They are crafting bold and original images for a new century of filmmaking, toying with the conventions of existing trans film images, and reconstituting certain modes of filmmaking, forcing a transition upon them. A new horizon is dawning for trans filmmakers who have a hell of a lot to show us, and if we’re lucky, they’ll continue to throw molotov cocktails at the film industry as we know it, and the radical trans film image will thrive in the ashes of celluloid’s desecrated transphobic past.

In the recent decade, there have been movements and campaigns within the film industry and other cultural institutions that have prioritized more art that centers trans identity. There have also been major successes in the visibility of trans cultural production and authorship. The interdisciplinary artist Tourmaline’s short film Salacia (2019), a tribute to the trans archive that serves as an intergenerational dialogue of trans struggle, has been featured in the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the mainstream, Yance Ford’s intimate documentary Strong Island (2017) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. Many trans directors who have been working in and outside of the industry have made features and are now regularly employed by streaming services and networks to direct episodic television. But strictly looking at an industry—one that has largely failed our community in terms of storytelling and labor opportunities—to get its act together, and to see through any ‘wave’ of trans cultural production, would be a fool’s errand. Some of the most exciting trans filmmakers operating today work outside the lines in independent cinema, making films that could not have possibly been made in Hollywood’s current form—and these works and artists are all the better for it.

Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022) embodies the spirit of working outside these lines. Her transgender coming-of-age comic book satire, which she co-wrote, directed and starred in, is at once a prank and a genuinely personal story for Drew. Vera’s personal stand-in character “Joker the Harlequin” uses absurdist stand-up comedy and directly addresses autobiographical experiences. These range from an egg-cracking moment upon seeing Nicole Kidman in Batman Forever (1995), to the fantasy of reconciliation with her mother, from whom her character is estranged. She dedicated the film to Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher, and has said that he needs to be spoken of in the same breath as Martin Scorsese. Drew carries on in the grand tradition of Schumacher’s operatic, camp extravaganzas, but through the molecular reorganization of Hollywood tropes. Drew is like a termite gnawing through the tired wooden trunks of pop-culture. This is primarily seen in the artificial quality of numerous green-screen animations, and editing techniques she learned while working on beloved comedy enterprises like On Cinema (2011). Drew’s cinema is highly personalized, and whip-smart about structural relationships between the trans community, trans children and their parents, and the bizarre state of modern comedy. She has carved out a unique place for herself in trans film imagery already. This is apparent in her exuberant editing work for fellow trans filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s holiday horror film Carnage for Christmas, set to be released in 2025, which uses sparkling Lisa Frank-esque digital wipes and tumbling composite imagery to link disparate scenes to one another.

If Drew is both our Joker and our Harley Quinn, then it is safe to say that Mackay is our Poison Ivy. “Edgy Doll Cinema” is in vogue, and Mackay implicitly devours any notion of metaphor, opting for a cinema of directness. In her horror film, T-Blockers (2023), lead character Sophie (played by the charming Lauren Last), is seen doing ketamine and poppers in clubs, and later, has a genuine breakdown over how fucking hard it is to be a trans woman, let alone a filmmaker—her dream gig. The parasitic monsters Sophie and her queer friends must contend with are infected with transphobia, recalling the Cronenbergian motif of Shivers (1975), and the premise of trans horror novelist Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms (2023). Mackay’s cinema is indebted to the apocalyptic, devil-may-care attitude of Gregg Araki, and in her own words, Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers (2016). There’s an element of Smith’s profane lackadaisicalness in her work, which seems to beg other trans people to pick up a camera and make a movie, because it’s not only accessible with the advent of smartphones, it’s fun. Mackay is still blossoming as a filmmaker, and at 19, she taps into the distinct reality of the gen-z trans woman born in the flames of the internet, and perceived through the lens of hyper-visibility.

If one were to think of Edgy Doll Cinema as a hydra, then the third head on this foul beast certainly belongs to Canadian filmmaker and producer Louise Weard. Charmingly described as a “despicable human being” by Vera Drew, Weard’s cinema is one of transgression and ill-repute. Her first film, Computer Hearts (2014), which she co-directed with Dionne Copland, is about a trans egg named Albert—played by Weard prior to transitioning—in an erotic relationship with an anime-tinged computer program. Here the eros of Shinya Tsukamoto’s body horror is filtered through an embarrassment kink, as Albert is dominated by the computer program. Albert undergoes a transformation, becoming like an organic, human USB. Alongside his transformation is that of the computer, whose disk drive has taken on the characteristics of a vaginal orifice. Weard’s montage exercise 100 Best Kills: Texas Birth Control, Dick Destruction (2022), is a castration kaleidoscope of split scrotums, crushed testicles, and wilting phallic transformation. Her newest film, Castration Movie, currently in production, looks to finalize this castration trilogy, and carries with it a Dogme 95 influence-by-way of spiritual trans femme patron saint Laura Palmer. It’s reportedly seven hours long, or eighteen, if you believe Drew, and if it sees the light of day, it may very well upend our notions of how trans film imagery can look and feel…and taste.

Jane Schoenbrun is having a moment with their latest film, I Saw the TV Glow (2024). It is a tragic love-letter to the trappings of dysphoria, constructed upon a series of ambient, flickering images, which carry their own weight as vectors of liminality. Schoenbrun’s cinema, dating back to the Slenderman documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018), lives on the precipice of personal formation, and chooses to find beauty within fragmentation. Analog indicators, such as the static on CRT Televisions, or the ghostly wail of a dial-up internet connection, act as poetic substitutes for transness in their work. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), Schoenbrun explores the haunted corners of cyberspace, as young character Casey (Anna Cobb) stares at her computer screen, and hopes to find herself in the process. In I Saw the TV Glow, adolescent Owen (Justice Smith) is also looking for himself, and feels a confusing pang of recognition through the character of Isabel (Helen Howard) in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque television show-within the movie “The Pink Opaque”. Schoenbrun’s cinema asks prudent questions on the limits of trans recognition through visual proxies, and how it may be so intoxicating to imagine oneself as another, that it could potentially replace the act of becoming altogether. In this way, Schoenbrun conceives of transness in a manner similar to the phantoms depicted in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s analog horror masterpiece Pulse (2001), in which characters vanish entirely, leaving only a shadow on the wall. Schoenbrun finds relevance in the interstitial moments of crisis and euphoria before a trans person can fulfill their identity, in which the shadows are simultaneously alluring and purgatorial. In these gentle, vivid imaginings of possibility there is both life, and despair, pulsing between one another in an emotional tapestry that is beautiful and horrific all at once.

Isabel Sandoval is the most classically influenced of all the modern trans filmmakers. She received her education through pirated DVDs of the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yasujiro Ozu and Alfred Hitchcock while growing up in her native Philippines. She works within the mode of melodrama, and is primarily interested in the sensuality and romantic relationships between her characters. In her most recent feature-length film, Lingua Franca (2019), she explores the capabilities of love between a trans woman named Olivia (Sandoval), who works as a housekeeper and is an immigrant without proper documentation, and her lover Alex (Eamon Farren), a cis man and recovering alcoholic. Lingua Franca is precise about the complications that can stem from concepts such as immigration and romance when transness enters the equation. Sandoval’s camera is supple and caring, keen on specific bodily gestures, and receptive to the sensations of physical touch and orgasm. A sex scene between Olivia and Alex is potentially revolutionary in its depiction of heterosexual transfeminine pleasure, but Sandoval knows her film history, and understands that in melodrama, sensuality only makes the heartbreak that comes later hurt that much worse. Sandoval is unlike her contemporaries, because her films unironically evoke a cinema of the past, but by re-considering classical modes of visual form through the lens of transness, she creates something brand new.

Sandoval’s work, while not a classic polemic, hits on the political undercurrents of the intersection of trans identity and immigration in the United States at the height of the Trump administration. Lingua Franca sharply contrasts with the trans authorship often epitomized by documentary activism, and the collaborative works produced by non-profit organizations and advocacy groups. While those works are well-intentioned, they are often politically safe, conceptually sterile, and uncinematic. Filmmaker Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s body of work, which includes the hybrid sex work film Empathy (2016), is much more politically radical, daring, and experimental. Rovinelli draws from the work of filmmaker Lizzie Borden (Working Girls [1988] and Born in Flames [1983]) in which intersectional feminism, left-wing politics, and the blurring of fiction and nonfiction are directly at play. Rovinelli’s So Pretty (2019) is a film that, frankly, should have gotten the attention that academic Paul Preciado received for Orlando: My Political Biography (2023) this past year. Even beyond its striking color and composition, So Pretty is an adaptation of Ronald M. Schernikau’s novel So Schön, resituating a 1980s German love story about queer men into contemporary New York with a broader array of queer identities. The film showed how an ‘update’ to an already queer story can take on a life of its own. Rovinelli presents her characters with an effortless control that eschews being self-congratulatory of its achievement, or pedantic over the struggles and heartbreak her characters face. Rovinelli also finds a commonality with Sandoval in presenting intimacy and desire that doesn’t feel limited by who is behind the camera, but instead unlocks something for viewers and serves as a respite to earlier forms of trans aesthetics.

Likewise, Angelo Madsen Minax’s work in nonfiction cinema expands beyond the borders of the typical nonfiction framework. Minax has made many experimental shorts and installation pieces such as Bigger on the Inside (2022), The Eddies (2018), and No Show Girls (2012) that have explored the perception of transmasculine bodies of desire within contemporary queer spaces, but his crossover film North By Current (2021) is a tale of familial turmoil and grief over the death of a young child—his niece. Trans narratives focused on the tensions between a trans person and their family are a well-worn trope, but Minax’s shows incredible control, empathy, and grace when approaching his relationship to his parents and sister, and how their lives are completely altered by tragedy and scapegoating.

Theda Hammel’s irreverent and hilarious bursts of originality have been a staple of the New York trans community for years, and have filtered into many online trans and queer spaces thanks to her incredible podcast with Macy Rodman, Nymphowars (2018-). But beyond podcasting, Hammel is a trained theater performer who has mounted her own cabaret acts and starred in the plays of Wallace Shawn. Shawn’s influence on Hammel’s New York nightlife milieu are very much what molded her excellent feature film debut Stress Positions (2023). Co-starring with comedian and frequent stage collaborator John Early, Hammel made a frenetic comedy set amidst the height of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The film is less a statement on ‘the way we live now’ but instead an absurd and hazy memory play of deeply selfish, flawed, but funny people who have to live with themselves and each other.

The fact that Hammel and Schoenbrun have each respectively, after years of working and performing, had their films distributed by the likes of A24 (I Saw the TV Glow) and NEON Rated (Stress Positions) is a very significant achievement. However, while accessibility through the film marketplace is a worthwhile endeavor, it is not always a filmmaker’s end-goal. Henry Hanson’s short Bros Before (2022), much like Alice Maio Mackay’s work, gestures at the anarchic, punk rock attitudes of 1990s New Queer Cinema. Gregg Araki serves as a spiritual godfather for Hanson’s funny and sexy T4T romance that presents transmasculinity through a lens of horny, broadly comic, caustic forces of nature. Hanson’s films are micro-budget DIY cinema, and his work has appeared in online spaces to great reception. His feature length work Dog Movie (2024) continues in that direction, recently debuting in Hanson’s native Chicago. If there is a filmmaker that will unleash the trans stoner film as a long overdue subgenre, it is probably going to be Henry Hanson.

As numerous means of film production tools become more accessible, trans authorship continues to grow. Whether it is coming out of film school, working in Hollywood, making films among your friend group, or in the case of Mackay, making feature-length films as a teenager, trans cinemas’ prominence is expanding and becoming increasingly unignorable in the larger film landscape. There are likely many other gifted filmmakers to emerge in this period, as one thing has become clear: To have a full-fledged new trans cinema movement, you gotta crack a few eggs.

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Willow Catelyn Maclay is co-author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema. She has written for outlets such as The Village Voice, MUBI, Film Comment, Polygon and Roger Ebert.com.

Caden Mark Gardner is the co-author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema. His work can be found in MUBI, Reverse Shot, Film Comment, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is based in Upstate New York.

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