In Vestirse, John E. Kilberg Explores the thorny & reflexive beauty of translating one’s self

Arts

Sep 7

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Spanish-speaking viewers of the short film Vestirse – the latest from New York City-based filmmaker John e. Kilberg – will recognize the title as the reflexive verb “to dress oneself.” It’s a pronominal verb – one that refers to an act taken upon oneself – a grammar without analogy in the English language. It’s an apt name for this little jewel of a film, which appears on-screen this month in Atlanta as part of the Out on Film festival. Vestirse addresses both the act of dressing oneself, and the thornier task of articulating one’s self to oneself, and to the world.

“It also reminded me of the word ‘versatile,’” John told me over a Zoom call recently from their sunny Brooklyn apartment. “My good friend, at first glance, saw the title as ‘versatile’ – I loved that.” This almost-anagram forms an elegant logic, too: as the film unspools, we observe the sole character, the non-binary Jacky, don a series of outfits – some feminine, some masculine – for a future, off-screen visit with their family. The simplicity of that plot belies the film’s underlying nuance: with each wardrobe change, an entire self is constructed, evaluated, and shed, a fluid choreography of transformation.

We watch as Jacky – played by John, who also wrote and directed – reaches into their closet hesitatingly, pulls on one piece after another, frantically robing and disrobing, pausing for long appraisals in a series of mirrors. Is this who I am? They seem to be asking, waiting for a glimmer of recognition from the opposing reflection. The ritualized movement – clothes on, clothes off – brought to my mind the German choreographer Pina Bausch, whose work often elevated quotidian rituals like dressing oneself onto a higher, stylized plane. John took modern dance in school, but developed the movement sequences more by happenstance than by design: “It wasn’t something that I planned, but a tick of the character that developed.” That squares with how John sees themself as a director: “I don’t want to move (actor’s) bodies like a puppet. I like to let the human live.” The effect is striking, even more so thanks to the warm drama of Michael Kirshner’s cinematography; the dancerly ritual endows each change of clothes with a heightened sense of significance. Each of these outfits is an optional self, a world of its own.

For what are clothes, but an exterior manifestation of our inner world? For nearly forever – and still today for nearly everyone – that exteriority was a codified social construction, a presumption of interiority enforced by warp and weft: girdle or jerkin, bowler or bonnet, pantaloon or pantalette. Even in this new world, where the gender norms of fashion have stretched and loosened, we are still more familiar with “transvestism,” in the literal sense of that word: a trans that is border-crossing, that disappears and emerges on the other side, transformed. The sartorial spectrum on display in Vestirse – from a conservative shirt and tie, which Jacky dons only to tear off in breathless desperation, to the film’s final and ascendant outfit, which I’ll leave for screening viewers to enjoy – evinces a different kind of exteriority, one less beholden to the binary of either/or. On-screen representation of gender-queerness is tentative and new, a language of being most filmmakers are only just beginning to speak, but for Kilberg, who is non-binary, it’s a native tongue.

“It’s very simple just to say it’s about being non-binary,” Kilberg explained to me. “It’s very much about my grandmother and my mother, and the feminine side of my life: there is feminine energy in me, and there is masculine energy in me. This was really about focusing on that feminine energy, and thanking those two women in my life.” They had not originally intended to play the role of Jacky, but pandemic filming necessitated a smaller cast and crew; when Kilberg stepped into the role, they shifted the film to make room for their own life story. “It really became a love note to my family.” That personal narrative is expressed through both the feminine contours of the film’s plot and aesthetics, as well as the Spanglish of its spare dialogue. Kilberg’s mother’s family is from Latin America and spoke Spanish; their father is Jewish. Spanglish was a constant feature of their childhood. “My mom calls me ‘mi hijo’ – m’ijo for short,” they explained; Jacky’s mother does the same in the film. “It means my son. I couldn’t have her say a non-binary term – it doesn’t exist. But it’s a term of endearment.”

What to make of such imperfect expression? Rather than shy from contradiction, Vestirse makes its home in the in-between. It is a film that acknowledges the inchoate plateau on which we are constructing a new kind of gender, a new way to dress oneself. Between Jacky’s furious outfit changes, we glimpse them, stripped to a pair of white briefs, the fact of the body undeniable. “Being in my underwear the whole time was very important,” Kilberg told me. “I’m not someone who’s insanely fit. It’s just showing that this body is a work of art, it’s not perfect – because what is perfect?” Our bodies themselves are nameless: we dress ourselves to translate. Jacky, in a dress, is still “m’ijo” – do we not contain multitudes, after all? One feels possibility gleaming in the truth of a story like this.

With the act of getting dressed serving as translator, Vestirse neither asks for nor offers much by way of dialogue. That laconic execution is immeasurably enhanced by the score, all original music by composer Samuel Campoli. Campoli used only a single instrument: a beat-up electric organ, which he found at Goodwill. “It has a mind of its own,” Campoli told me over Zoom when we spoke. “It’s kind of an organic living thing.” The organ – wheezily resonant and strangely reverent, like a church service shriveled down to the size of a fist – reverberates through the plot, keening so vivaciously it seems to be a character itself. “I was thinking of (the organ) as if it were whispering into Jacky’s ear,” Campoli said, “Leading them to this moment of self-discovery.” Campoli and Kilberg have worked on past projects together – another short film made heavy use of a saw – and their shared admiration for composers like Yann Tiersen and Ennio Morricone is central to the success of their collaboration. “I’ve worked with other composers,” Kilberg told me, “But at the end of the day, the connection to certain films that you share between you is the most important thing.” The lyric quality of Tiersen and Morricone’s work is evident in Campoli’s: his wheezing organ provides Kirshner’s cinematography with all the explication it requires.

An elegant amalgam of music, movement, and costume, Vestirse reveals the complex task we undertake in the articulation of our bodies, of our souls, to each other. Through this careful ritual of dressing and undressing, Kilberg conveys an urgent desire for translation: to traverse the limitations of language and of dress, and to reach the other side – imperfect, but so very much alive.

Catch Vestirse at Out on Film, September 23 to October 3, 2021. Tickets here.

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Rachel Garbus is a writer, satirist, and oral history podcast-maker based in Atlanta, GA. To keep up with the lesbian Joneses, she co-parents an anxious dog with her girlfriend and goes too far out of her way to recycle glass. Follow her on Twitter @rachel_garbus.

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