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Performing the Unperformable in 'Kate Plays Christine'

True/False

This story is part of True/False Conversations, a series of in-depth interviews with the filmmakers of this year's True/False Film Fest. Find the rest of them here or download the podcast on iTunes. 

How do you make a film about the feelings and consequences of suicide through the story of a woman who has been dead 40 years and is barely remembered?

 

That's just one of the tasks that Robert Greene, veteran True/False director and filmmaker-in-chief for the Murray Documentary center at the University of Missouri, took on in his new film, Kate Plays Christine. The film tells the story of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida newswoman who committed suicide on live TV in the 1970s. Greene follows actress Kate Lyn Shiel as she tries to dig up more information about Christine's life in order to play her in a film, but the documentary ends up as a gripping and cinematic piece that questions the audience as much as the characters. 

KBIA's Emerald O'Brien talked to Greene about how the filmmaking techniques brought interest and meaning to both the macabre story and the attempts to understand it.  

O'Brien: How did you decide that the best way to tell Christine's story was to watch an actress play her?

Greene: So, Kate is an old friend of mine and we've been trying to work together in various ways for years. The title of the movie Kate Plays Christine came with the concept. It was almost like one full thing. You know like I'll have Kate do this and what I'll do is I'll watch her as she tries to process this story. And as a thoughtful person, Kate's one of the most thoughtful people I know, so I knew that having her sort of work through this not only to create a character but also as a human being would be the thing that would, it would speak to the reason why the story wouldn't leave my mind for many years. That would be the way into it. But it continued to develop over the months and basically a year after the conception of the idea and the filming of the idea and then event through the filming, it's a conceptual film in some ways because it has a concept to start, but it was important that we discovered something, just like any documentary would, as we were making it. So the idea really developed through both the production process and even the editing process, it kept developing and developing until we got to where we were.

O'Brien: I know that you have a pretty significant interest in how people act in front of the camera and how they act off of the camera and this film plays so much with that and blurring when people are acting and when they're not acting, so how did that serve you in the film?

Greene: For this film particularly, I really wanted it to be... I wanted the question of whether she was acting or not. Now, it's a documentary, you put an actor in a documentary, the audience will automatically start reading into everything Kate does as a performance. Now Kate is incredibly in control of her performance in this film. She is absolutely giving a performance. She is an artist who is manifesting a version of herself and a version of a person going through this thing and that doesn't mean she's not actually going through it, it just means that she's also manifesting it at the same time. But in this film, those questions are meant to be starting places, not end points. If you watch this film and the only thing you take away from it is "I didn't what was real and what wasn't," it's a failure. If we use that question of what is real what is not, what is acting and what is authentic, and that drives you into the psychology of the story, so you get into Kate's head, and then by extension you try to get into Christine Chubbuck's head, and you think about what it means to be Kate and what it means to have been Christine, then that can work. That's the goal. The goal is to use that question, "What's acting what's not?" as a driver into the story.

Greene's last film at True/False was a 2014 film called Actress that follows an actress turned housewife trying to get back into her trade. Though the two films have very different subject matters, the use of actors in both raise those questions about performance.

O'Brien: How do you see [the two films'] relation, did you want them to be companion pieces or was it just something that the idea of [Actress] sprung the idea [of Kate Plays Christine] a little bit?

Greene: It was more like, I guess I was actually a little bit hesitant to make another film that's about an actor. Only because you can't help but compare them. It was more like the idea was such that I almost couldn't imagine doing it another way. Because what I was really fascinated by, what I continue to be interested in about Christine Chubbuck's story is not just that she committed suicide on television. It's that that story, the nature of her story, the details of her story, make you think about all these other things. And they can't help but make you think about all these other things. Like representation and the ethics and should we look at the footage or not. And all these questions that sort of come up through her story. And also just the need by people, when someone commits suicide, it leaves such a vacuum of meaning, and in that vacuum, in that hole created by the act itself, you try to fill the void with yourself and with what you can try to understand. You narrativize people's lives in a very specific way after they commit suicide, you try to explain it. It's a very natural thing. To me, the trying to explain it thing, that's the relatable part of the story. People consider suicide every day, people commit suicide every day, it's something that affects us all in some ways, so it's this attempt to relate to the story, this attempt to tell the story, this attempt to understand the reasons is the part of the story that I couldn't shake…I felt that going through Kate, going through her attempting to understand, the audience can attempt to understand and that attempting to understand and the failing to understand and the failing to narrativize someone's life could be the subject of the film. So there was only really one way to do that. So I was relatively reluctant in some ways to make a film about an actor in some ways just because I think Actress does what it does and I didn't want to think about it necessarily as companion pieces, but they speak to each other I think.