While visiting her Auntie Holly, Darling enters a parallel, dream-like world, where a series of encounters with transfeminine figures (played by Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis, and Flawless Sabrina) explore the complexity of identity politics, gender construction and the edification of affects amid a kaleidoscopic depiction of time and place.

Stuart Comer: She Gone Rogue functions like a lightning rod for queer cultural histories, channelling everything from the cinema of Todd Haynes and Maya Deren to the legendary transgender icons Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis and Flawless Sabrina, who all appear in the film. It could be argued that the film holds up a mirror to this complex set of histories and personas in order to release the protagonist, Darling, and allow her to “go rogue” and find her own path. What was the process of creating this film, how did you work with history to create an intimate family of influences and precedents, but also ground for inventing the future for a shifting set of identities?

Rhys Ernst: The film’s casting mirrors the actual relationships that Zackary has with Vag, Flawless, Holly, and her own parents. Holly, Sabrina, and Vag individually represent pioneers in transgender history; the film is a homage to their legacies as artists and as counter-culture heroes. The film looks forward and backwards at an imagined and real trans narrative, coalescing time and space as a means to talk about a self-preserving community, intergenerational relationships, aging, love, and chosen families.

Zackary Drucker: We absolutely drew inspiration from Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Pasolini’sTeorema, and Polanski’s Repulsion. We were also influenced by on- and off- screen artist relationships such as that of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, and Federico Fellini and Gulietta Messina. We were interested in the blurred line between fiction and reality when a couple performs itself. An imagined story of our relationship became a central theme in the film, as Darling pursues a lost love (played by Rhys).

RE: She Gone Rogue is a very truthful intersection of both of our practices as artists. We co-wrote the film, Zackary played the lead and I directed. We shot it in fits and spurts across five different cities and towns. While she travels in and out of figurative holes, what Darling searches for is wholeness. She chases reflections of herself, meets trans-feminine archetypes and family figures, and seeks to rectify her lost love.

ZD: She Gone Rogue is about the universal reality that we all exist in bodies that we didn't choose and nobody makes it out alive, or as Darling articulates: "Your body is a dead-end." While the soul is a continuous road, the future is a mere possibility, and that is the void of uncertainty that Darling stares into. In real life, Holly always says to me: “YOU are our future!” and I say back to her, “you are MY future.” It goes both ways. Then sometimes I walk in the door and she gets spooked because she thinks that she’s seeing the ghost of her friend Candy Darling. It’s funny how time and perception move on a continuum, that we live long enough to experience an abundance of moments in time and people who inevitably cease to exist.

SC: Where does this film fall within the spectrum of work you have produced, from performance and photography to, more recently, television. How would you compare working within the worlds of art and experimental film and more non-linear forms of storytelling to that of television and the mass media?

ZD: She Gone Rogue represents a unique turning point for both of us. Up until She Gone Rogue, Rhys had primarily been working with narrative filmmaking and had just completed his CalArts thesis film, a 16mm narrative short called “The Thing.” My original medium is photography, but at the time I was working primarily on experimental film / video works and performances. When She Gone Rogue was playing at Outfest in 2013, we started consulting on Jill Soloway’s pilot Transparent, and have continued working on the series, now going into it’s third season as co-producers. We work on other entertainment industry projects at this point too. We are acquiring new skills to make our own projects on a larger scale, and to maybe even have shows of our own one day. The realm of art making is a boundless horizon where we are free to take risks and break rules; bringing that spirit into other fields is a true gift for any number of pursuits. I think that artists will have an expanded role in the future, that we will be less cloistered in the world and economy of high art. I will always be an artist first and foremost – that is the core of my identity.

RE: There are symbiotic relationships between visual art, experimental film, independent film and television whether these seemingly disparate cultures like to admit it or not. I love using television as a trope within fine art – I have made video art work that has referenced soap operas, talk shows, cooking shows, and infomercials – and likewise, I love to bring experimental or more transgressive modes of storytelling into populist forms of filmmaking. The mode is flexible for me and is dictated by the needs of the project. Working in television right now is exciting because it’s is like the studio system in Hollywood in the 1970’s – it’s a brave new world for intelligent adult content and almost anything feels possible. Regardless of the mode, I’m interested in reaching people. Film, whether experimental or populist is unique in its ability to create empathy. For that and due to its elastic formal range, I’ll never tire of it.

Credits

Written & Produced by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst

Directed by Rhys Ernst

Starring Zackary Drucker, Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis, Flawless Sabrina, Rhys Ernst & Zackary’s parents

Original score by Ellen Reid

Premiered at Made in LA 2014 at the Hammer Museum