On February 5th, filmmaker Courtney Stephens visited Cornell Cinema for an in-person voiceover for her experimental essay film Terra Femme (2021).
Born in California, Stephens is a director and writer who majored in medical anthropology at Berkeley and later delved deeper into filmmaking while working in New York at a magazine company. This ultimately led her to enroll in the American Film Institute (AFI), a top-ranked and selective film school. Since then, Stephens has created various films, and her work has been exhibited at several film festivals and museums.
Her most recent work, Terra Femme, talks about the forgotten, traveling women who have fallen in between the cracks of history. The film comprises an anthology of travelogs that were filmed by various women from the 1920s to 1950s. These pieces were woven together into a coherent masterpiece that ultimately promotes intriguing and thought provoking questions such as whether the presence of a “female gaze” exists and the role that travel plays in other aspects of life. These aspects can include creative expression or simply the desire to document, to leave a mark somewhere in the midst of a fast paced society.
In an interview with the Cornell Review, Stephens further delves into the inspiration of the film and the intimate process of creating Terra Femme.
Why did you choose Terra Femme as the title of the film? Does the title have a particular meaning that you would like to share?
The title is a reference to the Latin phrase Terra Firma, meaning solid ground/firm ground, but gendered instead. My hope is that it brings up the idea of experiencing landscape through a gendered lens. The film is about a lot more than landscape, but I like that the title conjures the idea of something more planetary, rather than something that located the film more culturally in the idea of travel. Like: you are born on a planet, you have a certain body or a certain interior lens. You have some time to look around. I’m not a big fan of puns, but here we are.
What inspired you to create a piece like this? What got you into travel films and what does travel mean to you?
The film has a long back story. Back in 2011, I did a Fulbright in India, after having studied abroad there previously as an undergraduate. I was interested in looking at Western women’s travel accounts in India, firstly because there is a lot of this kind of writing going back to the 18th century, and secondly because I wondered how it would shed light on women’s relationship to imperialism, and the way imperialism supported, in a certain complicated way, advancing opportunities for Western women. As you can imagine, that is a large and vexed subject, and I spent a couple of years in India and then many more back home trying to put together a different film on this subject, during which I came across some of these visual travelogues from the 1940s, when India was gaining its independence from Britain. Eventually, I gave up on the original project and decided to focus on the visual travelogues instead, but a lot of the original concerns leaked in.
What was the process of putting together Terra Femme like?
The process was long. I actually began showing versions of this project as a kind of PowerPoint lecture in 2017. At that time I would talk about my interests, show some unedited clips from amateur travelogues, read some quotes, etc. It was like showing raw materials for a film and then having a dialogue with the audience that, over the years, honed my understanding of the material. It became more and more of an edited piece, until the pandemic when I was invited to show it online, and I decided to edit it into the form it appears in now. The process involves a lot of index cards and thinking about how to balance both facts and open questions. I never wanted to make something that entirely answered its own questions – I hoped that the mystery of these materials, the mystery of the sensibility looking out through these cameras – remained intact.
What did you hope to achieve by creating Terra Femme? What is one takeaway that you would want someone watching it to know?
I’m not sure I hoped to achieve anything, to be honest! I suppose at some point I thought that it was a worthwhile endeavor to go about recovering the artistic work of women who never really had a chance in their own lives to be artists, or filmmakers, or have their voices heard or known. But, to be honest, over my time working with these materials I started to find a whole new respect for private work that isn’t framed around the idea of being a capital “F” filmmaker, or a professional. I felt more like I was spending intimate time with intimate documents, and that was ok for me. So maybe that’s the answer to the question – that I hoped to give dignity to these women’s small gestures of attention and delight with the world. I hope the takeaway is to feel like there is value and beauty in exploration that remains private, is not posted to social media, not used to raise one’s status in the world – to be alone with oneself.
