The Peripatetic Metaphors of Lip Service: An Interview with Ann Marie Fleming - filmmaker - Interview

TAKE ONE, Dec, 2001 by Leslie Bishko

Ann Marie Fleming -- a.k.a. AMF -- is a prolific independent filmmaker. Her 18 films, made over the past 14 years, range from experimental and animation to documentary and dramatic genres. They explore themes of family, history and memory in a continuing media critique.

At a recent Vancouver screening of her latest film, Lip Service: A Mystery, AMF stood before the packed house saying, "Why would anyone want to do this? I don't know." Clocking in at 45 minutes, each frame of Lip Service is digitally painted and filtered. The effect is both painterly and dreamy and looked stunning on 35mm film, projected on the large screen at a local commercial theatre. The protagonist of the film is a detective (played by Valerie Buhagiar) whose upper lip is missing. She narrates the story of her first job, which is the investigation of the disappearance of a young man's mother. In the process of her telling the story with a tough matter-of-factness, we learn that she is not who she seems to be. She uses her disfigurement as a veil between her inner self and the circumstances in which she finds herself. While the mystery is eventually resolved, the real purpose of Lip Service is a poignant observation about the central character's identity and the subtle transformation that happens to her d espite her tough outer shell.

The painted and filtered effects are constant throughout the film, sometimes directing our attention to a particular story point, other times creating ambiguity in our interpretation of the images and the story they represent. Adding to the eye candy, animated sequences interact with the live-action footage to form another layer of narrative. So we have four things going on at once -- the voice of the narrator; the live-action footage; the manipulation of the footage; and an animated visual commentary of both the footage and the narration. It's a busy film to watch, but one that also lets you drift among these levels of story and image. Like the painterly effects, the voice of the narrator is a continuous ramble. It's not unlike the voice that lives inside your head, never taking a breath. The constant voice and moving graininess set up the dream--like tone that lets you float along with the story. "As some of you know, I'm very peripatetic," said AMF before she slipped out of the theatre and the screening be gan. I had to look up peripatetic in the dictionary. The OED defines it as "performed or performing while moving about." This is AMF and her film, Lip Service, precisely.

How did you develop the ideas behind Lip Service?

There were four separate events in my life having to do with missing persons and isolation that blended together to form the fictional narrative for Lip Service. When I was living in Toronto in 1995, I used to go for a weekly appointment across town. I ignored the street names because I had a landmark, a used-car-showroom marquee. You could see the marquee from miles away. One day, I drove right past my stop because the sign was gone. There was a news report on the radio about how they had found the body of a Jane Doe in her 30s when the concrete floor of the showroom had been demolished. It was determined that she had been there since the 1950s. I started to think about who this person might be. Maybe she was a post-war European immigrant, someone with no family, no friends, looking for work. Then met a doctor in Toronto who had last seen her son three years ago. She usually visited him once a month -- he lived in Montreal -- and when he didn't show up for one of their meetings, she went to his apartment and found it empty. She contacted the police and private investigators, but he was never found. Later I attended an artist residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in a castle outside of Stuttgart, Germany. I spent the first six months in the writers' wing. Most of the residents who were there went home from time to time. Sometimes in the snowy, bleak winter, I would find myself alone for days. The only way I would know if people were there is if they left their overshoes outside, in the hallway. I imagined that since I wasn't in regular contact with my family or friends, nor did I have a regular schedule, I could be gone for a couple of weeks before anyone would even think to ask about me. Later still, when I was travelling in Italy, I met a woman whose brother had moved to Canada several years earlier, and they were out of touch. When their mother was seriously ill, and subsequently died, she tried to contact her brother, but he had left his job and didn't leave a forwarding address. She had literally lost h im. So you can see, the subject was on my mind.

I've made several works involving first-person monologues. I wanted to deal with issues that concerned me personally, but in another kind of voice. I created the character of the narrator, who is an out-of-work single woman in her 30s who has lost her upper lip due to an altercation with a dog. I've always been interested in the voice of an unreliable narrator ever since reading Robert Browning's My Last Duchess. The narrator in Lip Service is so obsessed with the way she thinks people look at her, because of her disfigurement, that she sees the whole world through this filter. She thinks of herself as a monster and creates a tough-guy persona to compensate for this. This is why I decided to animate the film. The original video footage is heavily processed and manipulated, with animated elements weaving in and out. We see her -- and what she is looking at -- filtered. However, where she sees ugliness, we see beauty. I decided to do it all digitally because I didn't have access to traditional film equipment at the time. I wanted to be able to do something in-house, so to speak. Something hermetic.