Against the Grain: Ellie Lee Forges Ahead with "Repetition Compulsion"

It has taken her six years and countless hours of drawing with a team of animators. But now Boston filmmaker Ellie Lee is reaping some of the rewards. Her film Repetition Compulsion, which recounts the experiences of homeless and battered women, premiered at the Harvard Film Archive to a packed crowd. Last month, it won the Bronze Award for Best Animated Short at the WorldFest-Charleston International Film Festival. Currently, it's playing on the World Wide Web as part of the Reel Time Film Festival at http://www.reeltimefilm.com. You’ll need to download the latest RealPlayer from a link on the site, but the evaluation copy is free for 30 days. (For more info about video streaming, read The Future Is NOW from the October issue of NewEnglandFilm.com). A long-time New England resident, Lee grew up in Boston’s South End, attended Harvard University, and now lives in Newton.

Your film is an "animated documentary." What led you to this format?

I started the project in 1991 when I was a senior at Harvard, studying animation. One of my professors, Janet Perlman, kept saying, you know, no one’s making films like this.

At the time, I was the director of two homeless shelters. I got to know a handful of homeless women, all of whom had been abused, or had been in different abusive relationships. They grew up confusing pain with love. So, I wanted to make the film as senior in college, but I felt that I couldn’t ask them to be in my film since they’d be obliged to say yes. They were still in crisis, and they would come and talk to me at one in the morning. I felt that to turn a tape recorder on them would be too violating and traumatizing.

When it occurred to me that I could do it as an animated film, I realized there were a lot of directions I could go with it, and that I could use the line quality itself to enhance the visual rhythm of the film. Homeless women have said that the film really articulates emotions they can’t. They told me that they would see films with actors and say, that’s not me, but with my film, what’s interesting is that because it’s drawn, it’s not real and they transfer their own experiences into it and it’s a more powerful experience for them. It’s a wonderful compliment.

Was there a universalizing effect that you wanted from the animation?

The experiences being told through the narration were those of a lot of different women. I’ve noticed that animated characters are always white, and it really bothered me. For this film that’s really not appropriate--I thought, maybe she is white, maybe she’s Asian, maybe she’s African-American. I wanted the protagonist to have a universality to her, so I incorporated features from many different ethnicities and drew on gray paper so that she would read as a woman of color.

So, you intended to make the character racially indeterminate?

The character looks exactly like me. I thought long and hard about what this woman would look like, but I’ve always needed a live-action model to draw from. The more I looked at my face in the mirror, the more I noticed that my eyebrows and my forehead were broad, and could be sort of Native-American, my nose is wide, which could be sort of African-American and Chinese--that even my own face had a more universal quality.

What is your ethnic background?

I’m Chinese. My parents are from mainland China, and I’m from Hong Kong.

Did you do the animation yourself?

About a third of it. Nearly all of the close up head shots are animated by me, and certain scenes that I thought would be fun to animate. I began working on it again in 1996. It’s my design, and I created the overall "look" of the film.

There were five people on the animation team, and a composer, Christopher Libertino, in New York. I had two key animators working for me last summer, and three part-time assistants. I hired people once I had the grant money, but I had to find people that had the same visual sensibilities. I ran a studio out of my apartment in Allston last summer. It was a really wonderful collaboration, and I gave my animators a lot of freedom.

Was it difficult to achieve the effects you wanted?

Well, I didn’t finish the film in 91-92 due to car accident. The only thing that was hurt was the artwork--the accident destroyed over 600 original drawings before I had the chance to shoot them on film.

Working on the film at times has been an ordeal, since it’s been with me emotionally for such a long time. Until recently, I’d work on it for a month, then take four or six months off. I couldn’t have finished the film without the funding to hire artistic talent. I had a wonderful team of animators--it was the most fun I’ve ever had on an animated project. We had a casual, healthy, inspirational environment to work in.

Once the animation was done, I spent months on and off on the voiceover, editing and sound.

In some ways, the sound track is independent of the visuals--what kind of effect were you trying to achieve?

Every time you see the woman, you hear a lot of street elements that I wanted in the film. You hear the sounds of traffic, wind, subway cars, pigeons.

Whenever something horrible happens to the woman, you hear the sound of pigeons taking flight. They’re these filthy animals and we have all these negative connotations of them--they’re pests, they’re diseased, they eat garbage. When you see the abuser, you always hear the sound of violent wind, which to me is the sound of the harshness of living on the streets. It was a way of giving the characters a voice. In the rape scene, the second he opens his mouth, it’s just a violent gust of wind rather than actual words.

The voice over narration consisted of ten hours of interviews, edited down to two and a half minutes. I decided to stay with emotions instead of specific experiences. The women I interviewed reassured me I could use the personal experiences they told me about on tape. The more I listened to the tapes, though, the more I thought that the power of these stories comes from the visual experience. I thought that voiceovers that described, for example, how one woman would have her head repeatedly thrown against a brick wall by her boyfriend would compete too much with the violence of the visuals, so I tried to concentrate the voiceovers on the emotional: that these women somehow feel they deserve to be treated this way, that they have no control over what’s going on.

So, the specifics are in the visuals, and the emotions are kept in the voice over. The story you see in the film is true: one woman told me, "He kept threatening to find me and one day he did, he broke down the door and the only escape was crawling through the window, and it was on the 3rd floor."

A number of different voices narrate the film. Who are the people speaking?

There are seven different voices. Most of the voice-over narration is that of three formerly homeless women.

Who are the men speaking?

I also included conversations from four shelter directors--some of them only had one line. The men came from this group. At first, I only had women speaking, but I didn’t want it to play as a "women’s" film or to give the impression that women are the only victims. I wanted there to be a male voice and perspective on the issue. A lot of men were abused as children, and one of the messages I tried to convey is that they then try to exert control over other situations, so that they can have control over something.

How did you become interested in the topic of abused/homeless women?

When I first got to college, everything I studied at Harvard made me really miserable. It was very academic and it felt like what I was studying had nothing to do with the things around me. During my sophomore year I started to work about thirty hours a week at a community service organization. It really balanced me. I also started taking photography and filmmaking course and found that this was something I really loved to do.

As I said, I started the film in 1991, and at that time, there really wasn’t a lot of public discussion about domestic violence. That didn’t happen until around 1993. And it’s obviously not just the homeless--a lot of women from wealthy backgrounds seek safety in women’s shelters.

One thing that troubles me is that there are so few programs that work with abused women, yet there are even fewer that address the men that perpetrate this abuse. Abusers are really good at finding women who have no self esteem, who are so victimizable. I think that really has to change, for things to get better. Men have to seek treatment as well, and we need to focus on that. Our culture has to change so that we can keep the abuser from hurting fifteen other women down the road.

What kind of reaction has the film been getting from women’s shelters and outreach programs?

They’ve been very happy with the film, and I’ve been thrilled with response from the community. The York Street Women’s Shelter and Massachusetts Coalition for Battered Women has used it for outreach and training. An organization called On the Rise--well, they put me on the board of directors because of the film.

On the Rise’s outreach team and Safe Haven specifically supports chronically homeless women, 90 percent of whom have been sexually or physically abused. The women’s needs are so great they require a time investment that existing social service agencies can’t make; On The Rise provides support for more than 70 women who haven’t have any before.

An outreach team goes out in the streets. That team includes a social worker and two formerly homeless women who’ve made it out of homelessness and now have full-time jobs and great kids. In meeting them, you’d never guess they were once homeless – I mean, one was a prostitute for twelve years. They defy every stereotype you’d have of the homeless. They really draw upon their own experiences to draw strength--they’ve overcome these crippling experiences, and it’s amazing that they’ve overcome them, and the women on the street can look at them as mentors and as inspirations to get off the street themselves. Over months and years they’ll hopefully be able to assist these women into permanent living situations. They’re dealing with a lot of emotional stuff, and On the Rise uses the film for outreach, training, and fund raising.

How were you able to produce Repetition Compulsion?

Well, I had been teaching animation at Harvard, and I also taught three classes at the Boston Film Video Foundation. I’ve been very fortunate in getting grants: I received four grants for this film that let me pay my team’s salaries. Right now, I’ve got a small nest egg to live off of through Christmas to devote to writing. A really small, small nest--it’s more like a couple of twigs and a leaf.

We just finished the film in October. Since then, I’ve been traveling with it to festivals, to try to get some exposure for it, and to get people interested in my next project.

What is your next project?

Now, I’m more interested in live-action fiction. I’ve written a treatment for a feature length film called Worth. It’s really too early to talk about it, but it’s about four very lonely people who try to find worth in their lives, and it’s centered around a homeless man.