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Film Close-Ups

Peter Crimmins, Producer
KALX 90.7 FM
Sept 22, 2001

Interview with Giovanna Chesler and Peter Crimmins

Introduction (excerpts):

A program of short films. Some of them have a short experimental feel to them. In this How Do I Look program it’s about self image issues, which are never too far away. You know, we like to think that beauty is only skin deep and that it’s just a mere surface thing, but it really does matter. One way or another, how you look is going to getcha. Because it really does matter. It reverberates through your attitude toward yourself. So in this program I’m going to focus on two films in particular. One is called BeauteouS: Stephanie by Giovanna Chesler. She’s a local San Francisco based filmmaker. A film she made about her sister who was born with a cleft palate and lip. Also, later on we’re going to be looking at Inside Out, a film by Jennifer Petrucelli, a local San Francisco based filmmaker. It’s a film about her aunt who in her old age, 60 years old, came down with Bells Palsy.

So we’re going to start with Giovanna Chesler. It’s a fifteen-minute film where she looks at her sister, Stephanie and the series of surgeries that she had to go through.

Yes, it turns out Stephanie went through twenty, more like thirty surgeries. Born with a cleft palate and lip initially when you’re an infant, you do a surgery to close it, but she went through many many cosmetic surgeries while her body was, her face was developing and while medical technology improved itself. They kept getting in there. So she spent a lot of time tinkering with her face. Most of the time it was at her own parents’, her parents were pushing her into it because she was an infant, and her parents decided what to do with her.

So Giovanna came into the KALX studios a few days ago to talk about her film. It’s called BeauteouS: Stephanie.

Giovanna:
When I started thinking about the film, I went to Stephanie, who is my sister and I said, you know, I want to make a film about you and what you’ve gone through, and she said, well you won’t believe this, but last week mom, my mother and her mother, gave her this box that she’d been saving everything in for, since she was born, all the documents, all the needles and face braces and a journal.

Peter:
So Stephanie’s mother had saved this stuff.

Giovanna:
Yes. Saved it and had never shown it to her. So suddenly right when we’re about to start the film she’s presented with her history contained in a box. You can hear in her voice, she’s been thinking about this for a long time.

Stephanie, sound clip from film: “The box is gray and it’s very sterile looking. I guess you could call it like a mini file cabinet. I would have maybe picked something else if I was going to keep all my personal files in a box. I mean although the box is just filled with paperwork, and reports. It was documentation of everything that I had been through. I was three I couldn’t make decisions. I now have a box that contains an entire folder of what happened in those years. What decisions were made.”

Peter:
If we could talk a bit about the nature of her operations, the nature of her situation. She was born with a cleft palate.

Giovanna:
Cleft lip and palate

Peter:
Cleft lip and palate. So what does that mean as an infant to be born with a cleft lip and palate.

Giovanna:
When we are born our bodies come together and often there are spaces, and she had a space on her lip and on her palate. So literally she had no closure at her nose and at her lip. She had no line across like we have with a normal lip. And she had no bone there either. And this is something a lot of children are born with. Children really only have to have two operations when they have clefts. The rest are cosmetic.

Peter:
These operations lasted her entire childhood and into adulthood. Is is because as she’s growing, new nips and tucks have to be done.

Giovanna:
That and also then they reach what they think is the peak of what they can do for her and then all the sudden medicine changes, which is the situation that she had. Medicine changed and advanced so that other things could happen, like she could have a bone graft done. Um, when she reached the end of her cycle of operations, she was about 12. which is a significant part of the film. We see her in junior high school experiencing this feedback from children that are saying she doesn’t look right. And my parents had to decide well, does she have to undergo more surgeries and receive more painful surgeries, or does she just have to endure this pain of society telling she doesn’t look right forever. And those were the two choices to be made.

Stephanie: sound clip from the film “As a child I never felt ugly. I never, I didn’t feel as abnormal as you would expect. I felt that yes, my nose looked different and yes, I didn’t have the same lip shape as people in my family. You know, why didn’t I have a, why didn’t my lip look like my sisters’. They both have an upper lip. Why don’t I? But, I didn’t, I’ve never thought of myself as ugly.

When I was I was in 7th grade, was, I think the hardest time. This one boy made fun of me and he just used to constantly say things. I would talk to my friend and he would turn around and be like “crooked nose” or like “smashed up nose” or you know things like that. To the point where I think that’s when I really started getting shy and not talking so that people wouldn’t turn around and look at me.”

Peter:
So until this time, I mean junior high is a tough period for everyone. It’s a time when people are sort of growing into their bodies and figuring out what they look like.

Giovanna:
She had an interesting story, one that I couldn’t fit into the film, about her and two friends. One was a model in New York, these are young girls around 12 or 13 playing with makeup. And they’re all playing with makeup. They’re all covering their faces in different ways and trying to make themselves look older or more beautiful as they see it. But the way they started covering her face with makeup was different than how they were covering their own. And all these young girls, all these young boys are going through these changes and are trying to figure out how to understand their bodies, but her relationship to that and her experience with that was so much different and just an exaggeration of everything that those kids were going through, I think.

It comes down to, I think, women and beauty and what makes a girl. What makes a woman is to be beautiful is to look a certain way and suddenly she is coming into womanhood and she doesn’t and that continues, that continues with every woman who is trying to cover their face in some way, with these, with these shades of color.

Peter:
One of the ways that you ended this film, we don’t see her face. You uh, show us half of her face or extreme close ups of applying makeup or um we see her hands. We see everything but the face until the very last shot. When I’m watching this I thought, there’s a bit of showmanship there to hold off the prize. I mean, horror movies do this. They never show you the monster. Because that makes it all the more interesting. And I don’t mean to imply that this is anywhere monstrous.

Giovanna:
Well, it’s what we define each other by. It’s what we initially see and you make so many assumptions about somebody based on just the way they look. And when you’re watching the film, you really want to see how she looks. And so that’s either going to annoy you or it’s going to draw you in, or it’s just going to make you value what she has to say a little bit more.

Stephanie: sound clip from the film “I think about my cleft every day when I put my makeup on. I don’t know, that’s just my imperfection that I just like to kind of cover up. I don’t like people to notice that it’s redder there, um. When I look back on it now, I don’t, I wouldn’t want to take back any surgeries. They were all beneficial. It was just part of childhood. My childhood.”

Peter:
Now, does she. She’s a woman now. When people look at her, does she still see them looking at her lip, or does she see them looking at something else about her. Has she gotten over that, I guess.

Giovanna:
Yes, she assumes that people don’t see it anymore and people don’t see it. She’s just another pretty face. And it’s just as if no one has any clue what has been constructed there and what’s behind that. And she herself doesn’t judge people the way other people judge each other.

Peter:
We’re talking to Giovanna Chesler. Her film is BeauteouS: Stephanie. It’s screening as part of the Mad Cat film festival in the How Do I Look Program screening September 27th in the Artists Television Access in San Francisco, 8PM. Thanks so much for talking today.

Giovanna:
Thank you.