Caroline Golum
A collage like shrine to Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century Christian mystic who recorded a series of fantastic visions through text while in isolation.
Hi! Welcome to the Casserole Series. I’m happy to have you here :) Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My brief time on this earth has been pretty banal thus far: I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and decamped for New York City when I was 18, and I've been here for a little more than 15 years. Having only lived in the two biggest cities in the country, I consider myself fairly naive and ignorant - I've had the chance to travel elsewhere in the country thanks to film festivals and occasional family vacations, but for the most part my life is pretty circumscribed. I've squandered years on moviegoing, moviemaking, fine clothes, riding my custom bike around. Sprinkled throughout that time, I've had dozens of different precarious media jobs, programmed screenings around the city, written a fair amount, but my raison d'etre has always been filmmaking. It's a very costly enterprise, so my credits are regrettably light, but I'm proud of what little I've done.
My first feature, A Feast of Man, was born of a rather sudden and frustrated impulse. I had just finished shooting a mid-length film (50ish minutes) called Getting Away With It, about a pair of lesbian cat burglars undergoing a breakup. I shot it at friends' apartments, using the lead actress' minivan as our picture car and main mode of transport, and the film ultimately fell apart in post. Born of this frustration and failure, I co-wrote A Feast of Man with my writing partner, Dylan Pasture, and within a few months we were in proper pre-production gearing up to shoot the film at an Air BnB in Hudson. For a first feature, it has a lot going for it - not a perfect picture, but watchable, which I consider an accomplishment. If all of this sounds rather retiring, or a little self-effacing, that's entirely deliberate. Referring to oneself as a naive, ignorant, even humble narrator is a trope of medieval writing, which is a perfect segue to the meat of this interview!
You mentioned you’re working on a feature film about Julian. Can you tell us more?
Keeping with disappointment as a driving force in my work, I got hip to Julian sometime in the spring of 2017 - A Feast of Man was finished, and had yet to secure a premiere (it did a few months later, at the Sidewalk Film Festival, FYI). I spent years on this film and had nowhere to screen it, I felt like an utter failure, the election had just happened, I hated my job, etc. Suffice to say, I was in a very bad place, and my then-roommate - Feast star Laurence Bond - was working on his masters in medieval history at Columbia. He had written a paper about Julian, and one afternoon when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself he asked if he could read me his paper. It was the first I'd ever heard of Julian, and her story changed me. I was shocked to learn that no one had made a film about her, and initially I'd asked Laurence if he would lend his academic expertise as a historic consultant. Our collaboration eventually evolved to a more traditional co-writer relationship, and his contributions to this script have been invaluable.
When the pandemic began in March 2020, I had been making considerable headway on the film for a few years. I'd cast my childhood friend, the great Shakespearean actress Tessa Strain as Julian, and my favorite working actor, Theodore Bouloukos as Father Ambrose, her confessor. I'd been collaborating with my DP, Gabe Elder, and production designer, Grace Sloan, for more than a year. It felt like the whole thing could really come together, but we all know how that went. So by the summertime, when I started working on Sixteen Showings, I'd been sitting with this indefinitely halted production for a few months.
Speaking of March 2020, I was struck by the line, “Winter, summer, spring, fall. The moments in-between were hers to enjoy of her own volition but always in solitude. With nothing but her work and her thoughts year after year.” During lockdown I wished for that kind of peace in solitude, with my work and my thoughts, but never quite got there. I have a new understanding now of the internal work that is demanded of us in forced (or in Julian’s case chosen) solitude. I know you started working on this film before the pandemic. If at all, how has your relationship to Julian’s story shifted or evolved since March 2020?
There was a noticeable revived interest in Julian's writing specifically, and the medieval era more generally, as people attempted to make sense of the one-two plague-and-uprising punch. For most of 2020, I was working from home (fortunately) in a street-facing apartment. My days consisted entirely of Zoom meetings and sprints to complete some task or other, punctuated by wailing sirens and wasteful police helicopters. My then-partner and I were spending our spare time on mutual aid runs or at demonstrations, and all the while I kept worrying about if I'd ever make this film. It was hard to make any kind of work within a very visible, widespread malstrom of public suffering - not only concentrating on the work at hand, but justifying its creation.
I was struggling to stay "in touch" with the material when my friend Grace Kredell, who is a mystic in her own right and a dear friend for 20 years, suggested I make an altar to Julian. Initially, it seemed like a nice way to "distract" myself from everything going on outside. Julian worked in isolation for years - we don't know when she wrote her book, how long it took, only that she wrote it while living as an anchoress and that she wrote it in two phases: there's a "short text," which is a very top-level summary of her visionary experience, and an expanded "long text" which goes into greater detail. As I started putting together little items for the altar - a hand, a hazelnut, fabrics, cut-outs of medieval people - the idea occurred to me that I could use this as a little miniature "proving ground" for my feature.
Aw yes! I love the imagery in the film. Each shot feels like a small altar or miniature shrine to Julian. How did you land on this collage-like approach?
I began to treat Sixteen Shewings as my own version of Julian's "short text": a very broad, beat-by-beat account of her visions, without any of the biographical detail I added to the feature script. It was a welcome challenge, figuring out how to distill her visions to their most basic, symbolic elements. Keeping with the idea of being "anchored" to a place, I incorporated found materials I had at home, combined with a set of color gels I bought from Adorama. Without the ability to make a traditional film, with actors on a set, directing performances and placements, I found a canny workaround. Right before the pandemic, I'd taken these photos of Tessa at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, one of my absolute favorite places, and used those photos to "cast" Tessa as Julian in the film. I rendered them in black-and-white so they would contrast with the color scheme I'd assigned to the visionary tableaux. The historical background about the plague and the Peasants' Revolt were a must-have, not only because they informed her work itself but because they connected her story to our lived present. I'd gotten back into watercolor painting early in the pandemic, so the time-lapse watercolor was the quickest and easiest way I could think of to add "movement" and depth to the piece.
It should be noted here that when I'd finished the film, I once again was struggling to find the right exhibition context. I didn't want to park it on Vimeo indefinitely, I was proud of this work and wanted to share it with the world. It's hard to make a movie under any circumstances, let alone in your 10ft x. 10ft office space at the height of a pandemic. A few months after I'd finished it, I saw a call-for-entries from curator Inney Prakash for Prismatic Ground, a new festival he'd put together for experimental documentaries. I submitted the film, he graciously accepted it, and in April 2021 it had a virtual premiere at the festival - quite possibly the only premiere I could've secured, given how niche this film is. And to Inney's credit, that festival was a total joy for all involved: the filmmakers, the audience, and the curator I'm sure. I even wrote about it for MUBI, my first such outing writing festival coverage from the filmmaker's point of view. It was such a lucky break, and I remain grateful to this day that he gave me the opportunity.
What have you been listening to, watching, reading lately?
I really gorged myself on medieval period films while I was researching this film, and I'm still making headway through a rather lengthy list of titles, but with this great resurfacing going on here in NYC - everyone is vaxx'd, relaxed, and fresh out of fucks to give, it seems - I've gotten back into moviegoing for pleasure's sake. Last weekend I saw five out of six films in a mystery Hong Kong movie marathon, I saw the new Michael Bay film AmbuLAnce at a mall in Queens, I took a date to see Buster Keaton's The General recently. It's been all about scratching the itch and following whatever pleasure-seeking impulse guides me to pick a movie on any given evening. My reading has fallen off since I stopped commuting, but I just finished Dana Stevens' exceptional Buster Keaton biography, "Camera Man," and it's given me a lot of perspective as I gear up to make my feature, Revelations of Divine Love. Our approach to the film is not unlike early silent moviemaking: lots of built sets, shooting MOS, expressive acting, so reading about Keaton's methods in-depth have been helpful. And listening-wise, for my money you can't beat the Screen Slate podcast, of which I am a frequent guest.
Please check out Caroline’s first feature on Tubi, A Feast of Man.
And donate to the making of Caroline Golum’s feature on Julian of Norwich here! Ty
Caroline Golum is a filmmaker, writer, and programmer in New York City. When she isn't working for the man, she is either making, watching, or writing about a movie.
