Although it features me as a fat woman in the frame, January is not a film primarily about fat, it's about abuse in queer relationships. It's heavy! It came about because I've been wanting to write about this subject for some time, and I had the opportunity last year to learn about a theatrical technique called Verbatim. Verbatim entails making a recording of someone telling a story which is then acted by someone else. In January I am acting the story given to me by someone talking about how they have been abusive towards me. The effect is unnerving because the authenticity of the original recording is allowed to come through the headphones and then through my mouth. It's a way of telling stories that might be very difficult, and which maintains the anonymity of the original speaker, who might not be able to speak without that protection.
I thought Verbatim would be a good way of making a piece of work about abuse, and that I could do it very simply. My film-making aesthetic, through necessity because I am untrained, is of using very lo-fi equipment in a DIY fashion. With January it is just me and an old camcorder on a tripod. I edited the film on some free software that came on my computer. I have no distributor, I just burn and post DVDs as needed.
January has been a risky project for obvious reasons. I often think about Laurie Anderson's chorus "It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole," which I have reinterpreted over the years as: "It's not the abuse that kills you, it's the silence." I feel a great need to break that silence, I am doing so in various ways, and I see this as part of a feminist tradition of speaking the unspeakable. As well as being risky and heavy, the film represents hope and recovery to me, and a connection to politics and subjectivity that move me very much; it feels really good that I can make and show this film.
I hope other screenings will follow. I won't be making it available online for some time, sorry, but I will be submitting it to various festivals, and I am happy to come and show it to a group, or have a discussion about it. Drop me a line if you are interested in organising something.
January, by Charlotte Cooper, screening at the LLGFF as part of Radical Constitution, Monday 26 March 2012, 20.40, NFT3
