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Oct. 6, 2006
They're dying for attention
Filmmaker offers a unique portrayal of eating disorders.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
Because her brother is a filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield had been
to the Sundance Festival before and thought she knew what to expect
after a screening. "I have seen Q & A's," she said,
"Where people talk about 'What's your film budget?' and 'How
many weeks were you shooting?' and 'What was your technique?' We
didn't have any questions like that."
What Greenfield heard, after screenings of Thin, her documentary
about eating disorders, were "really emotional, kind of personal
responses to the movie" – not least because three of the
four women she'd followed on film accompanied her to the festival.
It's hard not to be affected by the spectacle of grown women –
shadows of their former selves, both physically and emotionally
– shuffling like zombies down the linoleum corridor of a clinic.
Often, they're clad only in flimsy pyjamas. Their hair is limp,
their fingernails are blue and the prospect of drinking a caloric
supplement is the most terrifying thing they face each day. One
of the girls wears a T-shirt that reads: "Cute but psycho."
For Greenfield – named one of the 25 most influential photographers
working today by American Photo magazine – the notion
of making a film about eating disorders sprang from Girl Culture,
her hugely successful project on women and body image. She had never
made a film before, but got the green light for Thin from HBO after
approaching them with a series of ideas on body image-related topics.
"I thought it would be an interesting film," she said,
in an interview with the Independent, in advance of Thin
screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival. "It
was the most pathological form of the body project and this really
extreme and visual and kind of literal example of using your body
as your voice. At the time, I thought this disorder was kind of
marginal – but I really learned during the making of the film
and now, as people are starting to see the work, that it's a lot
more mainstream than I thought.
"Even though it's a very serious mental illness, it's something
that people who have never experienced it firsthand have a reference
point to understand, because most women have been on a diet before.
Most women have obsessed over their bodies before, even if they
haven't gone to the brink of a true eating disorder – so it's
something that's in a way easier to understand than schizophrenia
or manic depression or other kinds of mental illness. What I realized
is that so many people actually had a direct connection to a true
eating disorder, whether it was their own past or a sister or a
girlfriend. Everyone has a story of connection. That really surprised
me and it wasn't until I got pretty far along into it that I started
looking into the statistics and saw that one in seven women have
had some kind of eating disorder."
Greenfield shot Thin at the Renfrew Centre for Eating Disorders
in Coconut Creek, Fla., which had been featured in Girl Culture.
Though much of her photography work, she noted, "has been of
a pretty intimate nature, this [the film] definitely brought another
level to the challenge. These are women who often have a lot of
difficulty with trust and a lot of body image issues."
The women include 25-year-old Shelly, a psychiatric nurse with a
feeding tube in her stomach that she likes to syringe food out of;
Alisa, 30, a mother of two who "joined the air force to lose
weight"; Polly, 29, a flamboyant southerner who struggles to
eat a cupcake on her birthday ("See," she opines, "I
wanted a bran muffin"); and 15-year-old Brittany, a neo-Goth
whose own mother has an eating disorder. On camera, Brittany describes
the "chew and spit" game she and her mother used to play.
"It was a good time," she says wistfully.
Gathering material for Thin required constant – and
delicate – communication. "It was a little like being
in a relationship," observed Greenfield, who had to allow time
for the women's stories to unfold at a natural pace. She also had
a small, all-female crew who were able to get close to the interview
subjects, often shooting them one-on-one.
Greenfield – whose past photographic projects also include
Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, has
long been fascinated by self-image, especially by those who seem
to live on the edges of societal normalcy. She's done spreads on
China's nouveau riche, Las Vegas strippers and transgendered suburban
couples.
The Girl Culture project, she said, "really grew out
of what I saw out in the world. I started really noticing little
girls and the way they performed for others at a very young age,
and this kind of exhibitionism and the culture in the U.S., and
that really became a strong thematic focus for me."
"Little girls" would be another way to describe the subjects
of Thin, who are unable to cope in an adult world. Shelly, in a
therapy session, admits to "a fear of independence." Watching
the film after it was completed, said Greenfield, the women were
often obsessed with their appearance: "[An eating disorder]
is a very narcissistic illness."
Of her own youth, she recalled, "I think when I was a teenager,
I was definitely affected by insecurities about weight and wearing
fashionable clothes and being in the popular group."
But she refers to Joan Brumberg's book The Body Project to
illustrate just how extreme female body consciousness has become:
"She put it in historical terms and looked at how, in the 1800s,
being a good girl was all about doing good work and in our time,
good looks have become the highest form of female perfection."
Thin screens at VIFF, at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 10, and
at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 11. Both screenings are at Granville
Cinemas.
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