Music, Feminism and the Work of Documentary Filmmaking

A Conversation With One of the Creators of Girls Rock!

originally published April 30, 2008

At the community-driven, diverse and low-budget Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, girls from the ages of eight to 18 have a week to make friends, form a band, write songs and perform for an audience of hundreds, discovering the power not just of amplification, but of their own voices in the process. The camp got its start in Portland, OR in 2001, and has since evolved, incorporating events for older women, delving into the world of hip hop and inspiring similar camps around the country.

In 2005, filmmakers Shane King and Arne Johnson - dudes both - spent a week documenting the camp for their brisk film Girls Rock!, focusing more on the experiences of four girls than on the history or structure of the camp itself. The film delivers poignant insights into the lives of pre-teen and teen-aged girls, a particularly underrepresented group of diverse, curious, entertaining, confusing (and confused) developing personalities. Laura, for instance, is an adopted Korean 17-year-old out of place at home in Oklahoma and eager to find peers who are into death metal, while Amelia is an eight-year-old more interested in wild, noisy explorations on guitar than in traditional song structures.

The soundtrack’s heavy with Kathleen Hanna and other ‘90s riot grrl luminaries, and some of the camp’s more notable counselors include Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and The Gossip’s Beth Ditto. Girls Rock! is currently touring independent cinemas and festivals, and opens this weekend in Athens at Ciné. Co-director and producer Arne Johnson will be at Ciné on Friday, May 2 to discuss his film; he recently spoke with Flagpole about Girls Rock!

Flagpole

You and Shane King are credited as co-directors. How did the division of labor between you two work?

Arne Johnson

Shane and I have known each other since we were 11 years old, so we’ve been best friends for 27 years. We started out about the idea of collaborating, but we didn’t talk about defining certain roles just because we’ve been working together for so many years. As time went on we noticed that we had really complementary skill sets. He’s a real visual genius and has an amazing knack for understanding rhythms in editing, and I tended to be more big-picture, both in the editing process putting together the overarching story and in driving the production along.

So, we’re listed as co-directors, and if we weren’t required to have all the different credits spelled out in our film, it would’ve just said, y’know, “a film by Shane King and Arne Johnson,” because we really just did whatever needed to be done and filled all the roles equally depending on who could learn more about each role. In any collaboration you’ve got to have as little ego as possible so you can see clearly who’s going to be able to do a particular task.

Flagpole

Having as little ego as possible seems to also play into the role of a documentarian.

Arne Johnson

I mean, the whole question of ego in documentary filmmaking is a complicated and interesting one. You can’t really make a documentary unless you allow yourself to be part of the process you’re documenting in some way. I know there’s some discussion in some circles about being objective and stripping subjectivity out of a story, but anyone who’s actually been on the ground knows that that’s almost impossible, there’s no way you can walk into a situation with a camera and not affect your environment in the way that you behave, in the way that you ask questions. And then someone like Frederick Wiseman who’s been making a film every year for 30 years, he shoots 80 hours of footage and then has to choose an hour and a half of that to make a film, and he’s always been very clear that “this is my film” because of the choices he makes.

Flagpole

Did you get a feel for the film as you were making it, or did the tone and focus develop in the editing process?

Nicole Weingart

Arne Johnson

We did a lot of research and interviewing ahead of time. Part of making a documentary about an event that’s at a specific place at a specific time, it’s important to know ahead of time what’s going to happen and what you might look for, but of course you also need to be flexible to let the story develop. Like, we have no idea how Palace, [one of the film’s subjects,] would react to a certain girl, or how Laura would get her band together. But we did enough reading of books about girls in our culture to know certain things the camps were addressing that were more important than others.

So, when we’re walking around this chaotic situation with 80 girls running around and four bands practicing simultaneously down one hallway, we knew that if we saw certain things we should be able to tune into that.

Palace was one of the few girls in the camp we didn’t interview ahead of time, but the reason she figured so strongly into the movie is because I was walking from one room to a scene that I knew about, and I saw Palace standing in front of a microphone being really shy. And we knew one of the themes of the camp was girls have trouble having volume, so I knew it would be good to get a shot of that, and it developed from there. And of course the editing process is a whole ‘nother layer of that. We spent about a year and a half constantly shaping the story, adding, trimming, changing.

Flagpole

You interviewed a lot of the girls before the camp started; did you have a good idea of which girls the film would focus on?

Arne Johnson

Yes, about 25 or 30, so roughly a third of the girls who were at the camp. We had in the back of our mind that we’d be looking for girls who’d be good subjects. We were really curious about the way people get to camp - there’s not a lot of advertising going on besides the occasional press piece, but there were girls there when we were there from Amsterdam and Thailand! We wanted to know how they came to be at this rinky-dink warehouse for a rock-and-roll camp. And in the process we started to realize certain recurring themes - feeling too shy to be who you are, body image issues, and also being really passionate about music. Laura has all of that stuff - she’s so passionate about death metal, but has all these other things going on as well.

So, we decided we should start narrowing it down to some girls whose personalities could more clearly speak to some of those themes.

There’s also an instinctive sense of which girls would be comfortable in front of a camera. There’s a fine line, and some girls would turn their heads away any time the camera was near, while others couldn’t help but be distracted from what they were doing and were always staring at it or high-fiving in front of it or whatever.

We got to the camp with eight or nine options for who we might be able to focus on, and then let the story develop as we spent time at the camp and learned the dynamics of all these girls.

Girls’ Rock Camp in Atlanta

Stacey Singer, formerly of Daemon Records, is organizing a Girls’ Rock Camp in Atlanta this summer. The daytime session runs from July 14–18 at Eyedrum Gallery and is for girls between the ages of 10 and 18. The camp’s looking for volunteers, instructors, gear and donations. For registration forms or more information, visit www.girlsrockcampatl.org, email camp@girlsrockcampatl.org or call 404-964-5976. Singer will appear with Arne Johnson for screenings of Girls Rock! on May 3 and 4 at Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre.

Flagpole

How did a lot of the girls find out about the camp?

Arne Johnson

It was a really sharply divided line by age. The younger girls were there almost exclusively because their parents had heard about it. You know, if you’re an eight-year-old girl, your parents are likely somewhere in their 30s or something, and they’ve grown up going to Sleater-Kinney concerts and are locked into indie culture, and they’re having kids now. And then the older kids, it was a real mix. Laura saw a mention of it in a magazine article and got obsessed with the idea of coming.

Flagpole

Can you tell me a little about interviewing the girls one-on-one?

Arne Johnson

It really depended on age. There was definitely an age break. One of my only regrets about the film is that we weren’t able to get a girl from the ages of 11 to 14 to speak very clearly about what was going on with them. And the camp talks about this, they’re addressing a lot of the intense self-consciousness that hits right at that age. So, for the young girls they want to prepare them and give them this boost that will carry them through that period, and for the girls who are older, it can help them look back at what happened and maybe heal a little bit from that time and better understand themselves.

So, there’s this multi-tiered approach to the age groups, and the problem with making a documentary about something like that is that the girls who are right in the middle of the most self-conscious stage, and who’d be the most interesting, are the hardest ones to get to know, especially because we were only there for a couple of visits over one week.

But the younger girls ranged from being completely, like Amelia, chatting away with no problem. Most of the girls were just simply excited about being asked anything. That was one of the cool things, and this happened with the older girls too, that they seemed thrilled that these weird old guys with cameras want to know what’s going on in their lives and what they think.

Interviewing is an artform in itself. And especially with kids, you need to be comfortable in your own skin enough to ask questions that are not patronizing and where they feel like you hear what they’re saying. And you need to make it more like a conversation so that it can flow naturally.

Nicole Weingart

Flagpole

How do people react when they find out two guys made this movie about a rock camp for girls?

Arne Johnson

We’ve had several interviews where someone will call us on the phone and ask for Arne and Shane, and we’ll say, yeah, that’s us, and they’re like, no, no we mean the filmmakers. Especially since our names are not super-obviously male like Scott and Tom or whatever. It’s something that comes up a lot, and we have a little treatise about it on our website, but it’s really been a great experience and opportunity to talk about these subjects from a framework of being men who are interested in what happens to girls, both the girls around us and in our culture. So, in interviews or discussions we get to talk about why men get to be, and should be, concerned about feminism and women’s issues, and that sort of stuff.

Flagpole

In the film you occasionally present facts to contextualize the situations girls deal with outside of the camp in the culture at large. Would the girls’ stories have been as resonant without those?

Arne Johnson

We debated that for a long time. It’s quite possible. But for us, we felt like we wouldn’t have gotten it without the context we gained through researching the film. And so something that might’ve sounded like just a throwaway line that a girl said gains resonance. There’s a lot of subtle stuff that happens with girls that if you’re not sensitized to it, it’s really hard to read and figure out.

That gets back to the fact, though, that it is our film, a film made by two guys, and the process of making the film is reflected in the final product, and learning a lot of this stuff was important to us.

And I know there’s a lot of people for whom those statistics and images were not necessary; probably a lot of women, especially those who have studied this stuff and have been able to articulate what’s going on in their lives, it won’t come as any surprise at all. No woman’s going to look at a fact about how teen girls want to lose weight and be shocked. But there are certainly people, especially parents of girls, who maybe aren’t as tuned into this culture for whom the facts will be illuminating and probably dispiriting.

Flagpole

Has the film been able to reach people for whom a lot of those facts and themes may not be so self-evident?

Arne Johnson

So far we’ve had a really great response. We get emails all the time! One of the great things that has happened with the film is that we found a lot of women were bringing their kids. So, we’re maybe not reaching people who are totally unaware of a lot of these issues, but we found that for the kids who see the movie, they hadn’t been exposed to a lot of the issues in a way that they could relate to. It’s one thing to have an adult tell you about self-esteem, it’s another to see a girl like you talk about it in her own words. It was for girls, and coming from girls instead of from their moms. And many mothers would tell us that after seeing the movie this was the first time their daughters felt comfortable talking to them about women’s issues.

One woman we met was a Wells Fargo banker, wasn’t really into rock and roll, but thought her daughter might like the movie. So, they came to see it and had a really great experience, and then she was able to talk to her daughter on her own terms about these things.

Chris Hassiotis

For more information about Girls Rock!, visit www.girlsrockmovie.com, and for info about the camp itself hit up www.girlsrockcamp.org. The film opens at Ciné on Friday, May 2, and Arne Johnson will be at Ciné that day to discuss his film; see www.athenscine.com for specific show and discussion times.