You may also like
Page 1 of 5
film and video art
Duration: 00:13:00
A filmmaker seeks to use her year of multiple travels as a platform to engage in an auto-ethnographic study, but realizes that she needs to abandon the academic pretense and embrace the messy, necessary work of listening to others and really seeing.
DIRECTOR, EDITOR, CAMERA, SOUND DESIGN : Jennifer Hardacker
ADDITIONAL CAMERA : Ulee Lamere, Lovelyne Sistoso
GRAPHICS : Mike Geraci
CONTACTS / LINKS : jenhardacker.com
In anticipation of a year filled with travel, the filmmaker sets out to make an auto-ethnographic essay film from the Super 8mm footage she captures along the way. She begins by creating a fictional filmmaker, well-intentioned but oblivious, with a tendency to over-academicize the creative impulse. When initial audiences miss the irony of this character, she abandons the device and is forced to more directly confront the legacies of colonialism she encounters in her travels. She begins listening to those she traveled with instead of speaking for them, and really listening to the places themselves. She realizes that her attempts to impose cohesive meaning is futile, and she comes to accept that listening and looking may not offer a resolution, but a way of being at peace with ambivalence.
Director’s statement
During the making of the film, I became increasingly conflicted about the act of filmmaking itself. I began the project believing that self-awareness and formal experimentation might be enough to complicate the dynamics of the tourist gaze, but over time I became more skeptical of the camera’s ability to escape it.
Some of the most meaningful moments of the project came when I shared the footage with folks I had filmed: my midwestern nephews who visited me, and the students from Oahu that I spent time with in Hawaii. Their insights cut through the over-academicized language I had initially relied upon. They reminded me that listening to people, to place, and even to discomfort, was more important than constructing a perfectly coherent argument.
Bio
Jennifer Hardacker is an experimental filmmaker and professor of film based in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Her work is subjective in content and formalist in style, exploring deeply personal narratives through experimental modes that forge a symbiotic relationship between story and medium. Her current project departs from some of her earlier work by turning toward questions of tourism, listening, representation, and the ethics of looking.
Hardacker has been making films for over 25 years. Her films have screened at festivals across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and have received recognition at numerous experimental film competitions. She currently teaches film studies and production at Pacific University.
BACK TO THE PROGRAM AND VOTING
BACK TO THE SUMMER SCREENINGS 2026
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved. Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.