One Frame at a Time

Pasadena Weekly columnist Ellen Snortland is a playwright, a pundit and an author. Patricia Cunliffe is an Altadena-based painter, a former costume designer and an occasional writer. And Catherine Bauknight is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in this newspaper as well as in some of the world's top magazines.

Each one exhibits her own distinctive style within her respective craft. But Snortland, Cunliffe and Bauknight also share something in common: Each one stepped outside of her field of expertise and chose documentary filmmaking to tell the stories they are most passionate about; stories that they have produced largely at their own expense and hope will help make the world a better place for the subjects of their work.

“There are a lot of people who would never read a book but would go to a movie,” said Snortland, who once worked briefly as a broadcast journalist for the NBC-TV affiliate in Sacramento. Her video shares the same name as her 1997 book on self-defense, “Beauty Bites Beast: Awakening the Warrior Within Women and Girls.”

“If you can make a documentary compelling enough,” Snortland said, “people will watch it, whether it's on TV, in the theaters or online. It's a faster way to disseminate ideas to more people.”

A story's DNA
For Cunliffe, even a run-in with New Mexico Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson's staff wasn't enough to deter her from completing the little-told story about the birth of her hometown, Santa Fe, NM: The Pueblo Indian Revolt and the subsequent Spanish re-colonization of the territory — a popular uprising that took place more than 96 years before the American Revolution.

“I am presenting the historical aspect through interviews, in the tradition of Native American oral history, as stories have been passed down through generations,” Cunliffe explained about her latest film, “The Coats of Arms and the Owingehs.”

Like Cunliffe, Bauknight used historical sources and then went directly to the people impacted most by her subject: indigenous Hawaiians subjugated by white settlers. She also turned to video as the best medium to do that job.

The 10-minute “pilot” version of “Hawaii: A Voice for Sovereignty,” which features interviews with native people talking about their fears of commercial development and the loss of their culture, was chosen from more than 1,000 entries for screenings at the Maui Film Festival in June.

“It was important for me to be able to capture that culture and tell the story in their own words, which cannot be done with still photography. You need sound,” she noted, “making video a necessity.”

The full-length version of Bauknight's documentary, which took 125 days over two years to shoot, is in production now and should be finished by November.

The film's trailer can be viewed at www.catherinebauknight.com.

To Bauknight, the people of any story are its DNA: “My goal is to capture that thread of DNA, which is revealed in people's behavior and culture.” And, she added, “within that is learned behavior, elements of spirituality and ancient history that explains the depth of the people as a whole.”

Snortland's film “Beauty Bites Beast” is about empowering battered and exploited women in Cudad Juarez and Tijuana, Mexico, helping them fight back against their male oppressors by using a number of easy-to-learn self-defense techniques.

“I am one of the only people I know of in the international women's rights community who is taking a stand that it is a human right to know how to protect yourself from violence — and for most women and girls around the world that is an incredibly radical and militant idea,” Snortland said.

Snortland will be among 27 area women honored Friday for their contributions to the Southern California economy at the eighth annual Women in Business Awards at Burbank's Castaway Restaurant. Occidental College President Susan Westerberg Praeger will be the keynote speaker at the event presented by Democratic state lawmakers Sen. Jack Scott and Assemblyman Anthony Portantino of Pasadena, and Assemblyman Paul Krekorian of Glendale.

“I always try to think as simply as possible because I'm a simple person. So if women are having the crap beat out of them, I'm thinking, ‘Hmmm, how come no one's talking about helping the woman while it's happening?'” Snortland said. “People talk about having women stay away from certain things after dark, or they have remedies that have to do with containment, but they don't talk about what to do when there is a fist flying at your face, which I think is the key point.”

Snortland's trailer can be viewed at http://youtube.com/watch?v=WchufP3J1Uc .

“Violence against women is a primary problem that, once solved, will help solve many other problems,” Snortland said.

Making history
Cunliffe's documentary on the birth of Santa Fe begins in 1598, after the region was settled by Don Juan de Onate of Spain. After the city moved to its present location at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in 1610, Cunliffe discovered, the Spanish forced the indigenous Pueblo people to donate part of their crops to support Spanish missions, military forces and civil institutions. They also made people work the fields without pay. But even worse was forcing the Pueblo people to abandon their centuries-old religion and adopt Catholicism.

In 1680, a few years after dozens of Pueblo religious leaders were arrested and four were hanged, one of the men who had been detained in 1676, Po'pay from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, secretly organized a rebellion with members of more than two dozen Pueblo tribes. On Aug. 10, 1680, the united Pueblos attacked the city and drove out the Spanish colonists for nearly a dozen years, until Spain's Don Diego de Vargas retook the city.

Cunliffe's project might have ended before even getting started if Gov. Richardson's office had had anything to say about it.

The idea for the film originally dawned on Cunliffe when she was visiting her family and friends in Santa Fe in August 2006 and saw a “call for filmmakers” notice for the New Visions grant offered by Richardson's office through the New Mexico Film Commission.

She did not get the grant, but “from everything that I had heard about Bill Richardson, I thought that this would be a project that he would be interested in,” Cunliffe said.

So she called the governor's office and was told to send an email about the project, which she was told would likely be referred to the state film commission. Cunliffe did as she was instructed and told the governor that she would wait until she heard from him before sending out a press release about her project.

But instead of hearing from Richardson, two days later Cunliffe received a call from an official with the film commission, who said the governor's office called her to say she had threatened Richardson.

Cunliffe immediately penned a letter apologizing to all the officials involved, including Richardson. But before hearing from any of the officials, she got an email from Dean Milligan, president of the Santa Fe Fiesta Council, a respected volunteer civic group dedicated to promoting the nearly 300-year-old Fiesta de Santa Fe annual celebration. Milligan eventually helped Cunliffe smooth things over and get started with the shooting.

As for Richardson — who was actually born in Pasadena — “I am not so naive as to think that Bill Richardson ever even read my letter,” Cunliffe remarked. However, “I do know that if he chooses to surround himself with such petty people, I cannot trust him to be my president.”

Haunting images
Bauknight is no stranger to tense situations either. Her news photos have appeared in many major magazines, among them Time and Newsweek, and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Other assignments included documenting the culture of the Catawba Indians, and covering Ethiopia's contaminated water supply and China's Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Bauknight said her interest in the plight of Hawaii's native people started on her first trip there, when she looked around and didn't see any indigenous people. “That haunted me for years,” Bauknight remarked.

When she returned to the islands in 2001, Bauknight said, the situation was much as it had been 22 years before. She decided to investigate and learned of an underground movement. Then she started researching Hawaiian history for clues to why indigenous Hawaiians would not communicate or interact with other inhabitants of the islands.

She returned again in 2005, only this time with camera equipment and a desire to find out why natives refused to join

the mainstream.

Little by little, people started opening up, and today, said Bauknight, “they are telling their story in their own voice — my goal from the beginning.” After winning that trust, Bauknight said she was allowed to shoot sacred ceremonies, protests, secret waterways, court hearings and home lifestyles.

“I feel a sense of honor to aid these people in providing a voice for them to speak for themselves about their issues and culture,” Bauknight said.

For her project, Snortland interviewed 25 Mexican factory workers in Tijuana who grow in

the film from women completely unaware that they are even able to defend themselves to women with the skills to stop men

from beating them up.

She also speaks with women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where approximately 400 women have been murdered since 1993.

The film, Snortland said, explores the notion that knowledge of basic self-defense skills may be just as vital as reading, writing and arithmetic. 

The basic question is: “What if enough women and girls hit back hard enough to have him stop doing it, not only to her but to the kids?” Snortland asked. “It's the hot stove principle: You don't have to convince someone to stop touching a hot burner once they've done it.”

Can't stop now
Despite her negative experience with Richardson's office, Cunliffe said she received great support from family, friends, interview subjects and ultimately state and Santa Fe city officials to finish her project.

“The truth is none of this work, which has been going on since May, would have been possible without the help of family and friends,” Cunliffe said.

Cunliffe, who is married to songwriter and former Weekly columnist Joey Alkes, who co-wrote (with Peter Case) the Plimsouls hit “Million Miles Away,” supported herself and her family as a painter and costume designer before picking up a video camera.

“After working on enough independent productions, you start to think, ‘You know, I would do this differently, I would do that differently.' Finally you start thinking to yourself, ‘I could probably make a movie, and I could probably do it well,'” recalled Cunliffe, who has done a number of mostly political video short subjects. Those include “Are We Criminals?” about the May 1, 2006, immigration protests, which was screened at the International Video-Journalism Awards in Germany.

“So little by little, you start to grow into yourself and you have more confidence,” she said.

Snortland, on the other hand, has only 50 hours of shooting logged. She isn't lacking in confidence, just money to finish the job. But, she said, “I will get this documentary done. I have to do it. I won't stop until I do it.” o