Feminist writer Chris Kraus, whose calamitous foray into filmmaking is revisited in a new play.
Before she became famous for novel I Love Dick, later adapted to a TV series, US writer Chris Kraus shot a doomsday cult film in New Zealand. Joanna Wane previews a new play inspired by its humiliating failure.
In 1996, I Love Dick writer Chris Kraus was sitting nervously on a flight from Los Angeles to Berlin, where her feature film Gravity & Grace was about to be screened at a market for potential buyers. Safe in her carry-on bags was a precious first graded print of the film, weighing 16kg, and a stack of presskits. I guess you could say that was lucky, because her checked luggage went missing when she caught a connecting flight at Heathrow, but losing her bags was a bad omen. And things were about to get much, much worse.
Kraus, described in a New Yorker profile as one of the few “female comic losers in literature”, was 16 when she came to New Zealand from the US to do an arts degree at Victoria University in Wellington. Now a key feminist figure in the American literature scene, she still considers herself half-Kiwi.
“There’s this kind of reasonableness that is not common among people who are completely American,” she says, on a video call from Baja California, where she’s escaped from her home in LA to work on her latest book — based on a methamphetamine-fuelled murder involving four teenagers on Minnesota’s Iron Range.
Her disastrous foray into filmmaking is exhumed by Kiwi playwrights Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCracken in a new take on Gravity & Grace that opens at the Auckland Arts Festival next week. The original film, an eccentric piece shot between Auckland and New York, begins with a doomsday cult bracing for the end of the world on a backyard tennis court in Remuera (they survive but an alien spacecraft does make an appearance). The story then shifts to the New York art scene, featuring Kraus in a hilarious cameo role. “It was a parody of an actual person in the art world at the time,” Kraus says. “She probably still hates me for it.”
The project, which ran out of money when post-production funding failed to come through, was beset with problems from the start. I Love Dick, Kraus’s autobiographical novel of erotic obsession, hadn’t yet been published and its adaptation into a hit TV series — with Kathryn Hahn playing Kraus and Kevin Bacon as the eponymous Dick — was still a couple of decades away. When she arrived in Berlin, where the trade fair was running alongside the city’s prestigious film festival, her name was missing from all the important after-party guest lists.
The city was carpeted in snow when her screening was held on a freezing Thursday afternoon. Twelve people came. By the time the lights went up, only one was left in the theatre, and all he wanted to do was grill Kraus about his ex-girlfriend, a Kiwi who’d worked as associate producer on the film but disappeared before the end of the shoot, leaving behind a trail of unpaid bills.
Gravity & Grace — with a cast that includes actress Jennifer Ludlam, Ani O’Neill (now an acclaimed artist) and poet Alan Brunton from Red Mole — was so commercially unappealing it was rejected by one film festival after another. “An amateur intellectual’s home video expanded to bulimic lengths,” is how Kraus herself describes it in her book Aliens & Anorexia about the whole fiasco.
In recent years, though, it’s enjoyed something of a revival, screening in museums and other niche venues all over the world.
“I was so heartbroken by the reception initially when it came out,” she tells me. “But what can be more gratifying than for a film to have such a long life. It was a collusion of so many different energies during that intense shoot in New Zealand and the even more intense shoot in New York. Films are an incredible record of time, aren’t they? So it’s very meaningful to me.”
Two decades after the film flopped, Wellington-based writer and director Eleanor Bishop was studying in the US when she got involved with the Wooster Group, an experimental theatre company in New York co-founded by Willem Defoe. After discovering she was a Kiwi, they asked if she knew Chris Kraus.
“It was the first time my New Zealandness had been associated with her, rather than, you know, the Flight of the Conchords,” Bishop says. “So I started reading all her books, and I really loved Aliens & Anorexia because it’s set between New York and New Zealand and has characters from both worlds that I’ve occupied.”
Like Kraus, Bishop has a certain recklessness when it comes to embracing artistic risks. Her decision to adapt Aliens & Anorexia for the theatre, a project she began working on at the start of the Covid epidemic, came with some extraordinary challenges. The book doesn’t only chronicle a film-making fiasco but weaves in the writings of French philosopher Simone Weil (who may or may not have suffered from anorexia) and a long-distance BDSM relationship Kraus is having with a Hollywood film director on location in Namibia. German anarchist Ulrike Meinhof also makes an appearance.
McCracken, Bishop’s long-term collaborator, co-wrote the script and plays Kraus on stage. Four other actors take on multiple characters and the show features some live camera work where McCracken directly addresses the audience, Fleabag-style.
It’s been a cathartic process for Bishop, who experienced her own excruciating failure with a “vitriolic” audience reaction to her 2018 production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Recovering from that involved “a lot of self-flagellation”, she says. “Beating myself up and walking around filled with shame and regret. A big part of why we were drawn [to the book] is that Chris’s tone is so self-lacerating and funny. There’s obviously a sadness under that, but it’s very soothing and healing to be funny about failure.”
• Gravity & Grace is on at Auckland’s Q Theatre, March 21-24 (aaf.co.nz).
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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