Film review: Framing Agnes widens the lens on trans history in a work that pushes documentary form
Blending talk show, re-enactments, and real personal reflections, Chase Joynt illuminates once-lost 1950s research transcripts
Zackary Drucker plays 1950s research subject “Agnes”.
VIFF Centre screens Framing Agnes from December 9 to 15
CANADIAN FILMMAKER CHASE Joynt’s latest documentary is in a state of constant, multilayered questioning—often of itself.
Like Joynt’s previous exploration of the trans experience, No Ordinary Man, Framing Agnes defies categorization—just like its subjects.
On one level, it is a re-enactment of real interviews by a researcher in a 1958 UCLA sociological study on transgender subjects. Joynt himself plays head researcher Harold Garfinkel, recasting the doctor as the host of a 1950s, Mike Wallace-style talk show. We hear first-hand accounts of life as a gender-nonconforming person in the years right after American Christine Jorgensen returned to the U.S. after surgery in Denmark: years when driver’s licences would forever carry your old name; when it could be impossible to find work.
The conversations play out in black and white, often on a retro TV set; when Framing Agnes switches to colour, Joynt and the trans actors interrogate Garfinkel’s line of questioning—his loaded queries like “Do you know other people like you?” At certain points, you can see his subjects bristle: Garfinkel tells one interviewee named Barbara about another trans person who’s troubled and lonely, and his interview subject tells him: “I’m not troubled.”
The titular Agnes (played with quiet finesse by Zackary Drucker) is Garfinkel’s most well-known case—notorious for “tricking” the UCLA team into gender-affirming surgery (which was only given to intersex people at the time). But Joynt and his team have uncovered several other interviewees. The actors who play them here root out the intelligence and defiance in their characters. Actor Jen Richards is struck by the self-possession and confidence of Barbara. Angelica Ross talks about how resourceful her Black trans woman would have had to have been to get by in an era before the civil rights movement.
Garfinkel’s questions come off subtly patronizing, naive, and judgmental. “I have a very hard question,” he says to Agnes. “Do you have any regrets?”
“That’s your hard question?” Agnes asks sarcastically.
The interview scenes prompt the actors, in other off-set moments, to reflect on their own, diverse experiences becoming men and women. Actor Silas Howard (an American writer-director in his own right) talks movingly about the “tricky” relationship he has to his own truth, and his years relegated to the construction industry for work.
Throughout, Joynt and historian Jules Gill-Peterson weave in the fascinating story behind their search for the research transcripts—literally using a crowbar on a rusted filing cabinet to find the documents at UCLA. Gill-Peterson is a lively resource, vividly reflecting on the faultiness of historical record.
Framing Agnes becomes not just a deep dive into the complexity and diversity of the trans experience, but about the way history, and white-cis-male-led research, can filter, distort, and erase stories. This form-pushing documentary also makes it clear that the voices from the past have a lot of knowledge to pass on—at least the precious few that survived in that rusty filing cabinet.
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