The Fleeting Lullabies of Queerness: An Analysis of the Queer Poetics in Jenni Olson’s Short Films

Soul, O My Rare Soul, Your Flame’s Too Fine for Their Crude Oil¹

Abbas Kiarostami, the renowned Persian filmmaker, once distinguished films into two types. The first is the “narrative” ones that take the viewers hostage, increase their heartbeat at the moment of screening, and “people from all walks of life come out of watching it with the same story.”² The second are those that induce sleep in the cinema theatre, “but afterwards make you stay up at night thinking.” According to Kiarostami, it’s the latter that leaves a lasting impression, with images recurring in one’s mind over time: “You come out and immediately or much later begin to reconstruct what happened.”³ The latter group of films belong to the “aesthetic of slow,” demonstrating “a deliberate retreat from forceful representation” and refraining “from disturbing the spatial and temporal unity inherent in pro-filmic reality.”⁴ 

And here I am in this bare bed,

This hotel room with rattling blinds

Alone and shaken by the rude

November winds⁵

When considering Jenni Olson’s body of work, it undoubtedly aligns with the latter category. Her works appear on the screen as short lullabies that a strolling mind whispers in the ears of the audience. Whenever Olson begins uttering her words⁶ on the backdrop of her images, it sounds like she is turning the pages of her diary. She takes us on a trip through the lines of her memory to relive the fluctuating feel of her body between two Marlon Brandos: one in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) and the other in The Godfather – Sometimes (1994); to recall her Blue Diary (1998), “the melancholy story of a dyke pining over a one-night stand with a straight girl;”⁷ to recollect “Claire” who had red flags all over her, was emotionally evasive, drank too much red wine with dinner, and had no attention span: “She was the road runner, and I was the coyote” – Meep Meep! (2001); and to reminisce how the church impacted her life: “low self-esteem and self-destructive impulses were following me all the days of my life, and I’m not even Catholic!” – In Nomine Patris (2019).⁸ Even in 575 Castro St. (2009), which is not directly about herself, Olson takes us to the diary of Harvey Milk, who appears to be recording a voice for the occasion of his probable assassination – a possibility that came true on November 27, 1978. 

It was a dream, ah’ yes, and thou hast never been’

All is alone’ no witness’ nothing sees or thinks⁹

Blue Diary

The colours of memory in Olson’s films are often painted on the canvas of urban scenes. The camera captures the silence etched into the intricate design of urban architecture. Against this backdrop of stillness, the soft brushstrokes of memory are implemented. Olson utilises the silent – and most often human-less – scenes as a matrix for her words, the vehicles of her queer memories. Questions come to our attention without any definite answer: is this the street where Olson first met the girl she is talking about? Is this alley where they had one of their walks? Is the place of the girl a small unit at the far horizon beyond this intersection? Is this the red light where they stopped and kissed in the car? Are those stairs where they were sitting on the night she is describing, probably wasted, in the arms of each other, with occasional bursts of laughter? Is this view, which seems to be out of a balcony or a large open window where she stood, holding her coffee, thinking about catching her roadrunner? Is this church where Olson used to go in her childhood or teenage years, searching for spiritual solace from the queer impulses of her body?

Nameless cathedral’ in this Paris, obtuse

And stylish garden, with its bourgeois Jordan

Haunted by dreamers, primped windows, stodgy Sundays¹⁰

The plain yet elaborate nature of her works makes the task of unfolding them both easy and arduous. What we see does not go beyond a couple of images and words. Yet there is something living in this amalgamation that excels the images and words. Perhaps we can call this quality Olson’s poetics of queerness where an intentional departure from conventional modes of artistic expression is evident. In Olson’s words, “I feel very influenced by poetry and that what’s so great about poetry, you can convey so much with so few words, well-chosen with craftsmanship.”¹¹ Her works transcend the boundaries of the expected, challenging the viewer to explore the nuances embedded within the intersections of memory, poetry, and imagery. It is as if Olson invites us into a realm where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the familiar undergoes a profound transformation. Olson’s ability to infuse her extremely short productions with a sense of fluidity, ambiguity, and resistance to normative categorisations contributes to the enigmatic allure of her poetics of queerness. We ask questions, and in those questions, we find an invisible imprint of “self” wandering around the stillness, around the emptiness of roads:

I’m very intentional about not wanting any people, ideally not even any cars, and ideally not even any new buildings in my films. I try to crop out any billboards or things that have text on them or anything that’s distracting. So the other thing I want to happen is that you as a viewer start projecting your own feelings into the film. And you’re involved in it in this way. Even though I’m telling you a story you’re putting yourself in it in a much deeper way than with a regular narrative film where you’re just being told.¹²

This little world’ And those deploying spaces

Ad infinitum’ Races of happier brothers

Who one day will not even know we were,

When their path crosses where we crossed before¹³

Meep! Meep!

Olson’s long pauses on landscapes transform the mind of the viewer from “normal” perceptions to “abnormal” questions. Perhaps this quality is nowhere more evident than in In Nomine Patris (2019) where the two-minute shot of a church building creates perceptual confusion step by step. Beginning with the normal reading of “this is a churchyard,” our minds gradually become captive in the geometry of the building and the scene. The concrete lines start to blur in our ocular, creating perplexity in our conception and cultivating a slight visual hallucination: what are those down-headed and up-headed triangles sitting with each other in a frightening seamlessness and changeability? What are those white lines creating a crisscross pattern at the heart of the up-headed triangles? What is this white line that links the camera – our eye – directly to that building? Why is that brown colour beginning to melt down onto the lying green line?

And it’s your fault that I’m this way,

That my conscience sees double,

And my heart fishes in troubled waters

For Eve, Gioconda and Dalila¹⁴

Memory, in this context, becomes both a companion and a provocateur. It weaves itself into the very fabric of the landscape, influencing its contours and breathing life into its structures. Olson’s poetics of queerness, therefore, navigates the labyrinth of urban architecture, unravelling the layers of memory that dwell within its walls. The result is a symbiotic relationship where the city informs the memories, and memories, in turn, shape the mundanity of the cityscape into a dynamic arena of queer expression. Through this distinctive combination, Olson invites us to reevaluate our understanding, challenging preconceived notions and inviting a reconsideration of the narratives that have traditionally been marginalised. In her hands, the cityscape becomes a stage for a nuanced exploration of queerness, where the intersection of architecture and memory offers a unique perspective on identity, belonging, and the fluidity of human experience. It is as if Olson tells her audience with each shot: “Look at this ‘normal’ landscape; I have a ‘queer’ memory lying at the heart of this everydayness, and I will read it for you.” This symbiotic relationship between “queer” memories and “normal” city landscapes can be seen not only in Olson’s short films but also in her feature films, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015). In her own words, “The way this works in my films then is that you need to be seeing something, but it needs to be not very interesting because I don’t want you going and getting involved in the image, I want you listening.”¹⁵

Which, from dark till day

And dawn till dark again

Languishes because it cannot

Bleed, ah, bleed its secret life away¹⁶

In Nomine Patris

On the other hand, the familiarity of the cityscape lends a sense of normality to the queer words, defying any attempt to marginalise or otherise them. The once marginalised narratives now find themselves woven into the fabric of everyday life, challenging the very notion of what is considered “normal.” The city becomes a canvas upon which the colours of queerness are poured to paint a picture that defies traditional boundaries and invites a broader, more inclusive perspective. In this symbiosis, the dichotomy between “queer” and “normal” begins to dissolve, revealing the artificiality of such distinctions. The city, once perceived as a backdrop for mainstream narratives, now becomes a stage where the multiplicity of voices, experiences, and identities take centre stage. The “normality” of the city is disrupted and redefined by the “queer” memories that breathe life into its streets. The words born from these memories, like seeds planted in the concrete soil of the city, take root and grow, transforming the mundane landscape into a garden of earthly delights; as Jennifer Peterson tells Olson, 

This is the thing that I love in your landscape films. You wouldn’t expect this to come through. There’s an evocative sexuality that for me is more sensual than watching a Hollywood sex scene, which is usually so uninteresting[. Y]ou have this description of how she smells and how she feels. The words are more sensual than the visualizing of it. When you say that line I think we’re looking at an empty driveway. That interplay between this sensual dialogue and those words versus just a mundane empty driveway with a breeze, it’s very powerful. It’s sort of the opposite way of getting at sexuality than Hollywood films, which are like, let’s just show it.¹⁷

Do you hear Madness’ hovering call

Asking for the rope or knife

As big as life, as big as life

Asking for the rope or knife, as big as life?¹⁸

In the absence of a traditional beginning and end, Olson’s short films mirror the “queer” complexity of life itself – an ongoing, ever-evolving series of moments and memories. They challenge the viewer to embrace the ambiguity, inviting them to find solace and significance in the nuanced beauty of the fleeting and the transient. In doing so, Olson’s cinematic creations become transient journeys into the intersection of memory, identity, and the silent moments of the city. The length of Olson’s short films is far too short for one to drift off during the screening. But they surely can appear as melodies of lullabies streaming along the screen, reaching out to our eyes and ears. Just like those brief visual poems that finish abruptly, it seems only fair for an essay about them to conclude similarly. 

So then I determined to be a writer,

But the Demon of Truth at my elbow

Had a way of murmuring soft and low,

“Well, lad, have you spoiled enough paper?”¹⁹

Endnotes