Finding the perfect shot: Cinema graduate student grows at Binghamton University

Graduate student Rebecca Blumhagen Chastain has already achieved success and a notable career as an actress and documentarian. She's produced commercials, starred in television series and won awards.

Nonetheless, she has made her way back to the classroom.

Image Credit: Alana Davis Photography.

"I see my studies at Binghamton as a complement to my previous work, but I have also been exposed through my professors and their work to another path," said Blumhagen Chastain, a second-year master of fine arts student in the Cinema Department. "They have mentored me through grant proposal writing experiences that I hadn't done before, and ways to speak about my work and see it as part of the collective whole."

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This new way of thinking seems to be paying off: she was recently named as an honoraria recipient for The Princess Grace Awards, established to identify and support emerging artists in theatre, dance and film.

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"The foundation called me to tell me that I received the honorarium, and when she said on the phone, 'We are deeply impressed with your artistry,' I believed her. The samples I sent were some of the most personal I've shared, the kind of art that isn't as commercial as the kind I usually get hired to make. This is a highly competitive honor, and I felt an affirmation," she said. "The award is not for a project, it's for an artist - they support you through your career."

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With the help of the Princess Grace Foundation and the Binghamton program - including the graduate director of the program and professor of cinema, Ariana Gerstein, and the undergraduate director and associate professor of cinema, Monteith McCollum, whose encouragements early in the process helped her develop her voice and connected her to funding opportunities including the Princess Grace Awards and the Leiberman Fund - Blumhagen Chastain hopes to continue telling the stories that inspire her. Her work explores memory and the disconnection between history and modern culture; many of her projects reflect on agricultural or rural subjects.

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She is particularly attracted to people who are underestimated and wants to use unconventional storytelling methods to invite audiences into listening deeply to a subject's perspective.

"There are some stories that are prioritized by the algorithm. Those kinds of stories are going to get told whether I tell them or not," Blumhagen Chastain said. "And then there are some stories that the current algorithm is never going to prioritize, but that I still think that people need. Those are the stories I'm trying to seek out right now."

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Many of these unheard stories center on people of a certain age.

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"I think generally, in our culture, octogenarians are often the most interesting people in a room, but no one's talking to them like that," she said. "To me, a wonderful outcome of my work would be if others started finding those people in the rooms that they are in and started asking them questions."

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One of her most lauded projects allowed her to do just that. Blumhagen Chastain describes The Happiness Machine as her "first really personal film." It was initially self-funded, though it later gained a backer. The 24-minute short centers around Carl, a philosopher, inventor and farmer who grew up on 22 acres in rural Iowa. In the film, he shares his thoughts about his work, the land that encompasses him and what he describes as "the gift of place," which he hopes to pass on to his children.

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The Happiness Machine derives its title from a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury in the 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. In the story, an inventor tries to invent a machine that manufactures happiness. Instead, it makes everyone miserable - the real "Happiness Machine," Bradbury writes, is his family and the threads that connect their lives.

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"I wanted to do something that even if no one ever saw it, I would still be glad that I did it, because it would make me more myself," Blumhagen Chastain said. "I knew that any time spent with Carl would not be wasted. He's such a wonderful thinker and a person who I respect so much. I knew the process of capturing his story would be enriching to me personally, even if the film was not successful commercially."

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The short eventually screened at 27 festivals globally, including DOCNYC, America's largest documentary festival. It won 13 awards and aired on PBS for three years.

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As part of her master's degree, she's working on a new film, the Untitled Feed Sacks Project, a documentary tapestry that uses the feed sacks of the last century (between 1935-45) as an entry point to allow exploration of the rural women who utilized them to create clothing and quilts.

A still from Cinema grad student Rebecca Blumhagen Chastain's most recent work, "Untitled Feed Sacks Project," which she hopes to develop into a feature-length film. Image Credit: Rebecca Blumhagen Chastain.

"I'm thinking of the project itself like a quilt, where there are many different little patterns that are self-contained but then together create this beautiful portrait," Blumhagen Chastain said. "Some of those are rooted in history, and some of them are rooted in the present and connect back. I hope to find ways to connect young people today - and their experience of some of these same things - to people of that generation."

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Blumhagen Chastain wants to allow the individual, and the object, in extension, to speak for itself. To do this, she tries to give people time and space while filming. Conversely, she hopes the audience can interact with the work via nuanced and unique paths, from poetry to sound to image.

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"I try to take time with the fabric, use the lens to look at the texture and the detail in a way that might invite you to wonder about the time it took or the stitching process. [I filmed while] someone says, 'These are like women's journals' - the choices of color and fabric and pattern tell you something about that person. I'm trying to create in the film opportunities for people to wonder and to think about the person who made it."

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Blumhagen Chastain hopes for this to one day become her first feature-length film. Meanwhile, she continues experimenting with her craft and feels that Binghamton offers the opportunity to be enriched by faculty and other students' input.

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"I believe storytelling can be a sacred process," Blumhagen Chastain said. "It can be healing for the person telling the story to be listened to, and I think it can be healing for the person listening to the story to be affirmed, because they may recognize a piece of themselves in someone else that they may have felt alone in. And I think the more ways to create those connections, where we can connect to another person's experience authentically, the more exciting the project gets for me."

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