Favorite Films Pt. 2. "The Fits" by Ian Maxton

While a huge range of films screened at Hobnobben this past weekend – and I had the privilege of seeing many of them – instead of writing short pieces on each of the films I saw, I thought I would pick two favorites. These films were not only great on their own, but also emblematic of what made the festival as a whole so fantastic.

For starters, they both happen to be directed by women. This was not a conscious effort on my part – it just so happens these two were my favorites from the fest – but it was a conscious effort on the part of Hobnobben to include a diverse array of filmmakers. Needless to say, it paid off. So with no further fanfare, some thoughts on one of my favorite films from Hobnobben 2016. (This is the second of two reviews. Scroll down for the first.)

As we move through life, it becomes a matter of habit, of survival even, to categorize things, people, and experiences. In the swirling chaos of existence, we fix safe moorings, which tether us to the familiar, the understood. These tethers multiply and we begin to believe that we have a firm grasp on the universe. Of course, we are always being proven wrong. But instead of spinning off into space, most of us simply fasten more tethers – sometimes pretending to understand, other times reaching genuine understanding. With age, we tend to detach ourselves as much as possible from the baffling strangeness of life. Among the many reasons why I think it is great, one is that The Fits is a film that seeks to make the world strange to us again.

The film tells the story of a young girl named Toni. It takes place almost entirely in and around an urban recreation center. Toni visits the place daily with her brother, immersing herself in the masculine world of boxing. She trains alongside her older brother and his male cohorts. Across the hall from the boxing gym, the Lionesses train. They dance as intensely as the boxers train. Their world is exclusively feminine. Toni finds herself increasingly drawn to this feminine world, a world she can see herself belonging in. Shortly after she joins the Lionesses, the older girls on the team begin experiencing unexplained seizures. The rest of the film follows the consequences of these fits as they spread through the dance team.

The setup for the film is peculiar, but relatively simple. However, director Anna Rose Holmer’s cinematic choices imbue the world with a dark strangeness. Early in the film, she shoots dueling dancers in tight close up. She utilizes slow motion to make the smooth, kinetic dancing resemble the titular fits. Each muscle spasm and strand of whipping hair is given a life separate from the body. The focus on the component parts of human movement serves to make these undulating bodies alien. The dance moves and the athletic movement of the boxers are shot in this way and the resulting effect is one which makes these “normal” movements hardly dissimilar from the “abnormal” fits.

Holmer also utilizes static framing to establish the organized and regimented space of the rec center. The geometry of basketball gym floors and rows of fluorescent lighting is broken when Holmer’s camera tethers itself to young girls running with youthful abandon through the halls, or when it follows Toni up and down the steps of the pedestrian bridge outside the rec center.

As more girls succumb to the fits, Toni’s alienation from them is expressed through shots which focus on the physical space that grows between her and her teammates. This fear and alienation is further emphasized by the score of taut strings which crescendo menacingly in the soundtrack. At 72 minutes, no beat in the film overstays its purpose. Tension builds visually and aurally until it breaks in the ecstatic finale of the film. Here, the abstract, arrhythmic string section is replaced by the trip-hop inflected song “Aurora” by Kiah Victoria: https://vimeo.com/121740441

The dramatic tension of the film finds its source in Toni’s search for belonging. She tries to negotiate the troubling lines between male and female spaces while struggling through her own adolescence. While the fits are a perhaps too-obvious metaphor for the girls’ entry into womanhood, this is somewhat mitigated by their mysterious nature in the plot. Nameless, faceless adults scramble around trying to explain and cure them, but they come up empty.

In their search for rational explanations, the adults forget that the world is profoundly strange and often unexplainable. For the adolescents at the center of the story, the strangeness of the world is central to their reality – the world, and their selves, are mostly unknown. Toni spends the film trying to figure out who she is and where she fits (pun intended). The end of the film offers a bright glimmer of a beginning for the answers to these questions.

After the film, the audience was treated to a panel discussion on diversity in filmmaking. And while I won’t do a disservice to the gracious panelists by clumsily attempting to summarize their thoughtful sentiments, I will say that The Fits is proof (not that we should need it) that more diverse filmmakers leads directly to more interesting and varied modes of filmmaking. As some of the panelists after the film noted, a film like The Fits cannot exist within the nexus of Hollywood, not only because of its fierce strange-ness (both narratively and visually), but also because of its commitment to amplifying the voices of women and of women of color in particular. As more and more people begin to consider and discuss diversity in filmmaking (as well they should), it is important to remember that small films are always at the vanguard, more beholden to artistry than market interests. Taking a chance with your ticket dollars on daring films like this is often surprising and pleasurable. Not only that, it pushes back on the endless stream of hegemonic Hollywood films, opening up more space for brilliant, diverse, daring, and strange movies like The Fits.