Under the waters of the New York Harbor, a bed of oysters quietly listens to the landscape of life on the surface. There is the dull roar of motorboats, of laughter and shouts and horns, a green-handed torch thrust towards the sun; things of little concern to the oyster, but unbeknownst to them, of utmost importance. For these things now far above the oyster determine their existence, and in their existence do we determine our own — but much like its inverse, we are apt to forget what’s below us.
Emily Packer, experimental filmmaker and editor, whose work has been featured at film festivals and streamed on Criterion Channel, who’s editorial work appears in The New Yorker and on PBS, premiered her recent documentary Holding Back The Tide, a film that uses the oyster as a lens to explore ideas of sexuality, community, and identity, at Providence’s Lost Bag on March 6.
Holding Back The Tide focuses on the New York Harbor, a place that was once home to half of the world’s oysters but now, due to pollution, threatens to determine the future habitability of New York City. The film is an effort to draw attention to the environmental crisis that faces the city, but takes, in terms of nature documentaries, a nonconventional route. Packer says, “I would say the process or product is very poetic. We weren’t interested in making a comprehensive argument or a film that was entirely designed to educate. We wanted to make something that felt like a poem; something that would move you.”
Such is, as found in the film synopsis, “A woman swallows a pearl. A subway car falls to the ocean floor. A deluge bursts through the cracks of New York City. In every borough, oyster shells are pried apart and carefully returned to sea.” There is a mythic in the oyster that Packer explores through her use of technique, fragments that piece together a dreamy narrative of the oyster’s origin and humanity.
Packer has always been interested in the environment and using film to communicate worthy issues. She recalls, “I was involved in environmental non-profit work when I was a teenager and simultaneously took a media class at my public high school in California; it just sort of clicked that filmmaking could be a good medium for my ideas about the world.”
Oysters are creatures that thrive in a community; they form expansive reefs that provide aquatic habitats and filter water, and these reefs also help protect against coastal erosion. Ian Shea, an oyster farmer out of Narragansett Bay, stresses the importance of this bivalve, “With all the pollutants and impurities in our ocean, bays and estuaries today, oysters and oyster farms are playing a huge role in cleaning up our waters. Oysters are filter feeders; a single oyster can ingest and clean up to 50 gallons of water a day. Multiply that one oyster by thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and you’re making a real impact.”
The gender-fluidity of the oyster (the oyster switches between sexes to help them reproduce) is an aspect that Packer uses in Holding Back The Tide to challenge the presumption of inherent heterosexuality. She says, “Throughout the film we were drawing connections between a person’s self-actualization and queerness and the oyster itself. I’m really tired of the narrative about heterosexuality as natural or reflected in nature, when so often that’s not the case. Part of the impetus for framing the film this way was to allow people to see themselves; take claim and ownership over their bodies. Our desires are supremely natural and are something that is reflected by our natural world.”
The main thesis of the film seems to be this: When looking towards the future, we should ask the oyster.
Packer threads a parallel between the oyster and human ecology. She says, “I think it would do some great good to be intentional about mimicking the oyster. I went into the film with this question: How do we as a city, as a contemporary collective of people, imagine ourselves in the future? How do we enact a better reality while we’re dealing with the existential crisis of climate change?” The oyster relies on their community to function, to filter out the bad and usher in the new – analogous to what happens in a healthy society that uses their collective force to create change. A society can only function healthily if all their participants (like the oyster) feel supported, and this support gives them the freedom they need to be individuals. Packer continues, “You can feel NYC as a collective entity – you can feel when it’s having a good day or when it’s not. Tapping into this necessary collectivism, and literal building on the backs of those that came before you, is something we can take from the oysters. They need that base to survive, but they also need the sexual freedom of being able to transition sex or gender; an entire ecosystem is dependent on that oysters’ desire to change.”
Greek mythology is used in Holding Back The Tide to explore how myth shapes our reality. Packer mixes conventional with contemporary; using gender non-conforming characters, women of color, and Black women to portray classic characters such as Aphrodite and Hermaphroditus. Packer comments, “when you’re dealing with something as storied as the oyster, reframing those existing stereotypes and imagery of the oyster is helpful to flip conventional narrative on the head, to redirect what we want the new connotations to be. We wanted these characters to be led to their own self-reflection and be able to change into their own transitions.”
By using the oyster as a symbol of autonomous transition, freedom, and community, Packer hopes to “develop new narratives so that we can unlock culturally stuck parts of our brain. This film is a poem; I hope it can open people’s perspectives about what a film can be and what a city is.”
As an independent filmmaker, Packer sees the future of film in the accessibility of the experimental. Bigger film production companies couldn’t see the vision for Holding Back The Tide, so she was forced to go her own route. A fact that Packer is pleased with, “I’m glad they didn’t back us; by not taking their money, I didn’t have to pick their nose. That’s a huge power. If a film is really trying to avoid mimicry and tell new stories, some voices have to be totally independent and can’t be tied to a media machine that creates something they think an audience would respond to.” To get at the essence of something, what it is, and what it can be, the artist, like the oyster, should be comfortable exploring below the surface. •
