Farming Out:
An Interview with Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher (Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern)
By Asha Phelps
Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher’s Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern, premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award. It would later be nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The story of the Jordan family being forced by harsh economic realities to give up the farm they had worked for decades is a poignant and beautiful epic in miniature, which the film’s subtitle gestures at. Evoking Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Jordan and Ascher’s film presents a beautiful portrait of an American agricultural crisis, delivered with grace and humor that would further shape the shift in form and tone of documentary filmmaking.
I chatted with Jeanne and Steve via Zoom about their filmmaking approach, how the personal felt political, and the surprisingly evergreen subject matter of the Jordans’ story. Recently restored by the filmmakers, it screens at Museum of the Moving Image on Sunday, September 29, as part of Personal Belongings: First Person Documentary in the 1990s.
Reverse Shot: Jeanne, what was the catalyst to start filming your family?
Jeanne Jordan: We called my dad one day, and he told us that they were supposed to get their operating loan, which farmers have to get every year. It’s a kind of loan used to buy all the seed which they'll pay the bank back when it's harvested. And then he said something like, “I think this is gonna be my last year of farming.” He was a third, fourth generation farmer, so hearing this didn’t make any sense.
Steve and I, we’d been married for about a year and had never done a film together. But we looked at each other and said, “If we call ourselves filmmakers…he's given us a timeframe.” That is what started it out, and I very much saw it as a political film, because I was angry. Our family had been through so much, and when we started, I did not want it to be a personal film. I didn't want to be in it, and I didn't want to talk. I just felt like this was about my parents, and they were going to lose their farm, and the heartless way it was happening to them.
Steve Ascher: My filmmaking life kind of got going in the MIT Film Section, where Ed Pincus and Ricky [Leacock] were the heads. They had both come up through cinema vérité and the whole idea of observational filmmaking from a more distanced way, and both of them had turned to much more personal ideas about filmmaking. A bunch of filmmakers in the “Personal Belongings” series—like Robb Moss—were there. It was a whole movement, trying to tell stories that you might tell from the third-person perspective as a personal story, and the depth and intimacy that you can get by telling it from the inside out instead of the outside in.
I had a tradition of observational filmmaking really instilled, and the joy of that, of just watching and structuring a story from what you can observe. This personal documentary movement was really getting the chance to tell the story from the inside, the chance to incorporate writing, which I've always loved. Both of us have written short stories and things like that. Doing Troublesome Creek, one of the things that became really clear as soon as we were shooting is that the story wasn't going to tell itself in an observational way, and that Jeanne's presence and voice would be really key to understanding things for people from the outside like me. I really didn't know Iowa or farming at all, couldn't understand without having a first-person guide and point of focus to bring you into the story.
JJ: Steve convinced me that I had to do that, or nobody was going to get it. It was very clear from the very beginning, and this is something we battled all the way through its life, and still battle with, is that people condescend to farmers in a way that is really unbelievable. And there was a way that people dismissed the film just hearing about it. “Oh, the poor farmers!” We didn’t want it to be what you expected it to be, and it isn’t. So it's really important to us that humor is a big part of the film. Irony, the clichés of what happens in the “flyover states,” I use, in heavy quotes. Or that people are the salt of the earth, and they're simple. When it was nominated for an Oscar, there was a screening in Los Angeles, and somebody stood up in the audience and said, “I was really amazed. You know, your family is so smart,” and it was like, there's an assumption that if you don't live near water, you probably are not very bright. So, we really wanted the film to be moving but not depressing, and not just go in the direction that some other farm films had already gone.
RS: Jeanne, you mentioned that you initially did not want to include your own voice, but I found your narration to be such an important part of carrying the film. It’s so humorous and witty.
JJ: I kept journals a lot in my life, and Steve had seen some of them, and so we used them as a jumping-off point for narration to provide some background about what it meant from the perspective of me growing up. My family is extremely sarcastic and funny. Humor is incredibly important to us, and I could not possibly have done a morose film about them–they would not have stood for it. I think that's what's really interesting is when people expect a subject to be sad. They have a really hard time dealing with it being funny.
SA: I want to emphasize the importance of having a laugh leader in the audience, because if there's somebody there to empower everybody else to laugh, they will laugh. The writing was also a kind of inside out, outside in process in that we would take Jeanne's journals, and the observations I had, and we kind of put them together and wrote it together. Jeanne did just a beautiful job delivering it, even in the rough narration. And then Jeanne’s mom Mary Jane died before we finished the film, and she had to go back [to Iowa], and we had to redo that part of the narration and try to capture the freedom and the spontaneity of these rough narrations.
JJ: While editing Troublesome Creek, my mother had ALS, so she was ill, and I was going back and forth to take care of her with my brothers and sisters. It was a kind of grieving time, even while we were writing the narration, but it wasn’t so hard to get the humor. But it was really hard to do the actual narration. I used to always say that I wanted to be an actress growing up, and I did a little in high school, so that really came in handy, to have the distance of this isn’t me, this is her. It was a pulling apart, a way that the narrator is a character as opposed to being you.
RS: What were some of the influences on the film’s tone and style?
SA: There was a kind of ethos at MIT that you don't use music, and we were pretty sure early on that we did want to use music as part of the storytelling. Sheldon Mirowitz, the composer for Troublesome Creek, who has worked on almost every one of our films since, gets at a lot of the ideas we want to explore. And then he explicates that in the most unbelievable way. His ability to see what's going on in a scene and express that in music is really part of our expressive toolkit.
One of the things Jeanne and I first bonded on when we met was one of our favorite films, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and also Days of Heaven. The scenes of the bugs in the fields… I think one of my favorite shooting days in my entire life was going out in the cornfield and just shooting corn and insects and tiny things. So there really was, you know, both nonfiction and fiction influences.
JJ: The narration was very much, to me, figuring out how that could be done, something that I'd be comfortable with. I thought of Sissy Spacek in Badlands. That gave me a clue of how you could talk about other things and still be pushing the story along. And it's interesting how Sissy and her narration in the story is different from her character and that's also got kind of a parallel. I agreed I would narrate, but I did not then think I would be in the film.
RS: There are so many intimate, yet joyous moments where you expect a different tone, like the scene of your family around the dinner table on the eve of the auction.
JJ: It was almost like everybody just got kind of giddy or hysterical. It was really that there was nothing that wasn't funny, which was so great. One of our big problems, when we started going and spending time filming my parents, was realizing what they did at night was watch westerns. There was a video store close by, and my mother would also send away for whole sets of things. So, what were we going to do? Just film them staring at a television, and narrate over them? They did not want us to sit them down, and so we figured we had to incorporate the westerns, and it made perfect sense. Because watching how my father dealt with this, that was his model, it really was, that kind of fight the real fight, of the little guy against the big gang. So that ended up being really fun to work with, and also unbelievably expensive. Licensing! Oh, my God! It's like films that nobody had even looked at for years suddenly had great value…
RS: I felt that those scenes of your parents watching the westerns are some of the more serious moments in the film. They are honed in. They are serious. This is a no-nonsense situation.
JJ: One of the most amazing moments was the night before the auction. Lonesome Dove was on, and there was a kind of profundity about a film about the end of the West, where we're filming something that feels like the end of the Midwest. Lonesome Dove is a film with a lot of ‘looks,’ which was also what was happening in the house, just people either looking or not looking at each other. My dad actually got quieter and quieter and quieter as we got closer to the auction. And the one time we tried to sit him down, to have him do an interview, he was having none of it. But he would tell the banker joke, the one about the glass eye, so that was enough, and we were pleased with that.
RS: What was the process of showing the film to the family like?
SA: We always show our films to the people in them. We want to hear their reactions. And if we got anything wrong or something that would be a real problem, we'd want to know about it. We want them to have a chance to have a say.
JJ: We went back to Iowa and showed it to all my brothers and sisters together, but not my parents. They saw it separately. And it was really scary for me, cause they all are incredibly smart, incredibly quick witted, and incredibly critical. And I’m the youngest girl! I was a nervous wreck. We played it in my sister Pam’s living room. The most amazing thing was that Pam said that she felt like she wasn't qualified to comment because she felt like the story was so much bigger than the family, even though she was in it. She recognized the story, it was true, but it had taken on a certain kind of universal feeling that made her feel that she was part of it. There were a few little factual things that they told us about. But there was not any of the pushback I worried about, like “you're humiliating Mother and Daddy.” I don't know what I worried most about, but it was great. They were totally supportive. When we showed it to my dad, he just laughed hysterically, but out of some kind of nervousness. I mean, he couldn’t stop laughing, so we actually just stopped the screening. But, since then, he’s watched it on a regular basis, because it is a way to see my mom.
RS: The film feels like it could be a time capsule, but the pressures on agriculture have not changed. Are there any Jordans that are still farming?
JJ: No. All of them stopped being farmers at some point and pivoted to completely different careers, though some still live in the same houses. None of the next generation wanted to be farmers; they didn't have any of the wonder that we saw when we were little. Seeing my dad on the tractor and being able to play outside. Oh, everything about it. That was just kind of gone by the time my nieces and nephews were growing up. Everything was kind of town-centered. It just wasn't the same. They all love farming, but they're not doing it. And they live in Iowa, where they all lived. I'm the only one that doesn’t.
SA: A hundred, maybe 55 years before we filmed, something like two-thirds of Americans were agricultural, the Jeffersonian model, and by the late-20th century, it was all falling apart. It actually didn't really last that long.
RS: Can you talk a bit about the restoration?
SA: We filmed in the days when video looked horrible. and we were totally committed to shooting on 16mm, because we felt that the beauty of the landscape was really an important part of understanding why somebody would be a farmer and what that meant. With that commitment, though, it meant that every roll of film was 100 bucks, and in processing, it was another, you know, 200-300 bucks. We would have these meetings where we'd order ten rolls of film at the beginning of the week and think that was going to last us. But by Wednesday we were having to order more with money that we didn't have. So, we ended up not processing most of the footage for over a year. We just froze it! Most films have dailies; we had “yearlies” because it took years to review all of the footage. When we could afford to process some film, we would pick and choose a couple to try to make a fundraising sample. And then every time we’d get any kind of grants—the early days it was all grant-funded and some contributions—then we would unfreeze some more and then get it processed, and try to remember, what was that scene?
It's really interesting to look at technology over time. We shot 16mm in the days when television was 4:3. Then we blew it up to 35mm for theatrical release. And then, eventually, when HD came in, it became a 16:9 film, which was kind of nice because it was more screen, and now more like a feature film in that way. But in other ways it messed up the framing, because that's not how I shot it.
We got the negative rescanned. A lot of it had degraded, but now I could just color it myself. That was something that, previously, you had to give to somebody else to do, because it was way too expensive and way too technical. So coloring is part of the expression of making this piece of art. It’s the color, the music, all of those things that one can now do. All aspects of shooting and editing are now more directly under your own control, and all part of your expressive power.