Penny Lane (filmmaker)


Penny Lane is an American independent filmmaker known for her humorous, innovative documentaries, including Our Nixon, Nuts! and Hail Satan?. Filmmaker Magazine named Lane one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012. In 2017, she was admitted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ella Taylor of NPR described Lane as “one of our foremost chroniclers of bizarro Americana.” Museum of the Moving Image chief curator David Schwartz organized her first major retrospective in 2018, writing "in the past few years, Penny Lane has quickly emerged as a major documentary filmmaker." Ann Hornaday wrote that Lane "might be documentary film's most compellingly cockamamie social historian," while Chris Plante wrote in The Verge in 2016, "Lane is the answer to a question more people should be asking: who's the great documentarian of this generation?"

Life and career

Lane was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. She received a BA in American Culture and Media Studies at Vassar College in 2001 and an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005. She has taught film, video and new media art at Bard College, Hampshire College, Williams College and Colgate University.
Lane became interested in filmmaking and video art when she was working at Children's Media Project, a nonprofit youth media center in Poughkeepsie, New York. Starting in 2002, she has made over a dozen experimental short films which span the worlds of video art and documentary film, including The Abortion Diaries, The Voyagers, Just Add Water and Normal Appearances. Many of her short films are collected and distributed by VTAPE.
In 2013, Lane released her first feature-length film Our Nixon. The all-archival documentary featuring the never before seen home movies of Nixon staffers premiered at the 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2013, had its North American premiere at SXSW, and was selected as the Closing Night Film at New Directors/New Films. It earned wide critical acclaim and numerous film festival awards at Seattle International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Nantucket Film Festival, and Traverse City Film Festival.
In 2016, the director's second feature-length film NUTS! a mostly-animated experimental documentary about con-man and quack, John Brinkley, world premiered at Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Editing.
Lane also released a companion project to NUTS! called Notes on Nuts!, a database of "footnotes" to the film in which she details over 300 instances of manipulation, tricky editing, and outright fabrications contained within the "mostly true" story in the film. Lane wrote that the website "takes the provocation of the film much further by engaging in a kind of radical honesty about all the tricks, maniupulations and outright lies to be found in my film, with the idea that in doing so I could expand out from this one case study to instigate a whole new conversation: what would happen if documentary filmmakers started to regularly use footnotes?"
Lane returned to Sundance in 2019 to premiere her fourth feature-length documentary Hail Satan?, concerning the birth and rapid rise of The Satanic Temple.
Critics have often noted Lane's use of humor and unique approach to the documentary form.

Features

''Our Nixon''

Brian Frye introduced Lane to the Super 8 home movies confiscated by the FBI during the Watergate investigation. The archival footage inspiring Lane and Frye became the basis of the 2013 released nonfiction film Our Nixon, directed by Lane and co-produced by Frye.
The documentary depicts a unique portrait of Richard Nixon and his closest aides, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman, and special assistant Dwight Chapin. The film contains footage from 26 hours of Super 8 home movies filmed by Haldeman, Enrlichman, and Chapin, as well as relevant news broadcasts and interviews. Among numerous films about the Nixon and Watergate era, Our Nixon stands out for its distinct, intimate perspective and the stylized all archival editing choice.
Our Nixon had its world premiere at the 42nd International Film Festival in Rotterdam and its North American premiere at 2013 South by Southwest. The film screened at multiple film festivals, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, where it won the Ken Burns Award for “Best of the Festival,” and Seattle International Film Festival, where it won the Best Documentary Award. Our Nixon was selected as the Closing Night Film at 42nd New Directors/New Films. On August 1, 2013, CNN broadcast the film, and Cinedigm handled the film's theatrical release.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that the "highly personal view of the Nixon years is, for obvious reasons, a sad and wrenching one - a film that is nonetheless filled with spirit, humor and a bountiful sense of irony.” Amy Entelis, senior vice president for development for CNN worldwide, praised the film for its “original material” and “unconventional” story telling.

''Nuts!''

After encountering Charlatan, an authorized biography written by Pope Brock, in her local public library in 2009, Lane developed an interest in John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor who attempted to cure impotence via goat testicle transplantation in 1917. The experimental documentary Nuts! mainly consists of animated reenactments and narration voiced by both actors and Brinkley himself. “Brinkley’s story is not presented as the object of a neutral nonfiction gaze, but opportunity for viewers to actively wrestle with the ethical and epistemological issues central to the narrative nonfiction form,” Lane wrote in the home page of NUTS!
Nuts! premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 22, 2016, and won the Special Jury Award for Editing in U.S. Documentary Competition of the festival. The documentary premiered theatrically on June 22, 2016, at Film Forum in New York.
Rolling Stone named Nuts! one of the 12 best movies they saw at Sundance 2016, saying “the fact that it’s all true didn’t stop Lane’s film from ending with the best twist of this year’s fest.”

''The Pain of Others''

Lane's third feature-length documentary The Pain of Others, an all-archival documentary about the controversial illness known as Morgellons, world premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and was later screened at BAMcinemaFest, Maryland Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest. The film is composed entirely of YouTube vlogs and does not answer the scientific question of the physiological causes of Morgellons—rather, it focuses on need for human proximity and unexplained suffering of the vloggers, as well as the specific formal and emotional qualities of 2010s era YouTube. Lane has described the film as both "YouTube body horror," and a "work of media archeology" which asks the questions, "When doctors send you away, to whom do you turn for help? When suffering has no explanation, what rushes to fill the void? How does false information spread on the internet? If a supportive and loving community forms around a shared delusion, can that be a good thing? What do you do in the face of someone else’s pain if you believe the pain stems from a delusion?" Lane was inspired to make the film by reading a 2013 essay in Harpers Magazine by Leslie Jamison describing the phenomenon.

''Hail Satan?''

An examination of the origins of The Satanic Temple and their brand of grassroots activism. The documentary premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and is distributed by Magnolia Pictures. Lane described the editing for the film occurred in approximately six months, "concurrent with the bulk of shooting."

Short Films

''The Abortion Diaries (2005)''

“The Abortion Diaries” is a short documentary film released in 2005 which Lane completed as her MFA thesis project at iEAR Studios, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's electronic arts graduate program. The 30 minute documentary was made for approximately $3000 and directed and edited by Lane. It features intimate interviews with 12 women who speak candidly about their experiences with abortion. Critics have written of the film, “hough the conceit is simple, it is also profoundly radical” and described it as “clear-eyed and surprisingly compelling”
Part of Lane's research process was to research the history of abortion stories in American popular media and share it publicly on a widely consulted timeline.
Lane said she made the film to address a “generational gap in language” around abortion after having an abortion in her early 20s which she found “horrifically isolating” and feeling that her experiences were not represented in the popular media. "I felt guilty for not feeling guilty... I expected I would suffer a lot. Because I didn't, I felt like a monster." Lane looked "literally all over the Internet" for advice to help her handle her emotions, but found mainly pro-life literature disguised as unbiased pregnancy resources and pro-choice Web sites that didn't offer much beyond statistics. She made this film to correct the lack of representation and to "approach a divisive issue and go beyond bumper stickers."
“The Abortion Diaries” was a DIY film primarily self-distributed by the director herself. It became an important organizing and discussion tool, screening at hundreds of colleges, churches, community centers, basements and bars in every US state. It won several awards, including an Audience Award at New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival, Best Student Documentary at Carolina Film/Video Festival, and Choice USA's “Spirit of Communication” Award.

''The Voyagers (2010)''

“The Voyagers” is an experimental documentary which tells the story of the NASA project to launch two spacecraft carrying golden records holding a wealth of human culture into space in 1977. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 pioneered research of the far reaches of our solar system and continue to hurtle further into outer space today. In the process of putting together these time capsules of human experience, Carl Sagan and the project's creative director, Annie Druyan, fell in love. Their story resonated with Lane, who created a personal take on it for her own wedding, as a meditation on the nature of love in an uncertain universe.
Lane said the film is “a valentine to Carl Sagan and the way that he... embodies the place where scientific skepticism meets child-like awe and wonder and joy and optimism.” Brainpickings founder Maria Popova described the film as “a living testament to the creative capacity of remix culture” while critic Collin Souter described it as “a beautiful film, one that never resorts to over-the-top sentiment to make a point about love and the cosmos.” Critic Andrew S. Allen described the film as “a profound story about love and the fearless ability of the human spirit to stand in awe of its vastness, to dream of its mysteries, and to catch a glimpse of it’s incomprehensible complexity, and, knowing what triumphs and heartache lie ahead, still boldly jump in head first.”
“The Voyagers” has won many awards, including Best Essay Film, Best Film, Winner of the Hammer to Nail Short Film Contest. Honorable Mention, Disposable Film Festival, Honorable Mention, AFI FEST, Los Angeles and Best Experimental Film, New Orleans Film Festival, NOLA.

Controversy

In 2016, Lane discovered that the Tribeca Film Festival was planning to screen Vaxxed, an anti-vaccination documentary directed by Andrew Wakefield. She wrote a widely cited open letter to the festival, originally posted to Facebook and later reposted to Filmmaker Magazine, in which she asked the festival to remove the film from their lineup. In the letter she wrote, "the problem is not that Vaxxed is controversial, or even that it’s deceptive. Honestly, I consider a large number of well-made, popular documentary films fairly deceptive. The problem is that it is dangerous misinformation being legitimized under the banner of your considerable prestige." After the ensuing controversy, Tribeca Film Festival eventually removed the film from its lineup.

Awards and honors