Eliza Barry Callahan
Eliza Barry Callahan
“I feel like I’m, in some ways, always a perpetual novice,” says musician, writer and now filmmaker Eliza Barry Callahan. “I like that position. When you always have the most to learn, you often have the most ideas.” Her second short film, The Non-Actor, which premiered at IFFR this year and just made its North American premiere at TIFF, is adapted from a section of her first novel, last year’s The Hearing Test. An autofictional account of Callahan’s experience with sudden-onset hearing loss that ended, after a period of experimental treatment, almost as mysteriously as it started, the book has garnered comparisons to Clarice Lispector (one of many writers quoted in the book) and Rachel Cusk, a novelist whose work is also tagged as autofiction. “It’s in vogue to bristle at the term,” Callahan notes. “I don’t bristle at it as much. Parts of this novel are rooted in my experience, but a lot of parts of this novel are entirely fiction, and that is what most fiction is.”
Starring Callahan’s longtime friend Maya Hawke, Non-Actor expands and significantly reworks a small section of the book in which the author travels to Los Angeles for a work engagement. Paying appropriately acute attention to its sonic mix, the film adds and subtracts sound all along the way as its protagonist’s hearing fluctuates. A sexual encounter re-casts the prospect of deafness in an unexpected context; a film that begins in an enigmatically depressive vein while following a character struggling to navigate an imminent reality ends on a surprise high note. The book is intensely cinephilic, beginning with a description of a partial viewing of Marlen Khutsiev’s 1967 Soviet New Wave landmark July Rain. “The whole time I was writing it, I was picturing it as a film,” Callahan says. “I was not reading really much of anything else as I was writing, but I was watching films. I remember rewatching La Cienega and films that had a lot of specific sound design, a specific relationship to space.” And while the book wasn’t initially intended as a blueprint for a film, ultimately the movie “was planned before the release of the book.”
Callahan grew up being “interested in quotidian reality, like HGTV or renovation videos.” After studying art history for her undergraduate degree, she completed a graduate writing program—both at Columbia, where she’s now an adjunct professor in the English department. Over the past decade, she’s also recorded multiple albums with her partner Jack Staffen, first as the eponymous Jack and Eliza and then as Purr. Her first short film, 2022’s Bay of Cadiz, was a guerrilla production shot on one roundtrip Amtrak journey without obtaining official approval and involves carving a fish in a dining car. “We got lucky with a nice conductor,” Callahan says. “I showed my Columbia ID. We also had massive sushi knives. We literally rode the train from Penn Station to Albany and back.” Other filmic output includes a video for Horsegirl’s recent “2468” single and co-writing the Sundance 2024 short Bust with Angalis Field (himself a 25 New Face last year).
Callahan and her longtime cinematographer Owen Smith-Clark shot Non-Actor on 35mm after he said, “I will do this for free if we can shoot on 35.” He had a camera and some leftover stock to start. “We had basically one take per shot,” Callahan says. “We shot it almost in sequence because we did not have enough film to do more than one take per shot. We reserved a few takes for some very specific shots and ran out of film and didn’t get to shoot a lot of things. But luckily, it makes sense.” Speaking exactly a year to the day after production began, Callahan recounts that shooting wrapped just after Labor Day, and she had a submittable cut in time for IFFR in January. She plans to shoot her next short on 16mm, an expansion of another section from The Hearing Test about her veterinarian mother making a house call that involves “a horse, two mobsters and 30 sitar players. There’s high action, there’s violence. It’s very different.” Then, her teaching semester begins, along with work on a new novel and “developing a feature based on the end of [Test].”—Vadim Rizov/Image: self
