5 Questions with Marcelle O'Brien

“Here Goes Nothing,” a self portrait video diary by Marcelle O’Brien, is a fascinating mix of moods and personality, concerning the difficult subjects of depression and abuse. We asked O’Brien how it came together, balancing emotional vulnerability with humor, and what comes next for her…

1) Can you talk a bit about how you first got interested in movies, and/or when you first realized you were interested in visual art?

Secretly watching A Clockwork Orange on my iPod Touch in my high school French class inspired me to make movies, basically. My dad and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey once on cable when I was a teen, and although it had tons of commercials and I slept through it, I remember googling, “Movies by Stanley Kubrick.” I wanted to really sit down and watch something from this guy Kubrick without “FX HAS THE MOVIES” blasting every other second in commercials. The perfect place to watch a long movie by him was during a lecture. After seeing A Clockwork Orange in school, I was obsessed. I didn’t know a lick of French by the end of that class, but I justify it by saying I watched the French dub with the English subtitles on. My teacher caught me watching it, actually. She asked what I was looking at, and when I told her, she was befuddled. She was disturbed at the fact that I found this raunchy movie. I wanted to make films that made French teachers squirm. I wanted to make art that made people feel anything. I watched so many movies behind a textbook and underneath my desk in that class, at lunch, and in seminar.

I always drew as a kid. Early on, I was an artist working with strictly traditional mediums, like paint, graphite, charcoal, etc. It’s in my personality to not settle for one outlet of creativity. I needed to make moving art.

2) When you were filming these, I guess you could call them video diaries, did you know you were going to be compiling them together? What made you want to express these thoughts in this way?

At first, I didn’t know I was making a documentary about my experience with depression at all. It first stemmed from playing with a camcorder app I downloaded the summer of 2017. I needed a break from big movie cameras at film school, so I sought out experimental forms of documenting my everyday life. When the fall semester started the same year, my one class (shouts out to Professor Michael Kuetemeyer at Temple University, you’re a G, my guy) required a final project. It was not limited and I could do whatever I wanted. So, I saw that as the best opportunity to do something unconventional, and I recorded a lot of my days from September on. Of course, I used mostly videos I made that November and December because, as you can see, my depression came through hard as hell during that time. That’s when I realized that this final project I was making had to be about living with depression, and not just an experimental piece about my everyday moments. I excluded a lot of early footage I obtained and included the issue that was important to me, and it was all happening in real time.

3) There’s such a vulnerability and immediacy to the way you speak to the camera, but also a real personality and sense of humor. Can you talk about the balance between being real and being entertaining?

I definitely was trying to make a dark topic as light as possible. I consciously didn’t want people to just feel bad for me. Depression shouldn’t define someone, but once a label is put onto a person with mental illness, I think it’s hard for them to be seen as anything but ill. I wanted to show my personality to not only entertain, but to get through to people that I’m more than my mental illness. So, while I tried to make sure I sat down and talked seriously about depression and surviving abuse, I wanted people to feel good by the end of it. Showing the hardest days was vulnerable, and the crying was so hard to edit and include in this film. I was showing what depression looks like. It looks like not just tears and sadness, but emptiness and exhaustion. I hope someone liked seeing me lip sync to Tyler the Creator and Mariah Carey on my bed in North Philadelphia. It was necessary to include.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that really blew you away, and why?

Dude…. Paris, Texas. That movie is INCREDIBLE. The day scenes are lit perfectly and leave me feeling like a wanderer in that world. The compositions of the long shots broken up in thirds are BEAUTIFUL.

5) What’s next for you?

I’m going to be a senior at Temple this year, and I want to end my academic career with another documentary, an animated film, lots of art exhibits and a small clothing line. I got crazy ideas in this brain, and I think the Philly scene needs me right now.

Contact information:

Email: obrienmarcelle@gmail.com

Twitter: @suckmydicktrump

Instagram: @art.marcelle

Facebook: facebook.com/obrienmarcelle