Summers’s film is about a voyeuristic photographer named Lena (played by Terah Maher, a teaching fellow at Harvard and friend of Summers’s), who by night dances at the Glass Slipper, and by day follows a man she’s been stalking for three months. The film brims with juxtapositions of perspective. “It’s a matter of who’s being watched and who’s watching, and what’s intimate and what’s not,” says Summers. There is minimal dialogue, relying on imagery and the communicative force of movement and facial expressions rather than conversation. This was a conscious decision for Summers, who’s been a photographer for the past seven years, since she learned she was going deaf and would need major surgery to restore her hearing. “A friend gave me a camera for my birthday,” she says. “And it was amazing, because photography became a way for me to feel connected to the world again.”
Summers’s hearing has been restored, with surgery and the help of hearing aids, and her deep connection with photography has flourished into a career in film, which has included stints working for the Allston-based company Element Productions and the fledgling Boston.tv, as well as freelancing as a producer and director. On the aforementioned faux-July Saturday, she shoots one of the requisite tree scenes, in which Lena waits for the man she is following to pass by. Summers is intent on perfecting a shot where Lena spins a colorful umbrella, in a distracted, childlike way. The umbrella, spinning, mesmerizing, and kaleidoscopic, fills the frame, then snaps suddenly to a stop when Lena sees the man she’s been waiting for. It’s a simple, unassumingly beautiful moment in the life of the film’s depressed main character. “To me, the images are primary,” says Summers. “The moments where nothing is happening can be amazing.”
Baker’s dozen
To say that no two Twelve film segments are alike is an understatement. There’s a musical, a serial-killer parody, and time-lapse filming accompanied by spoken-word artists reciting poetry on rooftops. The tree and 10-minute time frame are the segments’ only uniting factors. “The early stages of this thing were amazing, because we had these collaborative conversations that we just don’t normally get to have,” says Sean Baker, who made February’s film, and who works mainly in reality TV, including stints with Queer Eye and Sox Appeal. “The creative energy that has spun out of this is incredible.” Each month, the non-directing Twelve members attend each other’s shoots to fulfill crew duties, like a built-in functional family for each movie.
At the heart of all of this, keeping everything organized, is Masterson, though he seems more like a big brother than a big boss to the Twelve group, making sure everyone (including me) has eaten a burrito during lunch break at the Fens, and that passers-by aren’t walking through scenes. Masterson has worked on movie and commercial sets in Boston for the past eight years, and this past spring won the first-ever Howard Stern Film Festival, with a five-minute film called Radio Play, which starred kid personas of Stern and two of his on-air collaborators, Robin Quivers and Fred Norris. His Twelve contribution is the January opener of the movie. Fittingly, it opens at midnight on New Year’s Day, and is about an insomniac who hasn’t slept in the two years since his significant other passed away. He meets an eccentric woman in a diner and “she sort of forces herself into his life,” says Masterson.
