Katy McCarthy & Adam Golfer on Texas Rivers and Time Scales

Katy McCarthy and Adam Golfer both made films about Texas rivers, the Neches and the Rio Grande respectively, that were in a show recently at Underdonk, in New York City. I watched both films several times, and I thought about the way these two rivers have been and continue to be affected by humans. I also couldn’t help but think about climate change, as we in Austin are going through a very dry and unusually hot fall. I kept wondering, what will remain of these rivers? How will they change? What will happen to us, as the river floods or dries up? I was entranced by the slow shots, the lingering moments of birds grooming birds, and insects going about their life, juxtaposed against faster, larger human movements. The following is an edited and condensed conversation between Adam Golfer, Katy McCarthy, and me. 

 

Renee Lai (RL): Both of your films are about how human life connects to the river, specifically in Texas. How did your interest in these rivers, the Neches and the Rio Grande, arise? How did you get to know one another? 

Katy McCarthy (KM): Adam and I met in grad school at Hunter College in New York, and that’s when we became friends. Adam was already making films and was part of a group of people who were thinking about moving images. Our interests in rivers…well, Adam started first. 

RL: Adam, how did your interest in the Rio Grande start? 

Adam Golfer (AG): A lot of my work deals with borders. I was making work for many years that hovered around memory and family ties to the Holocaust and Israel and Palestine. I made a book about it that dealt with what divisions in land mean for people on each side of the boundary. When that project finished, I started thinking about the US and what was happening in this country. 

I’ve always thought a lot about immigration, but I was drawn to the Rio Grande as this mammoth line in the land that demarcates not only national boundaries but also who is allowed to go where. It is so politicized now but it has been politicized for decades. I heard about a tiny town, Rio Rico, on the south side of the river that once used to be on the north side. It’s in the Rio Grande Valley, sandwiched between McAllen and Brownsville. I was really intent on going to this place because I thought it was such a weird anomaly that the course of the river changed the national sovereignty of this place. There was an immigration court case called the Matter of Cantù that happened in the 70s where a man claimed to be American, but the U. S. government denied that, citing Rio Rico’s location south of the river. The man said it used to be north of the river. All this research was done which proved he was right. It called into question what dictates citizenship. I went to Rio Rico in 2018 thinking I was going to make a project about that, but I became more interested in sticking with the north side of the river, looking at the boundary from an American perspective. The project evolved into an accumulation of experiences relating to ecology, politics of the area, and the construction of the wall. 

RL: You started this in 2018, under the Trump presidency. Was that right when the wall was being constructed? 

AG: The wall has been built in pieces over several decades, and it got accelerated under Trump. I started going down there when it was in the news all the time. The project continues right now, and under Biden’s presidency, the wall more or less continues to be built. 

RL: Katy, can you tell me about your interest in the Neches River? 

KM: For the last couple of years I was part of a project at the University of Texas at Austin called Planet Texas 2050. I was one of the Artist Fellows and as part of that role, I talked to researchers who were looking at climate change in Texas. Eventually, I became absorbed into one of the flagship projects called Equitable and Regenerative Cities in a Post-Carbon Future. They were looking into the intersection of flooding, air pollution, and quality of life in and around Beaumont, Texas, which is where the Neches River flows into Port Beaumont. I also attended the Big Food Meetup at Lamar University where researchers, city employees, and activists came together to share research and updates related to flooding in the area. Initially, I was just spending time in the Port of Beaumont, which is hyper-industrialized. Then I met a really amazing activist and former park ranger named Ellen Buchanan who works on restoration and conservation further up the Neches River. I was struck by the contrast between the two landscapes, from the industrialized port to the conserved areas where it felt really vibrant. I received a grant from Lamar University to make work about the Neches and that’s where the project came from. 

I did a lot of interviews with people, which I originally thought would be the backbone of the project, but I realized I wanted to take a more ambient, narrative approach. I wanted to use the river as more than one specific place, and I wanted to be a little more poetically available to people who may have had a similar relationship to a landscape. I took a fictional approach. 

The landscape around the river where we filmed was in the Martin Dies, Jr. State Park. The river runs through it and is part of the Big Thicket National Preserve. It is a really odd place because the land is fractured and broken up into parts. They’ll protect one section but not the rest of it. People try to draw these hard lines about where the thicket and protections end. Privatization is a big cause of the fragmentation, which is true along lots of rivers. You start in Beaumont and experience one type of landscape, and as you move north, the river feels less intervened upon. 

RL: The two films had very different tones to me. Katy, I felt that yours was hopeful, that despite the change in landscape and the passing of time, the river remained a place of comfort. It felt like the river would remember the land and bear witness to the changes that would happen. Adam, I thought yours was much more ambiguous. I kept thinking about surveillance, especially the scene where red and blue lights were pulsing over the grass. I think about those colors being American flag colors, but at the same time, they felt very threatening. I also love the earlier snippets of dialogue about how nothing, not even animals, can move through the wall and so they’re blocked from their water source of the river. With the different tones in mind, what overall feeling did you come away with from the river? 

AG: I think something that ties both of our projects together is the idea of timescales. There’s an ecological timescale, and then there’s a man-made timescale. Looking specifically at rivers, industrialization, and runoff, all these things contribute to ecosystems being shrunk and carved into smaller enclaves. I think I was really aware that nature just keeps going. It doesn’t mean it isn’t negatively affected, because it is experiencing enormous devastation. In my film, I was attracted to the way that wildlife is just trying to get by. The river is trying to do the same thing, but it gets intense infringement on its ability to function as it has for millennia. So I was really attracted to things that people don’t look at directly when they think about the border. 

I’ve had many interesting conversations with Texans for years about the river. People who you would assume be politically aligned one way can have a surprising opinion about immigration. There aren’t simple ways to draw a line between different types of people. Before I started going to the Rio Grande Valley, I had more generalizations than I do now. 

I was transfixed by the idea that birds and wildlife are still trying to move back and forth freely across the boundary. Manmade development is trying to prevent that from happening, but if there is a wall, birds will just use it as a perch. The project focuses entirely on the Rio Grande Valley which is the site of one of the largest bird migrations in North America. All these bird watchers — I tried to use them as a way to look at people looking. I am watching them watch something. I’m watching Border Patrol watch something. I’m trying to figure out how to look at this enormous place that contains multitudes. I think I just start collecting to be totally honest. 

RL: The most effective part for me was the footage of the bird watchers. Even though you know it’s a harmless activity, there’s still that feeling of surveillance. Everyone is hyper-aware of what might be around them and what might be traveling past them. It feels so connected to the border patrol agent talking about tracking signs where people have been, whether it is from trash, a trail, or a set of footprints. Tracking and birdwatching made me think of hunting. The looking felt almost predatory. 

AG: I think they’re all looking for traces of life, whether it’s footprints in the dirt or a bird call you hear. There’s an obsession with looking into the natural environment to find something that should or shouldn’t be there. 

RL: Katy, how did you experience the river overall? Do you feel hopeful about the future of the Neches? You made a film that was about young life, but also about the end of a life. 

KM: I feel optimistic that things will survive and evolve into some new form. I think the act of being on location and seeing alligators, fish, birds, and dragonflies made me feel like it was a robust ecosystem. One of the cool things about conserving these landscapes is that people use them more. Watching people be out on the river, enjoying it, was exciting. I think it’s a place where a lot of different types of people come together. Like Adam was saying, you might be surprised by someone’s political perspective. It feels like a place of equal footing and mutual respect, even if we do feel very differently about certain things in this divisive state of Texas. Things felt like they were thriving and doing well. Finding that chopped down field of trees as a stand-in for future discussion was not hard, but it came out of conversations I was having about the lumber and paper industries in the area. Logging impacts the river deeply. Erosion and habitat loss are big problems, but a lot of where we were spending time was robustly treed. I feel good about that! I think things can change. The river has been around for a long time. The last thing I’ll say is that there’s a lot of advocacy, a lot of human beings on the ground to protect this area. There’s already been a lot of impact to the river because of levees and dams, and there could be more because we are having more flooding. If I build this dam, maybe it will stop the flooding today, but what will happen in 100 years? Who am I affecting generations later? 

RL: Adam, in your film I felt the habitat loss in progress. Something about seeing it in action felt more depressing, or maybe more urgent because it was happening right that minute in the film. Katy, in your film it was the moment after; the machines had gone, and you were looking at the aftermath.

AG: I think it’s also really banal. People were just doing their work and not overthinking it. It’s more violent in some ways because it’s not dramatic. 

RL: I want to ask about the different ways of making a film. Katy’s film had a clear narrative, and it felt very constructed to me. You flash forward and backward in time, and there is a shift in the color — the colors seem to get yellower with age, and the colors get more saturated in the current-day scenes. Adam, yours felt like a collection of vignettes, as if you too were a bird watcher, observing and stringing things together. How do you go about planning your films? When you have a collection, how do you figure out how to string them together? Did you know it would be in this format when you started the project? 

AG: I think my process is like gathering. I’ll plot a course for things I’m interested in looking at. If I’m lucky I’ll start to find some elements related to what I thought I wanted. I’ll also find things that I couldn’t have anticipated. This project started in 2018. I went back in 2019 and then the pandemic stopped it for almost two years when I couldn’t travel. As a result, I was able to constantly edit and reflect on what I had before going back to work on it more. It snowballs and then I try to figure out the structure. A lot of my filmwork does function like that where I collect a lot and start to put things together to see if they make sense. It is intuition mixed with chance mixed with really specific things that I want to try. I want to show my perspective — these are the things that I’m seeing and the people I’m talking to. 

RL: When you’re collecting, how intentional are you about seeking out something to collect? Things like riding along with the border patrol or joining the bird-watching groups — how did you find your way in? 

AG: By writing a lot of emails to people, looking on forums, and finding conservationists who are working at the wildlife refuges down there. I met a couple of conservationists who were all involved with the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, and a lot of conservationists tend to be bird watchers. A lot of bird watchers tend to know conservationists, so it was a meandering path. I think it is just trying to be open. I’m a pretty shy person so the film is very observational, but the voices of the people I spent time with were woven in and out of the project. There are some people I talked to and their voices aren’t in the project at all, but those conversations influenced the places I was going or the things I was looking for. 

RL: Katy, how did you come to the narrative in your film? 

KM: Originally it evolved from having a lot of conversations with people about the river, and then wishing that the river could speak for itself, for the river to just chat with me. That tends to be the impulse in a lot of my films, wishing someone who is dead or something who is not human can communicate with me. There were a lot of drafts where the river was talking, but they were very didactic. I think Adam is incredibly good at showing you a whole world full of conflicting beliefs and land use issues in an image, and I tend to be more word-forward. Eventually, I cut out a lot of the words. I realized the river could speak for itself by just showing the river more. It’s kind of technical but figuring out where to put the camera in some of my initial shoots helped me realize that if I got closer I might be able to feel the river more deeply. 

RL: That is a nice lead into my last question for you, which is about looking. Both of you have many shots that linger on slow moments, like the spider slowly weaving its circular web in Magic Valley, and Katy, in yours, the water rushing past the paddles. How do you find where to look, and how do you know how long to look? 

AG: I think Katy just said something that relates to this that I want to respond to. Katy is very word-forward, but then the final version is very, very stripped back from what she wrote. I think the moments of lingering and looking at things become stand-ins for how you experience memory in the work. I think there’s a lot of stillness that happens, with this girl who is exploring. You realize the things she is 

exploring might be the things the old woman might be recalling as we’re moving through the story. I think that my work also deals a lot with memory, and inevitably when I think about memory I think about time. The spider is a really good example for me; the longer I look at something, the more meaning it might take on. I’m really trying in this project to let everything linger and get people on board with the way I’m looking at things, which is to not cut away four seconds after but to really watch it go. I think some people can connect with that slowness. I was really focused on what it would look like to not rush through. 

KM: We talk a lot about boring or not boring. I think that in these longer shots, there’s a respect for the space, a different kind of story that can emerge. I’ve watched drafts of Adam’s film with my college students and they are challenged by it, but we also end up having a conversation about looking and attention. In the longer shots, I think your brain does very interesting things; in the spider scene, or the scene where you’re following a bird, there’s a way of meandering. You’re letting the river speak and it doesn’t need a lot of edification. It needs a minute to talk. 

I thought about that a lot in filming my project. I went back alone and shot a lot of B roll which is where I think interesting things happen. Suddenly you’re in a more pared-down shooting environment, you’re with the camera, you’re doing a lot of looking. I’m the director normally, but when I went back alone I was actually holding the camera and getting down low to look at cypress roots in the water. I think you have to be slow looking and then the shots do interesting things. 

AG: When you have to get down to the ground or you have to stare durationally at something waiting for something to happen, I think you take on something of that space. It sounds kind of mystical. Katy and I talked a lot about when she was going to go back and shoot more. I feel like it was a good experience for you to be there as a solitary person and take it in a different way. That’s the proximity in film that I really felt when I was working on mine because it was largely solo. 

RL: Are you planning on working more with these Texas rivers or do you have any plans for the works to be screened in Texas soon? 

KM: I’m currently working on a proposal to show Adam’s film at a space in San Antonio and another space in Austin, Texas in spring 2025. 

AG: I’m invested in the idea of putting out a film about something super loaded that takes a quiet approach to how you can experience it. I’m on the fence about whether or not I’m still working on this project, but there are a couple of things left that I think would complete it. So it’s possible there will be a little bit more.