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Far Out Magazine, 2024
You’ve heard of Greta Gerwig, Kelly Reichardt and Julia Ducournau. You probably watched The Virgin Suicides, Cleo from 5 to 7 and Girlfriends, indulged in the dreamy sound-scape of Air, lamented over faded friendships and yearned for the freedom of being both seen and unseen.
But if I told you about one filmmaker who influenced all of these women, who would you guess? Because (perhaps unsurprisingly) the answer is someone you’ve most likely never heard of – the trail-blazing voice of riot girl cinema and unapologetic honesty, Sarah Jacobson.
Jacobson crept onto the independent filmmaking scene in 1993 with her explosive short I Was A Teenage Serial Killer, a no-budget film about a high schooler who goes on a quest to kill “all the sexist pigs”, 19 in total, one for each year she’s been alive.The film is subversive and gloriously provocative, with a social commentary that was completely ahead of its time, displaying a kind of progressiveness that you rarely see even today. If it was made now, it would fry the brain of anyone working at Fox News, provoke your grandparents to monologue at Christmas dinner about the “snowflakes of today”, and cause people on the internet to complain about the death of femininity because the main character has a nose piercing.
This is all to say, I haven’t seen the likes of it since, with Jacobson pioneering a style of guerrilla filmmaking that perfectly encapsulates the angst and frustration of a world that was not kind to women, using her voice to articulate issues that people were too afraid to talk about, and doing so in a way that was so real and unconcerned with offending the wrong audience, because it was confident in its voice and that it would reach the right audience.
Jacobson then went on to make her feature debut, Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore,about a high schooler who tries to get in touch with her sexuality while working at a run-down movie theatre before going to college. The sexual coming-of-age genre is something typically reserved for male audiences, with films like American Pie, Superbad and Sixteen Candles showing a plethora of teenage boys in their (often quite problematic) pursuit of sex. However, there are few stories that show younger women with sexual agency, but Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore was groundbreaking in the grace and freedom it offered to the heroine in her search for true intimacy and sexual pleasure, with an open dialogue between the female characters about typically taboo subjects.
The low-budget nature of the production only heightens the grungy, underground feeling of the film, with a gritty visual style and scrappy soundtrack that add to the organic feeling of the story. Each frame exudes warmth and passion, with a down-to-earth intimacy that adds to the simultaneous strength and fragility of the project—something that was born from the struggle but found its strength in the fact that it exists despite this.
The film was fairly controversial, with many distribution companies refusing to share it and trying to kick the project into oblivion, too perturbed by its frank honesty and heartfelt rebellion. At the same time Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore was struggling to find distribution, Larry Clark’s Kids was shared with audiences worldwide, with people praising it for its gritty portrayal of the sex lives of teenagers despite the fact that it didn’t depict a single legal or consensual sexual encounter, with all the girls being coerced into intimacy. It’s interesting what the wider public deems as being “revolutionary”, as to me, what would’ve been truly groundbreaking is a film like Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore. But alas, it was too much for people to handle.
Jacobson tragically passed away in 2004 at the age of 33 from endometrial cancer. She was described by critics such as Roger Ebert as a key voice within the underground filmmaking movement, later working with auteurs such as Miranda July to advocate for women in the arts. When talking about Jacobson, her friend Jake Fogelnest said, “Here was a woman who made films in the ’90s, who was screaming about that stuff in her work and in her life before it became a fashion accessory button at a Hollywood awards ceremony.”
Jacobson had a bold and unflinching voice that disappeared before being fully explored or heard, and who knows what kind of films she would be making if she were still alive today. However, the raw authenticity and warmth of her work still ring true today, an ode to the fearless optimism of our youth and a heartfelt calling card to a new and liberated world, a world that has been shaped by her bold and undaunted cinematic voice, pathing the way for a new future.