In the 1960s, a sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, and a surgeon, Robert Stoller, led a clinic for the study of gender at the University of California, Los Angeles. The clinic performed some of the first gender confirmation surgeries that were available to intersex or transgender people in the United States, and as part of the team’s medical research, Garfinkel interviewed the patients. The documentary “Framing Agnes” uses these patient interviews to reflect upon the history of transgender people.
The director Chase Joynt reimagines Garfinkel’s interviews as black-and-white talk show segments, recruiting transgender actors to perform scenes from the archived transcripts. The rest of the film consists of colorful talking-head interviews with the actors, as well as researchers who have studied the archives in the present day. Of particular interest to Joynt is the story of Agnes (played in re-enactments by Zackary Drucker), a transgender woman who initially presented herself as intersex to the medical staff at U.C.L.A.
to receive gender-confirming medical care. But Joynt also stages re-enactments of interviews with transgender men and teenagers, and even enlists Angelica Ross (“Pose”) to perform as Georgia, a Black transgender woman who described her struggles with racial and gender discrimination to the clinic. Joynt’s scope as a researcher is admirably broad, but what his film lacks is a sense of purpose as a work of cinema.
The re-enactments are staged in a perfunctory, static way, despite brief standout performances from Ross and Jen Richards, as a transgender woman who found a community of women like her in the 1950s. More frustrating is that Joynt’s interviews lack insight. The documentary reminds its audience that it’s
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Transgender
Angelica Ross
Jen Richards
Zackary Drucker