‘Vivien’s Wild Ride’ Is a Poignant Bay Area Time Capsule — With a Punch

The real art of film editing, Vivien Hillgrove tells us in her unexpected and beautiful first-person documentary Vivien’s Wild Ride, is conveying “the story under the story.” Yes, we should be hooked and held by the plot, the characters’ journey and dramatic events. But the essence of a film — its themes and emotional power — is expressed between the lines.

Vivien’s Wild Ride, the Bay Area native’s directorial debut after half a century editing sound and picture for a bevy of landmark local feature films and documentaries, has its world premiere on Friday, April 18 at the Premier Theatre in the Presidio and Saturday, April 19 at BAMPFA in Berkeley as part of SFFILM’s annual San Francisco International Film Festival.

Hillgrove’s initial idea was to write a book for the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption while in her teens in the early 1960s — a memoir of a now-forgotten conservative era for young women. That era abruptly ended (in San Francisco, at least) in splinters and cracks, with Hillgrove seizing the moment to discover and then reinvent herself, both as a lesbian (“a sort of criminal euphoria of freedom,” she describes it in Vivien’s Wild Ride) and as a largely self-taught sound and picture editor at the production and postproduction company Studio 16.

Although her métier has long been thinking in pictures, Hillgrove, 78, didn’t conceive of putting her story on film at first. Perhaps it’s her temperament; she’s a collaborator more than an initiator. Maybe it’s her core motivation to solve the puzzle or mystery of each movie project — “How does all this shit go together?” she puts it succinctly — rather than create one. But there’s another factor, too: the macular degeneration gradually taking her eyesight.

Hillgrove eventually came to embrace the notion of a film, inspired by dreams and random mental images. “I went to the Earle Baum Center of the Blind [in Santa Rosa, not far from where Hillgrove and wife Karen Brocco live],” she recounts in a phone interview, “and I saw this labyrinth and I just went, ‘Wowie zowie, what would this look like at night?’ It looks like the constellations.”

Vivien’s Wild Ride abounds with poetic shots and metaphorical compositions that invite the viewer to access “the story under the story.” Bay Area audiences, in particular, will take pleasure in Hillgrove’s deployment of the traditional elements of documentary filmmaking, such as family photographs, archival footage of San Francisco and clips from some of the famous films that Hillgrove edited (dialogue for producer Saul Zaentz’s Amadeus, picture for Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June, Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman).

First-person documentaries typically offer irresistible, confessional intimacy. At the same time, they run the risk of becoming self-indulgent or insular. Hillgrove’s formative years as a commercial editor working on everything from industrials (corporate films) to adult films (she cut Easy Come Easy Go and Frisco Fiasco under the pseudonym Lorraine Sprocket, a joke that plainly predates the digital age) trained her to put the viewer first.

“The audience was constantly on my mind” while making Vivien’s Wild Ride, she declares. “Because it’s always a conversation between a filmmaker and an audience.”

Hillgrove praises a particular approach of Academy Award-winning editor Walter Murch. “He takes a tiny little cutout of a person and puts it on the screen of his editing machine to constantly remind him that you are talking to somebody. You are sharing love and all those esoteric things that . . . you can’t tell people about, you have to allow them to feel.”

Even a non-connoisseur of film editing will appreciate the skill with which Hillgrove and co-editor Eric M. Ivey intertwine the narratives of her life. Techniques such as foreshadowing and flashbacks are used to transform what could be a clunky, episodic account into a fluid representation of the way we experience our lives as an amalgam of naiveté, pain, wisdom, love, memory and (if we’re lucky) reconciliation.

Amidst that flow, Vivien’s Wild Ride plays at points as an affectionate rear-view snapshot of the earthshaking ’70s and ’80s Bay Area narrative film scene, and as a harrowing chronicle of a vibrant Golden Ager adjusting to diminished vision. Crucially, Hillgrove explores another personal concern that lifts the film beyond familiar subjects into the complicated realm of adult adopted children.

“I wanted the film to follow what happened in terms of my awareness of what happened to Kathleen,” Hillgrove explains. “Most people expect it to be a happy ending — which it is in a way — but it goes through this really dark period that I did not find out about until she was in her 50s.”

Hillgrove’s father played piano, and she had requested (among other things) that the adoption agency place Kathleen with a musical family. The agency paid no attention to the wishes of the mother in those days, it seems. And the system failed Kathleen, too, we learn.

Come for the story of Vivien’s Wild Ride, but it’s the story under the story that makes the trip so rewarding.

The 68th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 17-27 in San Francisco and Berkeley. ‘Vivien’s Wild Ride’ screens Friday, April 18 at the Premier Theatre in San Francisco, and Saturday, April 19 at BAMPFA in Berkeley. Details here.