Means of Grace

Behind the Scenes

As a young woman reading Jung, Ann Conger thought of herself as "a modern woman in search of a soul." Like her mother, director J Clements' came to MEANS OF GRACE after a very personal search. The project had its beginnings following Ann Conger's death in 1984. Her daughter, then a fledgling film student, was inspired to make a film from her mother's diaries, but wisely decided to wait. "I'm so glad I didn't go through with it then," says Clements. "I made two films before MEANS OF GRACE, which provided time to develop my vision and filmmaking style, and the emotional maturity that was required for a project of such profound feelings."
In the early 1990s Clements began to apply for grants, but received little response. She started to shoot footage anyway, with a borrowed Bolex wind-up camera. By the early spring of 1993, she gave up. She had received only one grant, in the amount of $5,000 - not enough to make even a low-budget film.

"I went on with my life," Clements says, "prepared for my impending wedding, and felt deep sadness that the film was not to be." However, upon her return from her honeymoon, she discovered that she had received three more grants, and soon thereafter a production agreement with ITVS which allowed her to proceed with the project. Previously undiscovered writings by her mother surfaced unexpectedly the following year. Written while Ann Conger was a patient at Napa State Hospital, these writings had been used in a pioneering feminist scholarly study on so-called "madwives." They helped to deepen Clements vision of her mother's life.

Additionally, Clements herself became a mother. "Having a child really helped me to understand more completely my mother's predicament. Although it was very difficult for me to balance a new marriage, motherhood, and the making of this documentary, ultimately my personal situation was of great service to the project," says Clements.

Ann Conger's story illuminates the anguish of many ambitious women in a decade when to be different - to want to be more than a wife and mother - was to be an outcast. "In many cases, schizophrenia was a convenient diagnosis to rid society of nonconformist, `trouble-making' women," says Clements. "At other times it was a diagnosis based on very real psychotic reactions. In my mother's situation it was both. I think a lot of mothers of the 1950s didn't reveal their true selves. They hid their dreams to keep a peaceful household, and for the `sake of the children.' Until I read my mother's diaries and novel-in-progress I had no idea how strong her ambition was to write."

The larger question raised in MEANS OF GRACE is whether society continues to marginalize creative women, to urge them down a narrow path of conformity. Forty years after she was first hospitalized, Ann Conger's story still resonates. In the words of psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes, "Right at this moment, across the world, literally thousands of girls are being born with special gifts. The question has always been, and still is, will there be a culture to support them, to help them thrive in their own ways?"

In addition to home movies and historical newsreel footage, Clements uses dramatic re-enactments from Conger's diaries and fiction to dramatize her mother's life. Shot on location at the former Napa and Camarillo State Hospitals where Conger wrote much of her journals, the dramatizations create a disturbing authenticity. "MEANS OF GRACE is a moving evocation of the difficulties faced by housewives of the 1950s and 1960s, some of whose lives were irrevocably damaged by their diagnosis and hospitalization as 'madwives,'" wrote Dr. Carol Warren, author of Madwives: Schizophrenic Women in the 1950s.


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All photos courtesy of J Clements