Picture this: a woman, Camille, enters a furniture store and sees a chair she really wants, but cannot afford. Overcome by inexplicable feelings of desire and obsession, she wishes aloud to become the chair … and does. This is how “By Design,” a body swap film where one of the bodies is a chair, begins—it’s the latest from alum director Amanda Kramer ‘02.
“It’s a classic body swap plot, in a sense,” Kramer said in an interview with The Beacon. “But just a middle finger to it, and an upside-down tonal fuckery of it.”
It’s also her first film to screen at Sundance, one of the biggest film festivals in the nation. On Jan. 23, “By Design” had its world premiere at the festival, marking a big milestone in her career.
“Sundance is a place that champions weirdos, then turns them potentially into non-weirdos, or well-paid weirdos,” Kramer said. “I don’t make films that I normally suspect would get into Sundance, but every once in a while, something strikes a chord with a different kind of audience.”
Kramer’s eclectic, genre-hopping films—as she labels them, “blender fuck genre movies”—use camp and pastiche to explore themes aligned with societal margins.
As a chair, Camille becomes the property of a jazz pianist, whose recent breakup leads him to be enamored with it. Meanwhile, the empty husk of Camille remains, but her friends, who spend their weekly lunches talking about themselves, don’t seem to notice. The fairytale mechanics at play—driven to their highest point of nonsense—articulate the universal emotion of being so unappreciated that you’d prefer to be a piece of furniture.
Her previous projects include 2018’s “Ladyworld,” about a group of girls stuck in a house during an earthquake who live out a “Lord of the Flies”-esque scenario, and 2022’s “Please Baby Please,” about a couple who, after witnessing a “West Side Story”-inspired murder, are drawn into a mystery plot that challenges their notions of heteronormativity.
“Imitation is an important way of processing and grasping at art,” Kramer said. “But there’s imitation that’s chic, then there’s imitation that’s dull. I’m not AI, so I can’t approximate things perfectly: It’s going to get mangled, and become a very punk manifestation of the thing.”
Kramer’s career is as varied as her style—she didn’t always intend to become a filmmaker. At Emerson, she pursued becoming a playwright and theater director, but when she moved to Los Angeles after college, she found the theater scene there lackluster.
By then it was the mid-2000s and house music was undergoing a revival. Kramer, who loved the genre when she was growing up, found some success producing lo-fi house music: she was part of a few bands and even toured for a bit, to which she attributes some of her fondest memories.
At Emerson, she had also spent a lot of time writing fiction, and wanted to write for publications like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. For various reasons, that plan never went through—though Kramer claims to have authored two young adult novels for HarperCollins, published under a pseudonym. These remain unknown to the public.
“I’ve always been like a bumblebee buzzing around art,” Kramer said. “I think it’s amazing to feel like you were meant to do something your whole life, but my life has never been that.”
After exploring various disciplines, she wanted to enter the world of filmmaking—she was in Los Angeles, after all. But because she never studied film at Emerson, she had no idea how to tap into that world. She attended meetups and approached people at parties, but had some trouble getting people on board despite her ideas.
“What really changed everything was that I started making things on my own,” Kramer said. “I took the entrepreneurial spirit to the next level: I decided if I can’t get people to pay for my work, I’ll save up some work and make short films by myself. And that was when people started to see my work and think, ‘Okay, maybe it’s worth investing in her.’”
Since those days, Kramer has carved a space for her campy, off-kilter, genre sensibilities, and her momentum hasn’t stopped since: “By Design” is her sixth feature film since 2018, and she’s currently working on a film about phreaking, an obsolete form of hacking in which people would mimic pay phone noises to get free calls. The cherry on top is Sundance, which Kramer is very appreciative of.
“Being an obscure artist is only chic for so long,” Kramer said. “Every once in a while you want to dovetail a little bit into the mainstream, and then you can zig and zag away. But it’s nice when you have an audience that’s bigger than just your cult following.”
Kramer’s work may be gaining greater recognition, but she misses the days of messing around and just being creative, too. One day she hopes to return to the theater, which was her original dream when she chose to be an artist.
“It’s such a precious and fragile time when you’re in school,” Kramer said. “Once you’re making things that need to make money, your mind is already on to another plane—I miss the purity, which was something I didn’t even know to be grateful for when I had it.”
