of
. And John ClareI picked up a ragged old copy of his poems in a London bookstall for fifty cents. No one had ever heard of him over here. I admired them both for their incredible openness. Neither of them was a very good poet technically, and both were as mad as March hares, but they both got the full lethal high-voltage jolt of life straight, without protection or defense, the undiluted juice right from the source. And it killed them both, of course, but for their few luminous moments they got it right, as Blake did. Smart was incarcerated for stopping people on the street and asking them to join him in kneeling on the pavement to thank God for the miraculous beauties of the world.
Anyway, I was a kid and aspired to such openness, and I had all the things I loved around me in those ghost rooms, now gone. Ghost-woman and ghost-light, and my familiars, ghost-dog and ghost-cat, beauteous apparencies, and I tried to catch them, with my little shadow catcher, to stop their vanishing, but they vanished anyway.
In terms of technique, you seem to be exploring new areas in these films. Was this your first use of single framing?
I think so. After a period of very long takes, I got interested in the possibility of twenty-four different images in a projected second, working with the individual frame as the basic unit.
There were a few people working in single frames then, but for the most part they all seemed to be trying to force techniques from other art forms onto film, which never seemed to work too well, that is, each frame as a word or syllable, or each frame as a musical note or a brush stroke, trying for a synthesis that was never really possible. I was interested in using single framing to convey kinetic energy. If it's done right, it can evoke states of high energy in the mind. Also, for me it's a much more accurate graphing of the flow of my own visual energy while shooting, more like a true picture of how I perceive. My seeing, at least while shooting, tends to operate in pulses and spurts of intensity, where thought and feeling and raw perceptual material coalesce and come into focus for distinct instants. Single framing is very attractive for that reason. I've refined my use of that technique over the years, and I think it came to real fruition in
and
and I'm working with it now in other ways.
The long, Lumierelike stare brings the mind to an attention of unnatural duration and intensity . . . an altered state, and that's the source of its power. With single framing, the constant interruption of focused attention forces you to a kind of heightened perception because the mind is racing to absorb a great deal of information very quickly; the
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power here is constant surprise, which compels unusual alertness and the exhilaration that comes with that.
Most of us can't really deal with a situation where every frame is different. The mind tends to superimpose them, group them together into more manageable units for easier comprehension, so that individual frames aren't really seen individually. A two-frame image has a much better chance of standing on its own, and three- and four- frame images are workable, practical units; almost anyone can perceive them.
How widely was
seen? Were there extreme reactions? Were screenings shut down?
It was shown a great deal and was considered very scandalous, although that was never my intention. Things were still incredibly repressive then. People who didn't live through it can't really imagine how much so.
and Henry Miller's books were still going through the courts, and I routinely had material seized by the labs. I remember once going to pick up some material at a lab and being told by the manager that they had destroyed it. I was outraged, but curious too, and asked him what they had done with it. It turned out that they had dropped the rolls in boiling water!
I think it was in 1967 that I showed the film at Notre Dame, of all places, at a conference on eroticism in the arts. The administration told the students not to show the film, so of course they immediately set up a secret screening in an out-of-the-way classroom. At least three quarters of the student body showed up and tried to squeeze into the room. About five minutes into the film, the police broke the door open and tried to seize the print. Some students got hold of it first and took off, police in pursuit, waving night sticks and mace cans. Meanwhile the print had come loose and was unreeling all over the campus as they ran with it. Finally, the police cornered them. Wild punches, bloody heads, girl's screaming, film flyinga living defense of the Constitution. The print was literally ripped to piecesthe body of Dionysus. That was an extreme case, but there were several other incidents in the heartland. In New York things were more civilized. A well-placed twenty-dollar bill assured your right to free expression.
It has been years since I saw
and
the next two sections of
and I confess I remember very little. You've told me that the films are out of distribution, being reworked. Recently, I heard that your reworking them has to do with the demand of the women filmed not to be seen in the films.
that the issue? Also, according to your filmography,
was reworked in 1977. How was it reworked? And why?
I can't imagine why anyone would say that to you. No one I've
