My films are rented fairly often, seemingly more as time passes. I have a certain following, and I certainly don't feel 'ignored.' I don't know if I would continue to make films if they were never seen by anyone; that's too problematic. I'm interested in echos, I like to get energy back in exchange for the energy I send out; in fact, it's a necessity.
The situation is very frustrating, to the point of despair sometimes, but then it always has been, going back twenty years or so. The audience for the kind of films we're talking about here is larger than it ever was, and there are more places for the films to be seen and more outlets for scholarly writing about the films than at any point I can remember. But still you can spend years working on a film, putting your lifeblood and best mind into it, and then when it's released, you are very fortunate if it's seen by a total of two thousand people. After it's made the circuit of the places that show this kind of work, it can sit unseen for years, no matter how well-received it was. My films are complex and intricate; there's no way they can be completely understood in a single viewing, and this is true of many films, many filmmakers. I can't count the number of times I've seen interesting work, knowing at the time that I would very likely never see it again.
The obvious answer is high quality, inexpensive copies, like books,
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records, and tapes, so that thousands of copies of a given work can be in circulation at any one time and can be found by their true audience. But this will never happen with film; the economics are against it.
When I showed
at Utica College this past spring, Pat [MacDonald's wife, Patricia O'Connor] leaned over to me at one point and said, 'He must love magic.' It struck me as an astute comment; in a sense you're in the Georges Melies tradition; for you the camera is the magician's top hat.
True in the sense that everything in that film was done in the camera at the moment of shooting. That's always been a point of pride with me, it's true of all my films. No optical printers or special processes. All invention in the moment of shooting itself. I stress this so that you'll fully appreciate my virtuosityand my humility.
is a magic trick, prestidigitatious resurrection of the dead, animation of the inert. That's the metaphorical nexus of the entire film. We all love magic, at least as children. That's basic good health.
I once spent some time studying occult matters, but in the end all of that just gets in your way. It's a trap like any other systematized way of thinking.
I still get a great deal of pleasure from alchemical thought and imagery. There's some wonderful cinematic poetry there and also some very sound, commonsensical advice about how to live.
I always liked this quote from 'The Exposition of the Typical Figures':
As the first substance of your work, seek the Water of Life that flows beside the Tree, and keep its counsel, and the counsel of the Wind and counsel of the Earth and counsel of the Sun. For while you anxiously look about in out-of-the-way places and long for extraordinary events to come to you, while you are desirous of witches brews and love potions and instant cures, you pass by the clear motions of the Blessed Stream. While you gather in groups to see unprecedented lights and colors in the nighttime sky, and while you await incredible assignations of power on earthly lands . . . the Stone of Heaven lies directly at your feet . . . it is that upon which you stand.
has a very different mood from your earlier films. In fact, the clarity of its mood helped me see that, while many of your visual concerns may have remained consistent since
and
each film feels the way it does because of your overall mental state during the period when you were shooting.
showed me that the films are more personally expressionistic than I had realized. Specifically,
seems a very happy film; you seem happy as a filmmaker, as a family man, as husband and father; a certain psychological darkness seems to have lifted. I have
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Successive frames
from Noren's
(1987).
