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a feeling that this is just the sort of thing you don't like to discuss, but is this how the film seems to you?
Perhaps, although it's a little more complicated than that. But in general you're right, and you're right that I don't like to talk about it.
I began the film just after my marriage to Rise, which was extreme good fortune for me, for many, many reasons. It was made in a period of intense hard work, apart from work on the film, in which we tried to make a home. I was able to reprioritize things and to gather and focus my energies in a way I hadn't been able to before. It brought about a kind of very practical, utilitarian down-home 'enlightenment.' I don't really care to say more.
also refers directly to your work as an archivist and researcher, in the found-footage passages. Could you talk about your work at Sherman Grinberg?
I work with news images daily, both modern material and material going back to the twenties and earlier, and that's how I came upon those shots. They were all originally shot on nitrate film and were in the process of decay when I found them, quite literally turning to dust, as nitrate does, so it wasn't really a question of appropriation but of rescue. I saved what I could of them and transferred them to safety finegrain. I found them very resonant and beautiful in themselves, and so I employed them, as though they were actors under my direction, frequently portraying me or acting as stand-ins for me. In their original commercial usage some fifty years ago, they were projected maybe twice at most. Some of them were never used at all and buried in the vaults and left to rot. So I was glad to be able to recirculate them, put them back into the light again.
I've worked as an archivist for a long time. My expertise is in knowledge of news, the ability to know about and locate very specific news images on request, very quickly and efficiently under intense pressure. And I'm extremely good at it. I also deal in the licensing of this material and in rights and clearances. I work on all kinds of projects: documentaries, features, television commercials, music videos, industrials, you name it. The stock in trade is war, murder, death, destruction, grief and weeping, disaster and degradation, greed, starvation, intense suffering, horrible human activities, crazed apes mad with blood lust! In short, news. Have you ever wondered why the news you get from TV and newspapers is all bad? Have I got news for you: there is no good news, none. The news is bad.
One aspect of the job is dealing with raw news material from the field, which is very interesting indeed. What you see on the evening news, compared to the raw material, is a very carefully constructed entertainment, disguised as reportage. This has always been true of
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news. The raw material is the real thing, and it is frequently horrifying. If you were appalled by the aired reports of the Valdez oil spill, or the Ethiopia famine, for example, wait until you see the field tapes. It was a hundred times worse than the media would have you believe. Working with this kind of material on a daily basis can have a profound effect on a person. It's an education of a very special kind, and in its way a very expensive one. It's not something you can buy at the Harvard Business School.
I also work regularly with a certain government agency that uses news material to make informational presentations to the president of the United States. I hope you're duly impressed.
The particular archival imagery in
the dogs diving into the water and later 'undiving'; the man who is put into the block of ice at the beginning and removed at the end; the boy and dog in bed; the X-ray material; the imagery of the laserseems to be used in a metaphoric way. The man going into and coming out of the block of ice is particularly suggestive, since it's a framing device for the film. I'm tempted to see it as a comment on your moving into and out of the filmmaking process; but I confess also to a more sentimental interpretation: that the warmth and happiness of
is a function of your coming out of a 'colder' period as person/filmmaker.
My use of those found images was metaphorical. There's a metaphorical progression from the first image to the last. This is something I rarely permit myself, although you can say that any film image is a metaphor, just by its very nature. Whatever else it is,
is a narrative, a carefully constructed one, the telling of a tale. Of course, every film is a narrative, isn't it, whatever other pretensions it might have, simply by virtue of the fact that one frame must follow another in time. Our minds are such that we are obliged to make a story out of everything we experience, obliged to frame things to make them comprehensible. We are constantly telling ourselves stories that allegedly interpret the play of light and shadow on the retina screen, and the play of imaginary light on the screen of the 'mind,' or 'the lighted field,' if you will. I think we probably became conscious in the first place by struggling to tell ourselves stories, to make meaning of the chaos of sensory input that afflicts us. 'Story' is the absolute basic essential of thinking. Our minds consist of a 'teller' and a 'listener.'' Consciousness is the mind communicating with itself about itself, telling itself the story of itself, story of past, future, now. We have to have 'story' to survive.
And our 'story' of consciousness is dream by definition. We live in a dream of waking, we dream that we're 'awake,' imagining past and future, telling ourselves elaborate stories about both. We flatter ourselves that we recognize a delusional present moment, not past or future
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but the reality of 'now.' But of course we no sooner apprehend this present moment than it is past. (I read somewhere that the average person thinks that the 'present' lasts for about three seconds.)
We invented cinema deliberately as a device to allow us to dream while waking, and to give us access to areas of the mind that were previously only available in sleep. It was no accident that the first filmmakers immediately seized on dream device and method as the first, essential film 'language,' as though the cinema was specifically invented for the objectification and articulation of those things.
