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In theory I'm interested in almost everyone. I simply don't have enough time to see nearly as much as I would like to. A lot of what I do see is discouraging because it's silly.
There's a fashion right now for work that is allegedly 'transgressive,' which is supposed to be liberating, but it's really middle-class adolescent petulance, art as an arena for revenge against parents. This is okay in kindergarten, but doesn't do much good elsewhere. A lot of work I see seems to revel in pathology, which isn't especially useful either. Monumentalizing alienation and personal misery and grievance is a waste of everyone's time. There's also a lot of 'clever' work from victims of art schools, which is depressing indeed. I do see good things from time to time, but as I've said, getting to see them more than once is a major effort.
The absolute best thing I've seen recently and certainly the most avant-garde was a lightning storm over southern New Jersey. It was so spectacular and sophisticated and surely one of the all-time great movies. It was incredibly powerful and intricate and intelligent and terrifying. It blasted us awake at two
A.M.
, and we watched it through the black frame of the back door: vivid, intense, electric presentation of every last single detail of each bush, tree, leaf of grass. Vibrating out of absolute blackness in blinding, blue-white light, figure and ground switching places several times a second. Violent dimensional collisions, macroscopic magnification of the smallest things. Then everything vanishing into blackness so intense that the after-images were almost as strong as the original. And sound! Earth-shattering contrapuntal booms and blasts of such power I was sure the house would be blown away. I wish I could begin to describe it. It was wonderful, and as avant-garde as it gets. We were enchanted.
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Anne Robertson
I first became interested in Anne Robertson because of her unusual relationship to her films. At the time when her
was shown, complete, at the American Museum of the Moving Image in 1988, it was over forty hours long, and was shown in a room that Robertson had decorated with childhood artifacts. The extended screening invited viewers out of their lives and prearranged schedules and into hers. Robertson's use of three sources of sound during the screeningsound-on-film, sound-on-tape, and in-person commentaryconfirmed the viewer's immersion in Robertson's experience. That the diary reels were often startlingly beautiful was an unexpected surprise.
As this is written in July 1990, the film continues to grow, though some reels have recently been censored by Robertson (see her comments in the interview). The diary is essentially every film she's made: even films listed under separate titles in her filmography
(1983), for exampleare sometimes included in presentations of the diary. As I've grown more familiar with Robertson's work (to date, I've seen about eight hours of the diary), I've come to understand that the relationship of this filmmaker's life and work is even more unusual than I had guessed. For Robertson, whose manic- depressiveness has resulted in frequent hospitalizations, making and showing the diary has become a central means for maintaining psychic balance, her primary activity whenever she is free of the mental hospital and free enough of drug therapy to be able to produce imagery.
Robertson's
can be experienced in a variety of ways. She most likes to present it as a 'marathon': complete and as continuous as
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possible. But in recent years, she has also begun to fashion shorter programs (the most recent I've attended was four hours long). The scheduled show date has become a means for sampling from the diary. If Robertson schedules a show for April 25, for example, she may show all the reels that were shot during April: viewers are able to see the development (or lack of it) in her life from year to year. In general, we see Robertson simultaneously from the outside (within her recorded imagery and sound, and usually as the in-person narrator) and from the inside, as she expresses her moments of clarity and delusion in her handling of the camera and her juxtapositions of sound and image.
While my original interest in Robertson was a function of the fascinating and troubling interplay between her filmmaking and her illness, my decision to interview her was determined both by the compelling nature of her presentation (particularly her courage in submitting her films and herself to public audiences) and by her frequently breathtaking imagery. The single-framing of her activities in her tiny Boston apartment in early reelsshe flutters around the rooms and through the weeks like a frenzied mothand her precise meditations on her physical environment make her
intermittently one of the most visually impressive Super-8 films I've seen. And the way in which she enacts contemporary compulsions about the correct appearance of the body (her weighing and measuring herself, nude, is a motif) and about the importance of meeting 'the right guy' provide a poignant instance of those contemporary gender patterns so problematic for many women. Robertson's
along with films by Su Friedrich, Diana Barrie, Michelle Fleming, Ann Marie Fleming, and othershas re- personalized many of the issues raised by the feminist writers and filmmakers of the seventies.
I talked with Robertson in April 1990.
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You remind me of a line in Jonas Mekas's
: 'I make home moviestherefore I live.' For Mekas, the ongoing documentation of his life is very important. But as important as his filmmaking is to him, I think the line is metaphoric, rather than literal: Mekas has a busy organizational life, as well as a filmmaking life. His statement seems more applicable to you. When you're not able to make films, your life seems in crisis. Could you talk about the relationship between your films and your life?
