Perhaps you could begin with how you got started making films.
I started the diary November 3, 1981, which, it turns out,
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is Saul Levine's birthday. Sort of a psychic tribute there. He was one of the people who encouraged me to continue making films. I started the diary about a month after I began sitting in on classes at the Massachusetts College of Art. I'd made eleven short films before that, the first in 1976.
When I began the diary, I bought five rolls of film. I thought I'd film myself, one scene every day, moving around my apartment. And I would go on a strict diet: I knew of a photographer in New York [Eleanor Antin] who had simply taken a still of herself nude every day while she was on a diet. I wanted to do that, but at first, I wanted to be clothed, I wore a leotard. Every day I'd do one more scene.
Five rolls of filmit wasn't enough. Sometime in late November, 1981, my father told me to tell a story. I didn't really have a story to tell, except to expand more on my day-to-day life inside my apartment. The whole film starts out with me carrying some grocery bags into the apartment and then emptying out a huge bag full of produce from my garden and from the co-op. Then I take off a black coat, hang it up, go into the living room, and get myself a dictionarya 1936 dictionary, which has fantastic definitions for the word 'fat.' In the thirties, 'fat' meant something good. It meant plump, pleasingthe best part of your work is a 'fat'' joband 'thin' had a lot of opprobrium attached: meager, of slender means.
Anyway, I started filming myself in this black coat over yellow leotardsI wore yellow because the
says that to wear a yellow undergarment brings good fortune. And yellow was the closest to flesh color I could get (yellow is also the color of fat). But instead of losing weight, I was gaining weight. I kept bingeing so I started taking more frames of that. Later, I filmed the actual makings of a binge, and street signs of food. It was all going to be about food. I didn't really have any goaljust to lose the weight.
I would do things like lay out the black clothing on the bed, a full suit, black pocketbook, black gloves, black coat, black dress, black stockings (this is after I had mended the black coat and put it awaybecause I was against wool: I was getting rid of animal products in my life, to become a vegannot just a vegetarian, but a vegan).
Well, my father died January 10, about two months after the film had begun, and well, that laying out of the black clothing went, 'Bong!' And, as if that wasn't enough, I'd just finished weaving a big yellow banner on a loom I had built myself. I had had it on the loom for ten years.
my father died. I felt like I'd predicted my father's death. And the reason he died was because he was a hundred pounds overweight when I was a kidat least a hundred pounds. He had a heart attack and strokes.
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After that, the film just sort of came. I started doing striptease, kicking breadsticks around on the kitchen table; I read
and started taking long strings of pictures of lights, because
says to stare into the bright light.
When you say 'pictures,' you mean single frames?
Frames, imagesjust a lot of pictures of lights, lights, lights, lights, lights, lights, lights in the city, lights outside. I used to have
as a soundtrack for the film, but I discarded it because, though the Tibetans say it's good for people who are alive to hear it, it has an amazing capacity for being used to hypnotize someone. Too many demons, also. I got into a lot of worry about future technologies and people resuscitating brains or keeping people in comas, making them think they're dead. When you die, if
true, you first see the white light and then the four bright-colored lights. I'm supposed to warn you: don't look at any of the soft lights.
I took a lot of pictures inside my studio and gradually started taking pictures more and more of people, of my family, of day-to-day life. Sometimes I'd introduce the film by saying, 'It's true, so, it's a trousseau': it's the only gift I have for the guy who will come along and be my partner and say, 'What have you been doing with the rest of your life?'
Eventually, I just sort of discarded the costume, and filmed myself naked. Last fall, I got very paranoid, and I cut out a lot of the naked parts. A lot of pans down my body were cut out. I left all the shots that were at a distance, but I cut out a lot of the ones that I felt really looked seductive. I wanted to take all that seductiveness out of the film, but I discovered you couldn't really do that. You take a picture of a naked body: it's seductive. But I did take out some of the best scenes, several hours of film. Eventually it went from being ninety reels last fall to about eighty-two. I took out nakedness and irreligious statements. I felt I couldn't leave them in anymore (my films of myself naked
[1987], et ceteraare available only for shows with small, trusted audiences and at legitimate artistic venues).
I also took out a certain amount of obscurity, although I did want to leave as much obscurity as possible, because I am hoping that there is a man in the world (whether he's a video or film artist I kind of doubt; I think he's more likely someone like this actor, Tom Baker [Baker played Dr. Who on
], I'm interested in)someone who has a burning desire to study parapsychology, and who's in synchrony with me. For several years I kept a dream diary and I would write down in my diaries all the dreams I had. I'm looking for someone who has done the same thing with random thoughts, poems, images that have come to minddream images.
might have written a poem that said, 'My
