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love is kicking breadsticks across the table and reading the definition of 'fat' from a 1936 dictionary.'
I've got notes in my film log for the first two hundred rolls of my film. I've got starting and stopping dates, right down to the minute I took a picture. I know Allen Ginsberg dates his diaries down to the minute. I thought that would be a good thing to do, so that later I could prove synchrony with somebody who was willing to keep a notebook with
and make jottings of images or the thoughts that come unbidden and you have no way of tying them to anything.
Tom Baker was born in 1934. Tom Baker has two hundred dictionaries. If I can predict my father's death, I might as well believe I've predicted that there's this guy who is interested in me, who happens to have a collection of dictionaries. The whole diary started when I became fascinated with this old dictionary and its crazy definitions.
Sometimes I think I'm going to go back and reinsert the naked parts back into my diary, but I have a feeling probably I won't. I kept them all on reels. Supposedly, they're in order. Some reels got so mishmashed by my paranoia last fall, I could never put them back in order again.
When I started the film, I thought I'd lose weight; and the second thing I thought was that I'd try to tell a story, as my father told me to; and the third thing I thought was that the film would be a trousseau; and the fourth thing was my realizing that my children would be watching.
One of the things that struck me last night when you showed sections of the diary at Utica College (I don't remember this so much from when I saw the film at the Museum of the Moving Image; I guess it depends on which sections you're showing) was your startling openness about your hospitalization.
Well, I've got to be! Otherwise, as Kate Millett says, you're a 'ghost in the closet.'
Is the history of your being institutionalized simultaneous with your making of the diary? How do
see the two things relating?
Well, I think Mekas's comment, 'I make home moviestherefore I live,'
really apt for me. You see, I didn't have any way of explaining why I was into bingeing, but I knew the bingeing was going to go at the beginning of the film. The film had a theme. The theme was I wanted to lose weight, because I didn't want to die like my father had. Yet, I couldn't explain why I had gotten into overeating, eating literally until I got sick, until I had to lie down because it was too painful to stand up.
You said last night that you had never been a bulimic, that you never purged.
No, that's true. I wouldn't do that. But there's such a
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thing as making eight dozen cookies and eating four dozen and then just feeling sick. This was after a whole day of being so very, very careful with food. The mental hospitalizations that had happened to me by 1981I had been hospitalized three timeshappened every fall. For three months each year, I was in a mental hospital. Mostly, I'd fight the drugs they gave me, but I would have to give in eventually because they'd say they'd take me to court: they'd inject me.
I had no way of explaining why I had breakdowns. It was another inexplicable thing in my life. When I was a kid growing up, I never thought I'd be having delusions, and be hospitalized. In 1981 I started the diary, and in 1981 I didn't have a breakdown. I think it might be because I was going to film school: I had somewhere to go, I had a camera to borrow. I made several other short films the fall of 1981 and then began the diary.
One short film was called
[1981]. It shows me against a blue wall, screaming and exhibiting the side effects of medication I had observed in the hospitals. The first real breakdown that I got on film was in 1982. I showed my delusions. I showed that I was afraid that root vegetables suffered, so I was going to take them back to the garden and replant them. You can see me getting on my big rain slicker and getting out the beets and carrots and onions and preparing to take them back, making sign language in front of the camera.
In fact, that first breakdown occurred shortly after a person at school threatened he'd call the cops and take the camera away from me. Losing that camera, I lost my mind. Every time there's a breakdown, I try to take pictures of it. My problem with a film diary (and with a written diary) is that sometimes I become so paranoid and obnoxious. Voices in my head become so frightening, and I cannot bring myself to document them. It's just too terrifying.
I believe in film being necessary every day. Monet did his haystacks and I have done the gazebo in the backyard. This winter I was so depressed, after getting out of the hospital and being put under a whole lot of restrictions, I was taking pictures every day of the gazebo in all kinds of weather. In fact, just this last week I stopped.
So for a while in the diary there are pictures of the gazebo, and of Tom Baker on
. Daylight is the gazebo, where I'd hoped to get married someday (I've discarded that notion since I think a justice of the peace is just about as good). Evening is
.
Anyway, I had so much trouble from my paranoia of the people across the pondthe neighbors. My problem is that a lot of my paranoia is warranted. I can't say the voices in my head are warranted, but I'm
