and also in
[1956] and
(1956) where one striped design passes over another to create an optical effect that reminds me of Vasarely.
My earliest paintings in Paris were influenced by early Vasarelynot by what got to be called 'op art,' but by his earlier paintings, which were very simple and much less systematic than the later op works. By the time I was making films, I wasn't interested in Vasarely, though maybe there's some residue.
The movement show at Denise Rene Gallery opened in 1955. And to go along with it, Pontus Hulten was supposed to organize a film show. He's an art historian and until recently was the director of the Beauborg Art Museum in Paris. He did the Machine show at MoMA [The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 1968]. Pontus got sick, and I picked up the pieces a little bit and helped him. We were drinking buddies in Paris. He was a collaborator on my Pope Pius film [
], and he used my camera to make an abstract film called
. He also made
[1956], a Dada-surrealist film that ends with a fire engine burning. Anyhow, the two of us made a document of Denise
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Rene's movement show. Denise bought a couple rolls of film for us, and we used my camera. Later I did the editing. That show was the first time Vasarely showed those grids that would swing in front of one another. Maybe that was the first gallery show of exclusively kinetic art, although, of course, Denise was preceded in general by the futurists. But after the war, kineticism was one of the things she picked up on. [Jean] Tinguely was incorporated into her gallery after his first show.
On a visit home in 195152, I went to an art supply store in downtown Detroit and saw this device'Slidecraft' I think it was called. You could rent a projector and buy a bunch of frosted three-by-three-inch slides and draw on them. I made sequences and projected them singly onto a screen, and then filmed them off the screen, one at a time. That's how I made
. Strange way to work, but I didn't know about using an animation stand yet. In some ways though, by seeing my images projected on a screen before they were shot, I could better visualize the end result. I still have a flipbook made up of those slides bolted together in sequence.
Did film grab you right away?
By the time of
I was enthusiastic. But at first I was scared of the camera. I had an aversion to photography, partly, I suppose, because of my father's enthusiasm for it. The only big fight I ever had with him was over his taking pictures of me, and of stopping things to take pictures of the family. He came to visit me in Europe, and we'd go to a restaurant, and he'd stand on the next table and take pictures. It was embarrassing. It seemed to me then that he photographed everything before he reacted and could only react
he'd developed his pictures. That was counter to my feeling of how life should be experienced. I didn't like the idea of the lens between me and what I was looking at. I wouldn't even wear sunglasses. It's a wonder I ever got into film.
From what you say, I assume that the history of film was not particularly interesting to you. Film simply became a way of doing things with painting that you couldn't do on a still canvas. And the filmmakers whose work seems related to your early films tend to have come to film for the same reason. Fischinger, for example.
In a way, I suppose that's true, but somebody I always mention as having a powerful influence on me was Jean Vigo, who didn't make animated abstract films. His spirit of free association in
[1930], for instance, and the kind of cutting he does there, moved me. And I liked
[1933], his anarchism, his humor, and his esprit. I could identify with him. I have an aversion to just purely abstract films. That's why I have trouble with Fischinger. I admire him in some ways and find him something of an abomination in others.
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I did bring to those early films all these post-Cubist notions of space. Making
I realized that whatever moves destroys everything else. You have to counter one movement with another. If you have one thing moving in an otherwise static field, the static field dies. You know the usual opening shot of a conventional film, the helicopter shot of a car going down a highway seen from aboveyou watch that car. It's a tiny dot on a huge screen, but you're glued to that one thing and everything else is peripheral. Once I was making films, I learned that I couldn't work with the stable kinds of relationships I'd worked with in my painting. I had to rethink things completely. And that's when I went for an all-over active screen and for real hectic films. Then I could play with the agitation itself in dosages, rather than try to think in terms of static compositions in which elements move.
Most of your films are not about particular topics. Was there a specific incident involving Pope Pius XII that caused you to do
It must have been inspired by something I saw, but I'll be damned if I know what. I had had this vision of
