if I'm going to say they come from me! When a person starts getting third-person stories, more hideous than they've ever heard be-
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fore, or ever read before, the psychiatric establishment says, 'You invented that,' and everybody else says, 'You thought of that.' Nobody, not even the psychiatrists, want to know how horrible the stories in your head are. I have never had a psychiatrist ask me, 'And what do the voices say to you?' No one has ever said, 'What do you mean by the insane monologue in your head?'' Nobody wants to know because they're too scared. They think that the person is insane and hears voices is making them up and is in some way as evil as the voices.
It's a real old thing. Instead of putting you in iron chains, they put you in drug chains. They've done a lot of drug pushing over the years. Speaking of drugs, another thing that's in the diary is the drugs I've chosen to use at timesa lot of pictures of alcohol, of cigarettes, of pot smoking, a few of cocaine, and the prescription drugs. I thought I'd focus on all the things I ever did that were wrong, and then I'd put them, one by one, into the films, along with the bingeing, and get perspective so I could shed bad habits.
So far every subject I come up withexcess apologies, thoughts about suicide (for three years, from 1976 to 1979, I heard voices saying, 'I want to kill myself'it was my voice) . . . every subject has been affected by being included in a film. I made a film about suicide [
1979] illustrating some of the ways I thought I'd kill myself, and literally edited it in about an hour and a half and screened it, and as I watched the film, the suicide voices stopped in my head and they haven't come back since.
Did that happen with bingeing, too?
Yeah, it happened with bingeing, when I made
which we watched last night. I was taking Polaroid pictures of myself with my mouth wide open, and closed but bulging like I had a lot of food in my mouth. I filmed all the objects going into my open mouthfood, fish, baubles of the rich . . . all kinds of things going into my mouth. And bingeing stopped being a major subject in my life soon after.
When you had the breakdown last year . . .
In September and then again in November.
Did it have to do with preparing for the show we had scheduled? Are there passages in the films that create problems for you when you watch them?
I can handle things once they're on film. But it's hard to know what I can have others see.
You're remarkably good with a Super-8 camera. I don't believe I've ever seen more beautiful Super-8 footage. Sometimes it's very subtle and precise. When you're looking through the camera, how fully are you thinking in terms of texture and color and framingwhat the image will look like?
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I'm trying to take a pretty picture, if that's what you mean.
I was surprised to hear you say that you shot for a long time before you even looked at the footage.
I still do! I don't look at it for at least a year! I just do assembly editing. Everything I take is in the film. The only alteration I've made is the taking out I've been doing lately, and I really regret that in a way. I thought that with the diary it would be great if
was included, if I left overexposed or underexposed film in. Then the guy who is in synchrony with me somewhere in the world would have plenty of room to put in
words. But lately I've been taking more and more out of the diary so that he has less and less space to put his own words over. Mostly I just take out anything that's not visually comprehensible, that's completely black or completely overexposed (thinking ahead to video transfer). Almost everything else stays in.
The idea of not looking at what I take is so that I always have a naive idea. I don't take a picture deliberately and then take another picture deliberately. I take pictures when I find something I really like. Recently I noticed that an image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, naked (I saw it on MTV), had gotten paired up with a picture of myself standing nude in front of my closet where my measurements and weight are printed on the side of the door. So there's probably subconscious memory and association involved with some of my images.
How much other avant-garde film have you seen?
I saw a fair amount when I was at Massachusetts College of Art, but I've gotten out of going to a lot of films. I've got to put going to see film back in my life. I'm trying to rebuild into my life things that I let go when I was really depressedlike reading.
I started reading last fall in order to counteract the boredom of the mental hospital. I read voraciously and I've been reading ever since, which is good, because about a year ago, and at times over the last few years, I've found it difficult sometimes even to read a newspaper. So I've been building reading back into my life.
