Who do you send those letters to?
I send them to the United Nations, to representatives, congressmen, governors. The first batch were sent to women representatives. I've sent them to show-business figures and music stars, Susan Sontaga whole bunch of people. I've sent them to the president of the United Statesthat was probably my biggest mistake. Mostly, they're just sort of your all-purpose liberal-green-politics letters.
How many times have you shown the whole diary?
I've only done the marathon three times: at the Massachusetts College of Art as my thesis, at Event Works in Boston, and in New York at the American Museum of the Moving Image. I'd like to do it a lot more.
Last night was the third or fourth time I've done a sample show, using a cross section of time, sampling from reels that cover the same time period each year.
That's an interesting way to show it.
Yeah, it is, except this spring show I did last night was really full of breakdowns. Actually, probably the whole film is! I don't know how many people have documented breakdowns. I understand Carolee [Schneemann] did.
In
[1971] she documents a breakdown. Can your films be rented anyplace but from you?
I don't have any copies. I don't make prints of any of my films.
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You're showing originals all the time?
I'm showing originals. Every time I see a scratch, I wonder if it's a new one. I can't afford to make prints. It's cost me twenty-four thousand dollars to make the diary so far. I don't have twenty-four thousand dollars to make a print of the whole thing. No way! I don't make prints of the shorter films either. All I can afford is originals.
Have you applied for grants?
Well, I'm planning to do that, retroactivelyto do a video transfer. The problem is you have to make a copy to show people in order to make money to make copies! It's possible that if I made video copies, I could get the money afterward to cover the cost of the video copy, and film prints.
I've applied for grants. I was a semifinalist once. But they don't really want a diary of a mad woman.
Well, this is a very beautiful diary of a mad woman. Of course, New England has a long history of quirky women artists: Emily Dickinson . . .
Oh yeah! I read all of her poems last spring. She wrote 1,775 poems in her lifetime and put them in little books and put them in a box. I read somewhere that she asked to have them burned when she died. They didn't do it, and they didn't do it to Kafka's things either. I've thought sometimes of killing myself. But it's interesting, I've got myself trapped now. I
commit suicide. I have all my written diaries, which fill about four fruit crates, and ninety reels of film, plus a box of edited-out stuff, and several boxes of audio tapes. How could I possibly jump off a boat with all that? It's too heavy to carry! Then I thought maybe I could just jump with the edited-out stuff. But then my family would be confronted. They would come upstairs and see all this film. It would be the most depressing thing in their lives because there would be all these home movies of the family growing up that they'd never be able to touch again because they'd be too melancholy to rent a projector. I've saddled myself with something, in effect, that prevents me from committing suicide. So it's another way of saying that the film has kept me alive.
I was thinking the other day that the diary is sort of like your skin.
You were thinking that about my film?!
The celluloid is like an outer skin.
There was a lot of skin in it! This last spring [1990], when I edited some of the nude material out, I discovered I'd accomplished one of my goals, which was to look at myself naked and like myself at all the different weights. I discovered it was true that a person who is thirty pounds overweight can be quite beautiful and that there was no reason
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for me to dislike the way I looked. I sent a ten-minute excerpt of the best of the naked that I was still too paranoid to keep in the film to . . .
