[Maya Deren, 1943], which I had seen about seven years
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before on public TV. My whole vocabulary came from watching TV or going to the local theater, so I had no idea what
was about. It just stuck in the back of my mind, and finally I bought a camera. I went back to school to finish my masters in math [1970]. Actually I wish I'd gone on to a Ph.D. I'd love to teach, math. Then I got a job teaching at Paul Smith's Collegea small, very conservative school in upstate New York. I lost my job. The circumstances were strangesomebody burned a building down, and I was one of the people who got investigated. Scary stuff. I went back to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, thinking I couldn't do anything but hide. I was going to go for one semester, but I stayed for three years and got an M.F.A. in film and graphic arts [1975].
[1972], the earliest film you list for distribution, is very different from your later filmsit's a conventional narrative, a grim day-in-the-life of a drill press operatorthough your interest in framing and in working with sound are already clear.
It was the second 16mm film I made. I hadn't seen much except theatrical film, so it was logical for me to begin with scripted, fictional, documentary narrative.
The way you go in and out of fantasy material is reminiscent of the foreign films that were popular during the sixties.
was what I remembered of working on a drill press: it was boring, and the speed of the machine regulated, you. You'd get bored and try to daydream, but the lengths of the daydreams were dictated by the machine. It's dangerousif you stick your hand in at the wrong time, you put a drill through itso you have to have short thoughts and get back to work. I put that into the film.
The soundtrack is unusual.
It's a combination of two tracks: one was noises that would synch with what was happening, not necessarily generated by something in the frame but which seemed to fit the visuals; the other was the slowed-down sound of a big cylinder being ground. I wanted the noise to be repetitious and circular, because I was trying to get at a way of life where every day seems the same. Everything was post-synched.
It was shot in black and white and printed on color stock?
Yes. At first I worked with a small lab in Milwaukee. They didn't do black and white. Earlier, I had made a one-minute film, which they printed on color stock. I liked the way it looked, so when I did
I had certain scenes tinted a little green, a little brown.
[
]: What was the nature of your collaboration on
The collaboration happened spontaneously. We'd been talking about ways of getting things across on film: I would say one thing,
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James would say another, and somehow this film developed. We both conceived of it, and we both worked on it. Even then I was interested in forcing narrative away from simple story-line and character identification toward problems of representation, language, and the reading of the film text. The minimal narrative in
contains a beginning, middle, and end, but an active viewer is required to fill in the spaces.
I remember that Bette was going to make a narrative film about two women. I can't remember the details. She started the film, but somehow it changed from a somewhat straightforward narrative to an optically-printed filman optical printer arrived in Madison, and I was familiar with it. I kind of horned in.
As the film goes on, the women's actions seem increasingly performed for the camera.
It's very much a conscious performance. The two women stare straight at the camera and the implied spectator, confronting the voyeuristic gaze.
I think one reason for Scott's observation is the actual change in technique. The first section was shot in slow motion (fifty frames per second); every frame was copied fifty-eight times, then dissolved into the next frame with a twenty-four-frame dissolve. It looks like a still at first, and as you watch the frame, different areas seem to move. Cars are the most obvious, then you see that people are slowly moving up and down. The second scene was shot at twenty-four frames per second, and every frame was copied once. The last scene was shot at twenty-four frames, and we copied either every third or fifth frame. The jump in the action is larger there, so you become more aware of the optical printing. In the third scene, the action is fast enough so that you actually start to see the freeze frames dissolving into each other. I think the changes make you concentrate more on the formal elements.
