In many of your films you seem aware of a certain kind of AmericanaNiagara Falls, Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore . . .
I hate a lot of that stuff, but I also like it. It has a certain political meaning to me.
I used to be active in local politics, working with people trying to figure out how to live. The last time I did that was in Springfield, Missouri, where I helped set up a dropout school [in 1967] and helped people try to get jobs. I knew that I could quit whenever I wanted and that the people I was working with Couldn't. It got to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and I finally decided that you either give your whole life to working for political change or you don't. I wasn't sure what my own life was about, and I had to try to define it, so I quit working there and tried to define my life by being an artist.
When I started to make art, I realized I still had a lot of political concerns. Was I or was I not going to put those into my films, or my drawings and paintings? I was trying to experiment, and if you're experimenting, by definition, you don't communicate with a large audience. I thought it was rather silly to try to put political issues into an esoteric context. If you're trying to make political changes, you should use the language that is easiest to understand. But I was trying to develop my own language. Little things creep into my films that suggest I hold certain political beliefs, but they're not meant to change the audience's beliefs.
I suppose if I think of my films as dealing with politics, it's with the way you look at the screen. If you look at things differently aesthetically, maybe you'll look at things differently politically. I do feel I'm doing something that isn't totally self-serving.
One difference between
and
is that in the latter at least three plot strands are followed: the women driving, the guy hitchhiking, and the older white-haired man who's out sometimes and home at others. After a certain point, because there's no regular alternation, you're not sure whether the next image will connect with any of those strands. The viewer has to examine every image to see if and where it fits.
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You don't really know those three strands exist until the film is over. It's a totally different film on second viewing. You might need three or four viewings to sort out the different narratives. And there are interjected scenes that deal with formal issues. Maybe that's a fourth narrative.
Also, even if you do follow the strands, things get ambiguous. In the Mount Rushmore scene, we see characters who look like the two women. One wears a red blouse like the woman in the car. In a narrative sense, though, she almost can't be the same woman.
She
the same woman. The other woman is a new companion, though she
just like the first. Two different women play the same part. And the older man wears that blouse in one shot. I change clothes among the characters, so the narrative gets confused. Every time you see that man, he's dressed differently and he seems to be defined differently: you see him saying good-bye to a woman; you see him in a kitchen with a family; you see him working at a gas station; you see him in front of a poster of Lenin; and finally, you see him playing golf. The scenes don't seem to match.
As in
most of the individual images look candid and recorded in synch, but the more closely you look, the more evident are the clues that indicate that the images can
have been recorded the way they first appear. The film is a training ground for nonillusionistic seeing.
That was a major concern when I was making
. When you start to watch the smokestack scene it's obviously a smokestack, and you can apply particular meanings to thateven cliched meanings like pollution or a phallic symbolbut since it's on for seven and a half minutes, eventually you have to deal with it as swirling grain on a screen. Near the end of the scene, however, a plane comes through, so that after you've begun to look at the image formally, it's reintroduced into the narrative: in the scene before a plane takes off, and in the next scene a plane lands. Hopefully, the film teaches you how to watch the film.
One image that particularly struck me was the one with the two women in bed. You hear the Dylan song and see the record going around on the turntable. But, since the women are moving in slow motion, the music can't be coming from that record. And there's the image with the moon, where everything looks fine until you look away slightly and the moon shakes.
The blatant sceneslike the ones we've just mentionedmake you look carefully at scenes that aren't as blatant. Eventually, you question the reality of every image.
A lot of the shots in
are fairly long, and, of
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