which has a few synch scenes.
There's a lot of mystery in
. It reminds me of de Chirico, partly because of the sound track. Things that we can't quite identify seem to hover around the image.
When I set up the structure of sixty one-minute scenes, I thought it would be very demanding on an audience. My idea was to make it a little more accessible by making it more like a game. I built mysteries into it, along with 'clues.' For instance, the structure of the film is spelled out in the shot with somebody doing jumping jacks, counting from one to sixty. Another puzzle happens, in the shot where you hear a woman speaking French, reading a mathematics problem I made up. The idea was that if you didn't know French and wanted to know more about the film, you'd have to have somebody translate. But, you still wouldn't have the answer, because it's a problem, and you'd have to figure the problem out. But the problem is written in such a way that you assume it's going to ask a certain question, and the question at the end isn't the question you'd expect, so you have to go back and rework all the information. That's the extreme of the game-playing aspect of the film.
There's a scene where a person's gagged and lying in the middle of the street. Also, at the end, a car stops and the person slumps over the horn. In a conventional narrative those scenes might be serious, but since there is no sequence, they declare themselves as humor.
The image of the woman tied up has been criticized as sexist. The scene before that is the baby carriage rolling down the street, a reference to Eisenstein and the Odessa Steps sequencea silly film jokeand in the background somebody with an accent is speaking about capitalism and the working class. The next shot is the woman who's tied up and gagged, which I meant as a reference to the working class.
seems to be your first attempt to come to grips, at least in film, with your own history as a filmmaker.
Of course, it's also distanced. It's an attempt to use my past, but not to explore it. I do show all the houses I ever lived in, and I include stories that are true, or that I think are true, about things that happened when I was in those houses. But they're read by a woman, which distances them.
I started
in 1977. There was no real script. I just did things that suggested other things. When I edited, I rearranged it and pared it down. The blowing up of the Biltmore Hotel in Oklahoma City
Page 237
was the first shot I made: it became a metaphor for the end of my structural concerns. Then I thought, why not tell a little more about my life, about what brought me to that point? I wrote the short story that's printed at the beginning of the film as a continuous sentence. The story of the young boy memorizing the digits of pi seemed like a metaphor for my life as an artist and for my decision to become a structuralist filmmaker. He's like an artist trying to define something indefinable, something you can get lost in.
I was also thinking about doing short performances. Two got into
. One was to visit every house I'd ever lived in and measure my feelings against what I had thought the houses would suggest. I did the other performances in Oklahoma. I went to the same river every three or four days, from the shortest day of the year to the longest day, again trying to measure my own feelingshow
changed from day to day compared to something that was itself both the same and different. Those performances don't give the audience the same feeling they give me. At the time I felt that my films were getting too academic, too far from a personal meaning that might be more important.
Did you modify your memories of the places where you lived?
That section is about storytelling: basically they're true stories, but they have little twists, either to make them funny, or more interesting, or to give a clue to the way I perceive things. When they're not true, they're metaphors for truth. I did find somebody dead in the backyard, and I did find a cow that was dying, and I did fall through the ice.
Though
is probably the film one would most identify with structural film,
is so full of allusions to structural filmmaking and filmmakers that unless you know that tradition, it would be hard to catch all the implications.
I would rather show it to a group that doesn't know of Snow, Rainer, and the others. The laughter then comes at entirely different places. I suppose I was thinking of my own audience when I made it, thoughpeople who have seen my films, and other films that I like.
Did you decide to use Frampton, [George] Landow, Rainer, and Snow because they were especially important in your development?
I like all four of them, but the way I used them changed as I made the film. I started
right after
when I really did believe in Minimalism and felt that less was more. By the time I finished it, my feeling was more like the Bob Huot postcard you sent me: 'Less Is More . . . But, It's Not Enough' [Huot, postcard of
1978].
