in that you seem to be using the camera to forge a new kind of relationship with your brother.
That's an interesting observation.
Though he slams the door shut on the attempt.
Well, he slams it shut, but not without revealing a startling fact: that my brother, with all of his medical background and his closeness to my father, doesn't know any of the details about my mother's death. He too has never talked to my father. There's some sort of strange Scottish Presbyterian existentialism operative here: why talk about the details of the death of someone one loves; who cares what the details are, we all understand the sorrow and the absence. Also, a certain politeness about not discussing unpleasant things is very Southern. I think it's partly the Scottish highlands heritage of a restraint in living, a feeling that men should not express emotions.
Would it be fair to say that because of this noncommunicativeness, your family can live within this complicated society and its racial inequities without thinking much about it?
The fact that they don't talk about it doesn't mean they don't think about it, or act upon it. I'm told that when my father set up his practice in Charlotte, after finishing medical school and his residency
Page 274
in New York City, he was the first doctor in the city to have a desegregated waiting room. There was no fanfare, no newspaper story. (I was not told this by him but by other people.) It seemed absurd to him that black people had to sit in one room and whites in another when he was going to be operating on all of them sooner or later. He's quietly done things like that all his life. I saw them throughout my childhood. Anyway, the fact that people don't talk about racism doesn't mean they don't have strong feelings and act to eliminate it. We tend to analyze things to death up hereespecially in Cambridge, which must be the self-analysis capital of the eastern half of the United States.
explores the paralysis that occurs when people are talking about their emotions rather than acting on them. That's a phenomenon we're saddled with in the Northeast.
Your particular presence as a narratorial persona in
makes that film different from
. I assume all the narratorial stuff in
was recorded after the original footage.
Yes. Painstakingly, with many, many revisions. The true chronology of when my films were finished is
and
. But that's not the order in which they were shot.
sat on the shelf for years and then was edited relatively recently.
was a sketch for
an experiment in how I could approach the bigger film.
is often formally beautiful, which is part of what makes it sustainable for two and a half hours.
is . . .
Cruder. Part of the problem with
was that I was just learning to shoot as a one-person crew. I was just getting over that odd sense of camera shyness in reverse. It takes awhile to summon the gumption to shoot people you know well, to be able to face them and talk to them as you're filming. Also, I was using a Nagra 4, a very large tape recorder: it weighs twenty pounds and I carried it slung over my shoulder. For
I used a miniature Nagra SN, a very highly developed piece of recording equipment that could fit on my belt. This technological improvement made shooting much easier.
In Wiseman's films you can always see that everybody is conscious of the camera, but not so much of him personally, whereas in
and
you know the people and have fairly complex relationships with them: the camera is more a part of you, rather than you a part of the camera. Your subjects may respond to the camera being there, but they're primarily interacting to
having the camera pointed at them. The interaction is more complicated. Or complicated in a different way.
In objective, detached, ''classical' cinema verite, you may
Page 275
