Friedrich and I discussed the films up through
in March 1986 and again in September 1987. We discussed
in June 1990.
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I find
and
hard to look at. They seem to have been made within a small circle of friends as feminist exercises. The change from those two films to
seems considerable, even though the style of all three films is related. I feel somewhat the same way about the jump from
and
to
. Do you see big leaps in power from the earlier films to the later ones?
I think of those early films as being too obvious, or too much about a single issue or image.
is about these acted-out women's rituals;
is about certain midtown men and women.
was made with a small audience in mind. I think it was made in part as a response to Dave Lee and his film
[1976, 1979], which was made with black and clear leader and footage from the Margaret Mead film
[1952]. We'd had this ongoing debate about what happens when you use clear and black leader. When I made
I was doing the opposite of what he did. We were very close then, and we talked a lot about film. I do tend to think of just one or two people when I'm working on a film. Actually, after I made
I made a film that you haven't seen. It had two titles: first it was called
; I changed it to
. I didn't like that film; it was so personal, about such neurotic aspects of my self-image, that I re-edited it, but I still didn't like it. Then I started working on a film about excision in Africa.
That's the removal of the clitoris?
Yes. And sewing up the vagina and the labia. I was really freaked out about the subject. I'd seen Ann Poirier's film
[1978]. In it there was this brief bit of footage of an excision being done on a little girl in Africa. When I saw that footage at the New York Film Festival, I screamed out, 'No!' But then I got interested in doing a film about excision. I read lots of material, and I started doing scratched-word tests because I wanted to make the film a conversation. One voice would be the 'experts,' like Western doctors or African men and women who would talk about why it's done, and the other voice would be the women describing what it felt like and their memories of it. I did a
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lot of tests with scratched words, but then I realized that that was a completely inappropriate form for such a film, which would have to be a much more accessible sort of documentary. Since I didn't want to work in a documentary style, I gave it up.
I started working on
because I was having a lot of trouble, and I wanted to reread my journals and then burn them all. Instead I got interested in many of the dreams I'd recorded. I developed
from those dreams.
When I made
I thought I should try to do something very personal, entirely about me. I failed miserably. I was much too self-conscious about exposing myself. By the time I got around to
I had accepted the idea of using personal material, but I had also found a way to work with it with some sort of distance. At first, when I was reading the dreams and thinking about them, I felt really embarrassed about revealing them. But by the time I began to see how they looked when they were scratched out and saw what images went with them, I had lost some of that personal investment.
When I was doing
and
I was much more rigid in my thinking, both about film and about myself as a woman. With
especially, I wanted to be very extreme, to just use a few elements and be very aggressive with them. In both films I wanted to convince people of something; I wanted to show them some little corner of the world and
