green rectangle with a red circle inside. As soon as that image got stabilized in terms of the retina, as soon as the retina wasn't oscillating over the surface anymore, the red circle dropped out. The color differentiation was gone. That physiological process goes on all the time. It's interesting that it's almost the same rate as twenty-four frames a second, but maybe that's not related. The important thing is that the thresholds are needed. In order to establish
you have to have
. I had a scientist following me around at one point. He got excited by my films because he hadn't thought of the consequences of this kind of rapid change. And
never thought about consequences; I just thought about how it looked to compose this way. But in teaching it over time I've picked up on what's going on.
What was Noel Burch's commentary in
I don't know enough French to understand it.
It's nonsense poetry: the words are puns that refer to the images. I made the film silent, as usual. I showed it that way for a while, but speculated on a soundtrack, and Noel got interested somehow. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he went off and typed up a text, brought it back to me, and I suggested he record it. In those days I usually used a microphone on the projector: I'd record on the sound strip. In this case, though, I edited the sound so that I could synch the words exactly with the events. After it was recorded, Noel had second thoughts, so I didn't use the soundtrack out of deference to him. Then later, after I moved back here, I asked him about it, and he said he liked the track after all. So I added the sound and a credit, 'Text by Noel Burch.'
[1956] seems like an afterthought.
I never show that film. I should've ditched it. I learned from doing it not to try and do sequels. I was just using up the leftover energy from
.
is an antimilitaristic film. In your earlier work you had been into abstraction. Here you're more directly political.
I have mixed feelings about that. For one thing, there are some figures in
who are no longer known. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus walks through with his briefcase and dark glasses. Governor Soapy Williams of Michigan rams his finger up the nose of the horse that a nun is sitting on: the horse lurches and the nun falls offsomething like that. They called him 'Soapy' because the Williams family had a soap company. I had no particular contention with Soapy Williams. It's just that at the time he was a familiar figure. After I made that film, I realized that a lot of those political allusions were gone, irrelevant. I'd begun with an assumption that is no longer valid: that
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there's a logical progression from figurative to abstract in the history of art, and that this progression was unidirectional; fine art had to be abstract, and illustration or illusionismincluding topical satirewas a step backward or a step down, a slightly lower form of expression. In this hierarchy political film is lower as an art experience than abstract film, because it quickly becomes irrelevant. Abstract art film wasn't subject to aging, and therefore was a higher form that could address itself to all humanity and all situations. Now I see that idea as another chimaera, a delusion. But in
I thought I could escape this supposed truth by having lower and higher forms in the same film: I could combine all levels of experience and all levels of ambition, from low vaudeville to high art, to make an analogy for real life. It was a great rationale for combining all my urges: to cartoon, to allude to my experiences in various degrees of depth and penetration, and to integrate all that stuff into a unit of experience by means of pacing, rhythm, and texture.
I guess I assumed that the more obvious politicalness of it had something to do with your coming back to this country and becoming reimmersed in American political life.
Well my politics were extremely simplistic. For all of my Marxist artist friends, Marxism didn't really take seriously on me. I had conventional liberal viewsI still have them, I guesswhich
pretty cool on capitalism. I'm very antiauthoritarian, but I've never sorted out my politics, and I'm always embarrassed to put politics up front in a film.
At one time I was hired to do twenty political cartoons for PBL [Public Broadcast Laboratory], when they had their Sunday night prime time series on big issues: birth, death, and so forth. David Brenner was the producer. Two of the cartoons got done:
[1968], the one about racism; and
[1968], about television. I have only a magnetic striped copy of
. The series was promising, but it got axed. The fourth show was going to deal with the Pentagon, and it was going to be a fairly critical, liberal view of the Pentagon. Word came from Washington that all the footage had to be prescreened, and everybody was embarrassed. That, along with the roasting the series got in the public press, ended the project.
I found that those little cartoons came easily, but I also suspected myself. I suspect pieties; I suspect the motivation behind the pieties. So I'm always a little embarrassed and suspicious of myself when I do polemical projects. I've gone South without
just so I wouldn't trade on easy political emotion. A really political person gets off on relationships to large
