say, 'You see, this is the way it is, and it's not good that it's this way.' When I made
I felt differently. I had certain assumptions about what my dreams meant, and I certainly had ideas about what it meant to be involved with a woman and then involved with a man. I had ideas about how to work with dreams and how I felt they were useful. But I also liked the idea that, being less doctrinaire, I was leaving things more to chance. I wasn't saying that all women are good or that it's only good to be with women. I was saying, well, you know, things are kind of messy in our private lives and in our dream worlds and that's just the way it is. At first it seemed that if I was going to be a 'good' feminist I should show the relationship with the woman to be a good one as compared to the relationship with a man. But I couldn't because the dreams that I had about the relationship with the woman revealed a lot of problems. The dreams revealed that both relationships were pretty much failures, and that seemed more realistic than trying to sell some theory about how relationships
be.
Are there a couple of shots from
in
?
Yes. There's also a lot of footage from
[1978], my very first film, in
: the stuff of the woman swimming in the pool and the woman rowing on the rowing machine.
Page 291
That material looks like found footage from another era.
Yes, it does. I really liked shooting that first film. It wasn't a very good film, but it was fun to do. I liked the footage in it, but I wasn't crazy about the way it was put together. I was low on footage when I was making
and I figured I might as well use this stuff. Actually, I was thinking of using some outtakes from
in
. I like the idea of recycling things and of finding new meanings, in a new context, for images that have appeared in earlier films.
There are some very weird dreams in
. The dream about making the second vagina and the image of the baby that crumbles are pretty powerful. I used the film in several classes this year, and the students found the film outrageous. They were riled up about it.
If people see the film without knowing it's made from dreams, they do tend to get very anxious. But if they recognize that the texts are dreams, they tend to accept the film. We all have weird dreams.
Well, there's also the question of admitting what you dream or feel. We may know we have embarrassing dreams, but publicly admitting what they are is something different. I'll bet most people repress confusing dreams very quickly.
I've been surprised when I've traveled with
how many people tell me that they never remember their dreams or if they do they never bother to write them down. They don't take them seriously. I find that I go through periods when I don't remember any of my dreams, and I feel terrible after a while because I feel like I really need to remember them and look at them. When I went through my journal to find dreams for
I found great dreams I hadn't rememberedthe one about making the second vagina was one of them. I thought, 'What a great image. It's so loaded and says so much'and I'd forgotten about it! I would never have come up with that image during a conscious moment; I feel grateful for the images we create while dreaming.
The dreams that ended up in the film are suggestive in different ways. Remember the dream where I say that the woman sitting on the stage asks a friend from the audience to come and make love to her? Every time I show the film and I'm in the audience, I think about how somebody in the audience feels. As a filmmaker, I'm doing just what the woman in the dream is doing. I think there's something about making work that has to do with your wanting to please people, to make love with the audience. This dream is a bald statement of a desire that I think is part of a lot of films.
Page 292
How many dreams did you start with?
Ninety-four. I asked my current lover, who was a man, and a former lover, who was a woman, and one male friend and one female friend (both of whom are gay) to read all the dreams and tell me which ones they liked.
After I got all their responses, I studied them to see which ones the men liked and which ones the women liked. I didn't really use that as the basis for making a final decision about which to use but it did help me to think about the dreams. Finally, I chose to do the dreams about women with moving scratched words and the dreams about men with optically printed freeze-framed scratched words. I did about forty dreams, some with images, many without. I put it all together and showed it to a few people. They said, 'It's just horrible; it's way too long! Nobody
