could ever make any sense of it.' So I went through a painstaking process of cutting dreams out: each one I eliminated felt like such a great loss. But that experience was a crucial lesson for me because I learned that no matter how painful it is to let go of material, a film usually benefits from a very severe editing process. As I whittled the film down, I also started developing more ways to use images; I started combining images with dreams that hadn't had any before.
Your use of text reveals a strong sense of poetic timing. Do you read much poetry?
No. I read Walt Whitman one summeralmost nothing but him. The only other poets I've read closely are Sappho and Anna Ahkmatova. But I have trouble reading poetry. I get impatient with it.
There's something about the timing and the spacing in your films that reminds me of William Carlos Williams.
Well, the timing is important. I started out with each dream on an index card, and kept whittling down the phrasing until it was really succinct. Then I started breaking it up into lines to see how it should be phrased in the film. I heard the rhythm of each dream very clearly in my mind before I started scratching. I would scratch them onto the film and project the results. If something wasn't right, I'd cut out a few frames or add a few frames.
I remember Hollis Frampton saying that once you
read you can't
read. When the words appear, the viewer has no choice about reading them. You participate in this film on a different level from the way you participate in a conventional film.
I have a fantasy that one day I'll show
and the audience will say the whole thing out loud.
I'm at a strange point now, as far as using text goes. I had so much fun making
that I ended up making a second, similar film,
. I liked what I did in
but I wasn't
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crazy about it.
is made out of a certain amount of repression and depression, and it shows.
Even the device of scratched texts doesn't work as well.
I feel very intimate with that device, but I also feel that I might not be able to use it much longer. Actually, I pushed it further in
than I did in
or
.
You may articulate it more in
than in
but in the longer film you found a way of using it without its dominating the entire experience.
One large area that I haven't really worked with is scratching words over images. I mean I did that a little in
(when I go to my mother's house, for example) and at the end of
where 'blindness' is spelled out over the water with that incredible movement. That's one area I'd like to explore more. I'm interested in what would happen if I started using scratched text to comment on the images that you're seeing, or to completely confuse the image, to have them be so contradictory that you couldn't, or wouldn't, want to be looking and reading at the same time.
What got you started on
?
Well, I remember that I was in California on tour with Leslie Thornton, showing films. I wanted to make a movie, and I kept thinking of the phrase, 'She built a house'just the phrase. I was doing a lot of drawings and making little notes to myself about having a sense of home, and one day I suddenly thought of my mother. She was someone I thought of as without her own homealthough she's lived in the United States since 1950 and is settled here, she'd always seemed a little bit uprooted to me, partly because I'd never met any of her relatives.
Suddenly, I thought that her life was something I absolutely had to find out about, something I had to work with. I went to Chicago to see her. I had to lie a little bit, to make it seem like this wasn't such a serious project. I was very diffident about it when I talked to her, and then I showed up with lots of equipment. I think she was
