identified with some of what she said, not just about nuns, but about other things too. I particularly love what she says during the Coney Island section, when she talks about her spirit splitting from her body when she had sex with a man. That was really beautiful. It was nice to discover her again and have her be such a crucial element in the film.
She enacts one of the conflicts that the film's about. She talks about being gay and yet she also sings the Lord's Prayer.
Yes. That ambivalence was very appropriate for the film. And since she's a trained soprano she has a powerful voice.
We see two motifs during
the black-and-white snake that curls through the water and the swan through the fence. On one level both are reminiscent of the nuns because of their formal coloring, but both are also traditional phallic images. I assume that you're reappropriating the imagery so that it represents female sexuality.
The first time the snake and the swan appear is when Ela has fallen asleep after seeing
. My alternating between them was meant to be a dream sequence of hers. I was thinking of the snake being the Ela character (its movements are very sensual but sort of dangerous) and the swan being the nun. But actually, I think it was just that I loved the footage and wanted to use it, and worked it in that way!
At the end you announce the women's sexual union by showing a routine between male and female tightrope walkers. It's a convenient metaphor for the nun's doing this chancy thing of coming to the other woman's room. But why did you use a heterosexual tightrope couple?
I liked the dance between them. I thought it was a wonderful ballet of a seduction. I certainly considered that it was a heterosexual
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moment right before a homosexual moment, but I don't see sex as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. At a discussion of
somebody asked whether I was trying to imply that all nuns are lesbians. I really hope that people don't think that that's what I'm saying in the film; it's very important to me that people
think that. To be provocative, I said, ''Well, I think it would have happened exactly the same way if it had been a man and the nun.' At the time I thought to myself, 'That isn't entirely true!' But I wanted to make people think about it. I think the whole ritual of seduction works out to be pretty much the same thing between a man and a woman or between a woman and a womanat least that's been my experience. There are differences, but there's also something universal about being attracted to somebody and trying to make something happen about it.
is about your relationship with your father, but the way in which you present your struggle to come to grips with that relationship is unusual. Probably of all your films,
has the most rigorously formal organization. The only other film I know that uses the alphabet as a central structural device is Frampton's
. Obviously, your film deals more directly and openly with personal material than Frampton's did, but I wonder, is there any conscious reference to cinematic fathers, as well as to your biological father?
That's a hard question to answer. Offhand, I'd say I wasn't making a conscious reference to any other filmmakers, but that the structure was determined more by the fact of my father's being a linguist. I thought that using the alphabet was an obvious choice for the overall structure. I've certainly been influenced by many filmmakers, including some of the so-called structural filmmakers, like Frampton or Ernie Gehr, but my films are never meant to be a direct comment on or a reworking of ideas from other people's films.
I tend to think of the structural film school as avoiding the use of personal, revealing subject matter; I think they're more concerned with how film affects one's perception of time and space than with how it can present a narrative. Whenever I set out to make a film, my primary motive is to create an emotionally charged, or resonant, experienceto work with stories from my own life that I feel the need to examine closely, and that I think are shared by many people. With that as the initial motive, I then try to find a form that will not only make the material accessible but will also give the viewer a certain amount of cinematic pleasure. In that I feel somewhat akin to the structural filmmakers, since I do like to play with the frame, the surface, the rhythm, with layering and repetition and text, and all the other filmic elements that are precluded when one is trying to do something more purely narrative or documentary.
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In the text of
I had to make a decision about form. I was using stories from my own life and began by writing them in the first person, but I got tired of that very quickly. I sounded too self-indulgent. Writing them over in the third person was quite liberating. The distance I got from speaking of 'a girl' and 'her father' gave me more courage, allowed me to say things I wouldn't dare say in the first person, and I think it also lets viewers identify more with the material, because they don't have to be constantly thinking of me while listening to the stories. Some people have told me afterward that they weren't even aware it was autobiographical, which I like. The point of the film is not to have people know about
; it's to have them think about what we all experience during childhood, in differing degrees.
On the other hand, it can sometimes be a problem to impose a structure on a story. I was happy to have thought about using the alphabet, but then that forced me to produce exactly twenty-six stories, no more, no less. I
