went into a panic at first, thinking that I had either seventy-five stories or only ten, and wasn't sure that I would be able to say all I wanted to say within the limits of the twenty-six. But that became a good disciplinary device; it forced me to edit, to select carefully for maximum effect.
I think the irony is that Hollis, for example, really thought his formal tactics were keeping his films from being personal (his use of Michael Snow to narrate
is similar to your use of the young girl to narrate the stories in
). When I talked with him about his films, he rarely mentioned any connection between what he made and his personal lifea conventionally 'masculine' way of dealing with the personal in art. But from my point of view, his best films
[1972],
[1971]are always those in which the personal makes itself felt, despite his attempts to formally distance and control it.
The issue for me is to be more direct, or honest, about my experiences but also to be analytical. I think there's always a problem in people seeing my films and immediately applying the word 'personal.'
is personal, but it's also very analytical, or rigorously formal.
I don't like to generalize about anything, but I do think it's often the case that the more a person pretends or insists they're not dealing with their own feelings, the more those feelings come out in peculiar ways in their work. Historically, it's been the position of a lot of male artists to insist that they are speaking universally, that they're describing experiences outside of their own and thereby being transcendent. I think conversely that you get to something that's universal by being very specific. Of course, I think you can extend beyond your own experience; you can
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speak about your own experience while also describing the experience of other people you're close to or decide to know. But I think you have to start at home.
Maybe these things are cyclical. I'm sure those late sixties, early seventies filmmakers who avoided the personalFrampton and Snow, Yvonne Rainerwere reacting against the sixties demand that art, including film art, had to be personal. You bring two things togetherthe sixties' emphasis on the personal
the reaction against itand make the intersection into something that exploits the useful parts of both approaches.
I am a child of both worlds. When I was studying art history, I really responded to conceptual art, minimal artthose approaches which were very much about form and not about personal drama. But then, of course, I grew up through the women's movement and from the start really responded to the personal drama involved there. Not just that: I love fiction, I love to read about other people's lives, to learn about the choices people make and the ways in which they survive, or overcome, their personal histories. So I feel very much caught between the two approaches and I learn from both.
As an artist, it's important to me to keep both issues alive: to remember that my responsibility is to speak honestly about how it feels to be alive, and that my pleasure is to use my medium to its greatest advantage. I wouldn't be happy if I only let film tell a story in a conventional form, but I would feel that the heart of the work was missing if I only worked with the film as a material, if I only investigated its formal properties. The film scene is in a constant state of flux, and I think this effort to convey meaningful subject matter through unconventional form occupies a lot of filmmakers today. Hopefully, the lines between narrative, experimental, and documentary will continue to be broken down.
Now that you've made a film about your father, as well as the film about your mother, it's probably inevitable that the two films will be paired a lot. When you made
did you already assume that, sooner or later, you'd come back to your history with your father?
I know some people always have three or four projects in mind, but I never know what I'm going to do next until I'm completely finished with my current project. Certainly when I was interviewing my mother for
and she got onto the subject of them getting divorced, it really struck a nerve and I thought it might be something to explore later.
One time a friend said it seemed like all of my films have been about my fathernot really
exactly, but about reacting to his influ-
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ence, or trying to get away from his influence, which is, in a larger sense, reacting to patriarchy. That was a pretty good observation, and I suspected there was going to come a time when I would have to deal with the question of patriarchy more directly, to look at how it happened closest to home, not
somewhere.
This film is clearly going to have a larger audience than some of the other films, just because it's in synch with the pervasive, contemporary issue of child abuse. What's interesting about
is its focus not on the most extreme types of child abuse, but on the situations men create because they feel that in order to
