How was it, coming back here?
When I came back in 1960, we had two kids and a house on loan up in Rhode Island, near Jamestown (where we'd stayed a few years before, and I'd made
). The house wasn't heated, so we could only stay there until the end of October. Then I rented an old farmhouse in Westchester that had rats in the basement, which is where I worked on film. I used to chase them around with a broom. I made
there and also the Tinguely film [
1960].
I began to hang out with pop artists. I didn't know many of the independent filmmakers. I had met some in Brussels in 1959, but I didn't connect very strongly with them yet, though Amos [Vogel] must have been throwing us together at his Cinema 16 screenings.
When I got back here originally, I thought I had a connection. In France someone had sent me to Henri Langlois. He was enthusiastic about my filmshe and Lotte Reiniger who was there too. Langlois said they were the best experimental films he'd seen since 1928. He wrote a letter to Richard Griffith at MoMA in New York, and sent a reel of my
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films ahead. A lunch was arranged with me, Griffith, and John Adams, Griffith's assistant; after lunch they went back to the museum to look at the films. Three or four days went by and no word. I went by the museum, and another assistant came out, handed me the films, and said, 'Mr. Griffith really prefers Westerns.' It was a real cheeky thing to say, and I didn't know whether it was a put down of my films or of Griffith. Then somebody sent me to Margareta Akermark, who was in charge of film circulation at MoMA. She was very skeptical, but she sent me to a woman who ran an educational film distribution company. I can't remember the name. I do remember she went into a frenzy. She couldn't decide whether my films were good or awful, but finally she decided they were awful. She sent me back to Akermark.
I went back with my hat in my hand, and Akermark sent me to Amos. He was the only one who could deal with this kind of film. Amos wanted to drive a hard bargain, sign a contract, exclusive this, can't do thatand didn't promise me much return. But he would show the films, and it's all I had and so it was fine: I went with Amos.
Who else did you meet?
Brakhage was gone [to Colorado] by then. I met Madeline Tourtelot. She made films in Chicago, including a documentary about Harry Partch (he designed his own musical instruments and composed music for them). I'd met Marie Menken in 1958 in Brussels at the experimental film festival that Jacques LeDoux created, and I'd met Kenneth Anger there too. He was kind of silly and very gay and private. I also met Agnes Varda. And Peter Kubelka. He and I got along; there were similarities in our filmsby that time he had done
[1957] and
[1958]that made them different from anybody else's.
[1961] was the first collage film you made after returning to the United States. It seems a bit more systematic than your earlier collage films.
was an attempt to put my money where my mouth was. I'd written a piece on abstract expressionism as being just fossilized evidence that some action had taken place previously and that film could actually give you the action while you were looking at it; you didn't have to look at streaks of dried paint anymore, you could look at streaks of live action. It was a thin argument, but it made me think about what I was doing. I was adding up what I could do with film that painters couldn't do. I wasn't competing with painting; I was legitimizing film. Uniqueness enhances the market value of art, but I didn't want to participate in that way of thinking. I had my democratic idealism to justify working in filmand I didn't even need that: film was just fun. But I also had a romantic bittersweet attitude about the limited commercial possibilities of working my way. The gap between the legitimacy of
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painting and of film art was so wide that I couldn't help openly challenging it. Anality makes the art world survive: the guy who's anal retentive and wants to have a better art collection than the next guy. You can get anal about paintings, but how can you get anal about film? It's an endless run that you can keep printing and reprinting.
What led to
[1962], the live-action film you made with Claes Oldenburg?
After I did that film, I seriously debated going into live-action filmmaking. But I didn't think I could deal with production, especially with getting the money. I had four kids. And I didn't want to quit working on film until I had the money. I guess the thing that bothered me most was having to get involved with other people on an artistic level. With Oldenburg there was no problem because we were on the same wavelength.
Actually, before
I shot a live-action film that became a segment on the first installment of
. I had moved into a little house in Palisades that had been owned by this TV producer, Ted Yates. When Maya Deren's Creative Film Foundation awards were announced in the
