first came out, it was shown at the Other Cinema for two weeks. There were some very good discussions organized around it on the weekends. I don't think the question of essentialism came up in those first discussions, but later.
[
We also got criticized for casting a black actress as Maxine. We thought we were simply giving the part to a black actress, Merdelle Jordine, whose work we both admired. Of course, we were also aware of how difficult it was for black actresses to get parts, as a result of discrimination and stereotyping, and we wanted to do something toward breaking down that kind of prejudice.]
How did you and Peter divide up the work of making
?
We tried to get everything possible organized beforehand and leave the narrowest margin for decision during the actual shooting. We worked things out endlessly on charts when we were thinking about the film. Later, when we were working on films where the collaboration was much more difficult, we thought about how avant-garde strategies, like those we used in
enable collaboration, because once we had determined a fixed, formal system, all we had to do was organize all the elements around the formal system. We could decide an enormous amount in advance.
We spent a really, really long time talking
through. And all of that was completely both of us together. I don't think one could say that one thing came from Peter or me, rather than the other. There
a shift in responsibility in the writing. We collaborated on the voice 'off' over the first three sequences, in the sense that although in the end Peter composed the text we both together collected the key words, making arbitrary associations and collecting a vocabulary. Then Peter arranged them as poems, but I was always looking and making suggestions. The last two sequencesthe mirror sequence and the British Museum sequencewere written completely by Peter. I might have done a little editing. I think the voice-over in the British Museum sequence, in particular, is an astounding piece of writing. I've been working on the myth of Pandora and the box in recent months, and I find I'm thinking about things
that were already there in the British Museum voice-over. It continues to set off resonances for me. I think it is very brilliant, perhaps particularly the way Peter creates a fragmentation of subjectivity. The 'she' shifts around and you realize that the voice represents the child's
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point of view at some time in the future. It encapsulates, in a few lines, the feminist commitment to a fragmentation of subjectivity. This isn't just an avant-garde or postmodern strategy, it is a result of the way that femininity is an enigma in patriarchal society.
the 'riddle,' women must make use of the heterogeneous in theory and aesthetics to figure out their own incoherent subjectivity.
The dream passage in the mirror sequence was written with a dictionary. Peter was trying to get a completely arbitrary association of words. I think he even used a French dictionary. He would look up a word, then find that word in the English dictionary and use the word
something like that, something to get a complete displacement of logical consistency, rather like Bunuel and Dali trying to break down personal associations in
[1929]. Out of that collection of words, he'd build up a series of fragments of images.
[
That's right. I took words from a French dictionary, according to an arbitrary system I had devised, and then incorporated them in sequence into a narrative. It's a technique that derives from Raymond Roussel. I also used some words from H. D. (pseudonym of poet Hilda Doolittle). When I wrote the earlier voice-off 'poems' I was thinking of
by Gertrude Stein.]
At what point did the use of 360-degree pans become clear as an essential element in the formal design? I first saw the film in Syracuse, when Owen Shapiro showed it. I was puzzled for the first three sections, but the minute the Louise story began, I was enthralled. I've never felt more exhilaration about a strategy for revealing a dimension of realityin this case, child care in a domestic settingthat conventional film didn't deal with.
You never got to see
did you? It's been out of distribution for yearsthough Peter and I are trying to change that.
No, I've not seen it.
In
each segment was two continuous 16mm rolls of film run together, roughly twenty minutes. That gave us a formal logic, a pattern to work with, a constraint and a sense that our form was conditioned by something outside us. So in
it was the literal material length of the roll of film. For
we wanted an equivalent formal strategy, so we could still use long takes, but in a different way. The point of the decision in any take is: when do you end it? Is it ended because something dramatic happens on the screen? Is it ended because of some relationship to the mise-en-scene? Is it ended just because of some arbitrary whim of the director? The circular camera movement solved that problem for us. I must ask Peter what he thinks about this, but
