I hadn't seen the Morgan Fisher film. Peter knew Morgan Fisher, I think, but I don't know if he'd seen the film. In the sphinx rephotography section (Section Three), we certainly had in mind American structural film and the importance of rephotography in that work. Probably, if there was a reference there, it would have been to Ken Jacobs's
[1969]. I'm not so sure where the acrobats came from, Eisenstein's montage of attractions, perhaps. That sequence was done by a lab; it was the one bit of the film that kept eluding our control. We didn't like a lot of things the lab did, but now I like the sequence more than I used to.
[
I thought of the 'Sphinx' and 'Acrobats' sequences as East Coast and West Coast, respectively. And yes, I had seen Morgan Fisher's film.]
I was surprised when you said at Hamilton College that you hadn't seen
in years, and hadn't really talked much about it.
I hadn't seen it in I don't know how long. The film that I show and talk about a lot is
It's only thirty minutes long.
How did it feel to see
again?
Well, I still get anxious, but it felt much smoother than it used to. Right after we first made
Peter was in the United States, and I did a lecture tour that the British Film Institute had organized. In those days, there was a feeling that the difficult films of the seventies would be humanized by the director's appearance, and we had always thought of the film as having an agitational element, not only politically, but in that its experimental strategies should be discussed and explained. This was not to give the director's answer, or the author's privileged insight, but to give people a chance to talk about ideas and issues that were unfamiliar. Or, if they were familiar, to respond with their own ideas and reactions. This particular tour was around Southwest England. I showed the film at various colleges and film societies. Lots of quite unwitting people from small towns suddenly found themselves confronted with
. Well, that was anxiety-provoking. I did get an unusual sense of the shape of the film. Often, at
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experimental film screenings, when people realize what they're going to see, they walk out at once. With
that didn't happen: people just sat, kind of bewildered and mesmerized,
synch sound came on. They would sit right through the rephotography of the sphinx, which is in many ways the most difficult part of the film. They would sit right through the opening three pans of Louise's story. And then they would leave during the telephone exchange shot. There would be a first walkout exactly at that point which, strangely enough, is exactly one third through the film. There's a reel change just before that shot. There was something in the rhythm of the film that captured people at the start. And then, one third of the way into the film, people would leave.
[
That sequence is too demanding. I hate it myself. We should have done a mix of telephone conversations as a voice-over. Then it might have worked.]
My students are usually overwhelmed at first. They tend to be frightened until they can get a handle on the form and realize they can begin to make sense of the film.
They should be able to figure out that the film has a pattern, that it's symmetrical. That should be engaging and is, indeed, intended to be a 'handle.' That is one of the things that I always thought, and still think, is most important about its structure: that it has a symmetry that can help viewers orient themselveseven if that structure was originally chosen for formal reasons. Even if you can't figure out
during the first viewing, afterward you can see that
matches
that the two bits with me go together and that acrobats go with the sphinx, and so on.
The experience of
relates to the work I've been doing on Pandora, where I develop a parallel between Pandora and the box. Pandora herself is like a film noir figure: inside, she's deception, but outside she's beautifullike Rita Hayworth in
[1947]. I argue that there is a 'topographical' repetition between her structure and the box's structure. So, her opening the box is a figuration of woman trying to look at the secret of femininity, or the enigma of femininity, as Freud said. I've been arguing for an 'aesthetics of the enigma,' an aesthetics of the riddle, in order to get away from literalism about the body and the literalism of the look and into the look as curiosity, directed toward the deciphering of a sign. To go back to
organizing the film around a formal pattern gave it the structure of an enigma; the audience is then allowed to enjoy deciphering the shape or pattern of it, so that aspect of the riddle wouldn't be a frustrating obscurity but a form of play.
