A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

MacDonald:

Though not so much in film to that point . . .

Mulvey:

Not so much in film. We were trying to put that question into film. We wanted to make an advance in cinema narrative by having a narrative that was a journey into the psyche, so its 'resolution' was literally an 'opening,' rather than a closing down. It's the same kind of thing, perhapsI hadn't thought of this beforethat Bunuel and Dali tried to do by slitting open the eye in

Un Chien Andalou

and discovering a completely different space with a different kind of logic and a different relationship between figure and event. We didn't have

Un Chien Andalou

in mind at the time, but we were trying to move into a phantasmagoric space in the last two shots.

We used the British Museum not as a real live space where people go to see exhibits, but as an image of the enigmatic and historical nature of the unconscious. That's why there is no one else in the museum. The British Museum isn't on the same register as the shopping center is, or the streets, or even the playground. It's the final stage in the film's

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movement from the space of Sirkian melodrama [melodrama as epitomized in the films of Douglas Sirk] into the space of the psyche.

Yvonne Rainer

MacDonald:

In recent years every time there's a new Yvonne Rainer film, I read someplace, 'This is new and accessible work from Yvonne Rainer . . . '

Rainer:

Right. They said that about the last one, and I've heard it about

Privilege

.

MacDonald:

I didn't find

The Man Who Envied Women

[1985] more accessible than earlier workthough there were elements of it I likedbut I do find

Privilege

extremely accessible. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and when I screened it as part of my film series in Utica I discovered it was accessible to a relatively general audience.

Rainer:

This is a mainstream-geared audience?

MacDonald:

Pretty much. My series has a reputation, so the audience usually expects something unusual, but they're certainly not shy about leaving. At

Privilege,

I don't believe more than five people left, out of seventy-five or eighty. I've always assumed that your refusal to provide certain kinds of conventional pleasure was a defiance of what the audience has come to expect. But this film includes the audience in a new way.

Rainer:

In Australia, someone asked meafter screening

Privilege

'Why are you so committed to depriving the audience of pleasure?'

MacDonald:

They said that after

Privilege

?

Rainer:

After

Privilege

.

MacDonald:

That surprises me.

Rainer:

I was astounded because I have never thought of myself as depriving anyone of pleasure, unless a shot or a sequence had a specific political agenda, like the tracking shot into the nude in

Film About a Woman Who

. . . . There was a specific mission there. It was an arduous experience for the audience to stay with that shot:

no

one could derive pleasure from

that

image of the woman's body. But in the general course of things,

I

always thought I was introducing

new

pleasuresthe pleasure of the text, of reading.

MacDonald:

It's true; there are pleasures in many of the stories told in your films but not much

visual

pleasure, especially in the films after

Film About a Woman Who

 . . . : that film and

Lives of Performers

[1972] have an unpretentious elegance and sensuality that's lacking in later films, especially from

Journeys from Berlin/1971