(and
too) uses a lot of sexual imagery, more than most of the other films.
In
there are these tiny objects that rain across the screen from top to bottom. Some look like sets of cocks and balls. The others look like upside-down coffee cups. The origin of those is pretty complicated. They were made with rubber stamps sent to me by Claes Oldenburg, one ordinary rubber stamp very carefully divided down the middle. One side had this giant lipstick on it (in the scribble form it looks like cock and balls, which is typical of Oldenburg: he's always dealing in phalluses and so forth); the upside-down coffee cup shape doesn't quite fit as the opposite of his phallusit's not quite the vagina shape, but it relates. Anyhow, I play with those shapes in
and in
.
Those rubber stamps were the culmination of a drawing contest Oldenburg and I had during a period when we both were having sculptures made up in a big sculpture factory in Westhaven. Mine was a big float, now in Stockholm, that you can sit on and ride. Every time I'd go up there there'd be a drawing of his lipstick on caterpillar treads; it looked like a tank and was aimed aggressively at a sketch of my coffee cup-shaped 'rider float.' I had to retaliate with a drawing that had my float getting underneath his sculpture and driving off with itmy point being that my sculpture was motorized and really worked, while his only
like it would move. When I came back the next time, I found a drawing of the two of these things going over a cliffhis point being that while my float was motorized, it didn't know where it was going. At the bottom of the cliff, the lipstick is stuck in the ground and the treads are up in the air. My sculpture was cradled in the treads of his as though on a pedestal of his sculpture, and there was a guy standing there scratching
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his head, wondering what kind of sculpture
was. My reply to that was to have the cliff that they had gone over collapse and create an avalanche that covered both of them completely. He came back and had a helicopter with a magnet fly over and pull them out of the debris. I retaliated with the same helicopter flying too close to the sun: the blades dropped (in another version it was hit by lightning), and the two pieces fell into the ocean and disappeared. His retaliation was to have the ocean turn into the contents of a pop bottle, and the two sculptures became bubbles going to the surface in huge numbers. I didn't know how to answer that. I ended up making vast numbers of little sculptures half his and half mine out of Play-doh. I put them in cotton, in a box, and sent them to him. His answer was the rubber stamp, and of course you send a rubber stamp to an animator and it's going to get into his films. All that time I never saw Oldenburg.
and
seem to be blends of collage and animation with bits of live action. Do you still see each film as a new experience or is the newness now in the particular mixes of techniques you've already explored?
You didn't use the word 'rehash' but that might be your question. New wine in old bottles, or is it old wine and new bottles? I forget. I'm always hoping for a totally new kind of image, but I've been around long enough to know that repeating myself is something I can't help. I don't think you fall into ruts; I think you're born into them, but that every effort to break out is a healthy one and should be nurtured. When I was a kid, I thought style was going to be forever elusive, and that it was something some people had and others didn't. Now I realize that style is something everybody has in spite of themselves. Anyhow, the way I'd put it is that in those films I was looking for a maximum range of technique.
Have you ever thought about making a feature-length animation? That's been the fantasy, and in some cases more than a fantasy, for a number of serious animators.
To do an animated feature is reminiscent of fakirism, beds of nails, and other activities where you try to extend your normal capacities beyond the ordinary. The idea of filling up twenty-four frames every second for an hour or two hours sounds pretty dreary to me and, unless it was one of these full-blooded collective efforts like the Disney features were (which I'm not interested in anyway because in the long run that sort of collective process usually takes all the corners off the film so that it's no longer very expressive), everything would get stretched thin, and you'd see the stretch marks. At the rate of ten minutes a year, it would take me six years. So, no, I don't have any feature film yearnings, certainly not for films that would look like the shorter films I've made.
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What else have you been working on?
Well, I've been sawing wood and painting window frames for what seems like years. I have six hundred feet of new material I haven't told anybody about; it hasn't congealed into a film and might never. I play with words on the screen and do some rotoscopingusual techniques, but with a different look maybe. I got interrupted so many times last year in the middle of this film that it might be lost forever. I do have plans to make a new film dealing more with the soundtrack-picture relationship than I have in the past. At least that's my concept now: anything can happen to change my mind. As far as how the future looks: from where I sit it looks compressed. As a little kid, I was told there was a Beyond, but I never got a convincing picture of it. So without a Beyond, I have a kind of trapezoidal vision of eternity. It's like looking at the table I'm sitting at; the table tilts away in perspective, but it's sawed off at the end: it doesn't go to an infinity point. My sense of time compressing does make life a little more savory, though I don't know if it was ever unsavory. Right now I've got a couple of shoe boxes full of index cards and half an urge to go up and fiddle them into a sequence, and I follow my urges pretty much. They don't always take me into doing a film, but I'll return to the euphoria of putting out a work of art because it's a high you can't get any other way that I know of.
