was finished, I had a little private screening, which I thought might be the
screening. There's a nice photograph of the people who were there.
Who was there?
Richard Foreman and Amy Taubin, who were married then; Jonas [Mekas], Shirley Clarke, Bob Cowan, Nam June Paik, Ken and Flo Jacobs, a few others.
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The loft in Snow's
(1967). By permission
of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
What was their reaction?
They thought it was good!
It's still a remarkable film. And it still works as an effective subversion of conventional film expectations. If I want to make my students furious,
is the perfect film. The duration of
has been much talked about. What kind of thinking did you do about how long
would be, and how you would control the duration? It's a long film for that period, particularly given the fact that no one had much money.
Well, it's hard to post facto these things. I knew I wanted to expand somethinga zoomthat normally happens fast, and to allow myself or the spectator to be sort of inside it for a long period. You'd get to know this device which normally just gets you from one space to another. I started to think about so-called film vocabulary before I made
with
. You know, what
all these devices and how can you get to
them, instead of just using them? So that was part of it.
And the other thing is that a lot of the work that I was doing, including the music, had to do with variations within systems. One of the pieces of classical music which I've always liked (I got one of Wanda Landowska's records of it in 1950) is J. S. Bach's
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which is a statement of theme, followed by a number of variations (I'm oversimplifying). That was the basis of a lot of my work, like
. I wanted to make this film a unified unfolding of a number of variations with the zoom as the container for the variations. The process had to have a certain length of time. It could be fifty minutes and it could be thirty minutesmaybe thirty would be too shortbut that's how I thought about it. I did want to make a temporal place 'to stay in,' as you've properly put it.
I'd noticed something like this happening in another way, in
. Sometimes when the music is at its most passionate or frenetic, there's a feeling of being in a space that's made by the continu-ity of the music and the picture. Other people might not feel this, but it gave me my first taste of a kind of temporal control I was able to elaborate in
.
Another thing that's very important in
is the way it deals with narrative. It sets up its direction, and what would be considered the conventional narrative moves in and out from the edges. Hollis Frampton comes in and falls dead and the camera just continues on its way. One is tempted to say, 'There's no plot,' and yet there is a 'plot,' in a number of senses, including the mathematical: you plot straight ahead on an axis toward the far side of the loft. At any rate,
comments on conventional narrative, especially on mystery and suspense.
Yeah, but you know, I had no background in that at all. I just wanted to set up a temporal container of different kinds of events. In the sections where you don't see anybody in the space, it becomes much more a two- dimensional picture. When it's peopled, it's a whole other thing. And the memory of the space seen one way affects our other views of it. The space and duration of the film allow for all kinds and classes of events. There is a life- and-death story, but on another level, the whole thing is sexual. And there are a lot of other considerations, like
