What strikes me as similar in
and
is that both are look-backs at the past, and in both the earlier work is 'destroyed.' In yours the destruction isn't literal [actually, it isn't in
either, since only
are being burned and since they're exhibited in the film before the burning 'destroys' them], but because of the processes of recording those paintings have gone through, there's no way to know what they actually looked like: what we know is that we
see exactly what they were.
That's interesting. And in both films, the works discussed are two-dimensional surfaces.
There's been a tendency, at least among some people I talk to, to think of you as an old-fashioned guy who has a problem accepting women and women's independence and that this problem is embedded in
.
Well, I am an old guy, but I've never had any problem accepting women's independence. In fact, I was very much interested in women's independence before this current wave of feminism. I was always very supportive of Joyce in her work. Everybody should have the possibility of going as far as they can with whatever they do. It's not an
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Nude in opening section of Snow's
(1980).
issue for me. However, exactly how ''independent' anyone can be is a question we'd better not try to get into now.
I suppose it surfaced in the case of
because the film came out at a time when everyone was talking about the eroticized female body as the subject of the male gaze. This film seemed to rebel against that concern: it focuses in on a naked woman's body at the beginning, and then in the third long section where you jump from one shot to the next, naked women's bodies are used often. Were you addressing that issue or . . .
Yes, I guess I was. It was probably the first time I'd done something specifically as a means of entering a current dialogue. The way you said 'rebel against that concern' is interesting. It reminds me of that horrifying phrase 'politically correct.' Is having
differences of opinion with
feminist/social theory 'rebelling'? Is the 'concern' so defined that it can't be discussed, only approved?
Looking for 'what does this mean?' first and not experiencing what is happening in its sensual complexity is a terribly wasteful, ass-backwards way of experiencing my films or any other work of art. I have never made a work to convey
meaning. I work with areas of meaning and know that there are as many meanings as there are viewers. What is
in the concrete, phenomenological sense is of first importance. You seem to see all my other films, except this one, that way and I appreciate your observations. The problems here seem to be as much yours as the film's.
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On one level I was asking the spectator to consider the relationship between separate, or seemingly separate, parts of this one film to each other, and in that light to consider the relation between the two parts of the human species. After the opening where the image, which is electronically shaped, focuses on the nude woman, there's a section that's totally staged: there's a fixed camera and the set moves. The longer, third section is the opposite of the first two in terms of what is done to make the image.
The first image sequence is made by shaping, molding, manipulating the entire frame. In the second, what was photographed was staged, constructed, the way a play or most narrative fiction films are made. The camera is fixed on a tripod and what one first reads as a series of side-to-side trucking shots is soon revealed as the opposite: the entire set is being moved. This sequence is audibly directed by the director. Then the camera dollies into the set, destroying it and knocking down a wall, which starts the third and longest section: a montage of images taken from life that's quasi-documentary and diaristic. It's important that I shot all these images: the surgery, May Day in Poland, the Arctic hunt, et cetera. All the shots are hand-held panning shots, the movement of the camera always being derived from an aspect of the scene: following a line, moving with, or against a motion . . .
I wanted to make a dialogue between these systems. Aspects of the film are male: it's made by a heterosexual man. Some of this is conscious, for
film, and some of it's inevitable. Aspects of the film have to do with experiencing the inherent nature of the
