camera, and then, seeing with the camera within the different systems used in the film, which includes man seeing women with the camera. It so happens that I do occasionally lust and while I didn't try to shoot only that way, I do
women. I noticed in working on the film that women's magazines always have women on the cover, which is very. interesting. There are a lot of photographs of women's magazines in the film. There's some so-called pornography. And there's some intimately personal stuff.
These images involve my sexual life as an artist in some respects, but they're interwoven with many, many other things that are all thematically announced in the first section. For example, the room is pink and the film gradually develops into a discourse on red: the symbolism of red, which, at least in the West, has to do with 'stop' and red-light district, blood, sugar, passionall those things and, of course, communism too. That's all in there. It demonstrates the multiplicity of readings there can be for any word or image.
The word 'presents' has incredibly varied meanings and uses, including the use in zoological literature that females
to males. Biology is as important to the film as psychoanalysis. Entertainment advertising
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says So and So Presents Such and Such. I like that my title is an abstraction of this. It doesn't say who presents what, it says that 'Presents' will be the subject of this film, so 'presentation,' then ''representation,' is invoked. A mostly feminine use is: 'is so and so presentable?' But of course the film is also 'presents' or 'nows,' and also 'gifts.'
Interwoven with all
is this business about how things are made. There are three different ways of making things. You can shape something, squeeze material into a certain form. Or you can add this to that. Or you can subtract this from that. And those are the
ways you can make anything. The film is involved with those options, and with a latent aspect of them, which is the unfortunate truth that in order to make something, you have to destroy something else, or at least change its form. And that crisscrosses with the sexual themes in some ways, but again, it doesn't attribute any one way of making to one gender or the other. So much is interwoven in the film in so many ways that it's almost the opposite of
.
' references get wider and wider. It closes with the fading out of the red and a drum roll, which is either military or funereal, the death of the film.
I understand that
had some hostile audiences, at least at first.
One of the worst was at the Collective in New York, where some women were furious in a way I found really obtuse. One question was, 'How come there's so much tits and ass in this film?' I was tempted to say, 'I can tell from your voice that you are the possessor of tits and ass.' The assumption seemed to be that tits and ass
. It was brought up that you
photograph so-called pornographyfor
purpose. That's amazing. I don't necessarily have anything against so-called pornography. I'm aware that there are aspects of it that are extremely questionableinvolving children and cruelty for examplebut I like, sometimes, some of what's called 'pornography.' I say 'so-called pornography' because that's always a question, too. What do you mean by 'pornography'? You mean it's what doesn't turn you on? Or what does? Another amazing question that night was, belligerently, from a male voice, 'How come there's no men's asses in this film?' I thought the discussion at the Collective didn't have much to do with the film.
It's true that
was prompted by the debate about eroticism and the depiction of women that was going on. I had been thinking about those issues for quite a while.
I think it was at that Milwaukee conference [Cinema Histories/ Cinema Practices II, held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, November 1982] that, after the screening of
Christian Metz asked, with a certain amount of puzzlement, 'What is the relationship between the two parts?' What
want that film to do is to force the
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spectator to
about the relationship between the two parts. All I could say to him was, 'The relationship between the two parts is a splice.' How
they relate? How are they part of the same organism? The point is that there are
of answers.
has been very useful for meespecially in thinking about the relationship of film experience and film criticism. Film criticism is almost always considered to be a
text about a
