experience. But there's an inevitable gap between what writing can communicate and the multi-dimensional experience of film. It strikes me that a lot of what passes for complexity in writing about film is interference that results from the inability of the word to really come to grips with the visual/auditory experience of film.
is about these issues; it turns film onto language in the way that language is normally turned loose on film.
Early in the film you pay homage to independent filmmakers who have used text in inventive ways: Marcel Duchamp, Hollis Frampton, Su Friedrich. . . . Had you been thinking about working with text for a long time or did the recent spate of this kind of work inspire you?
I wrote the original part of that text around 1975 and made the film almost ten years later. It came out of the text for the Chatham Square album [
Chatham Square, 1975] and out of
as another way of controlling duration. Since then, I've been asked whether I knew Jenny Holzer's work, but I didn't at that time. The things she's done have some relationship, although there's no timing involved in her work, as far as I can tell.
is poetic justice for people who make a fetish of the ability to write and read sentences. Is that what you had in mind?
That's part of it, yes. Another thing is the business of using the art object, in this case film, as a pretext for arguments that the writer considers of more interest. That's valid in some senses, but sometimes it seems like a misuse of the stimuli, the film. It's as if you're producing these things for other people to advance their own interests and arguments.
The way in which text is used in
makes a comment on language-based approaches to film. The formal design of showing one word at a time with the same margins, regardless of the size of the word, results in the little words being large, which of course grammatically they often are in the language, and the big words being much smaller. This is precisely the opposite of what a lot of academic writing does. At academic conferences, using complex vocabulary often becomes a performance.
seems to critique that kind of linguistic performance with a different kind of performance.
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It does, yes.
There's sometimes a tendency in academe to see filmmakers as laboratory animals who don't really know what they're doing, but whose doings can be explained by theorists. Have you read much theory?
I've read lots of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard. Some of those people have become deified. I think Derrida is one of the most interesting.
Barthes's writing is unctuous. He seems often to be defining a new category of the object under observation, but when you start to examine what he says, you find that it isn't as essential as the revelatory tone of the writing suggests it is. And some of the ideas are really ludicrous. 'The Death of the Author' [in Barthes,
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, translated by Stephen Heath)] is this essay written by a very distinctive stylist, with a name, and
says that the individual writer is subsumed in the totality of writing, that there really is no writer. It's an arch little essay by a famous author! A lot of 'theory' is like that. And in Barthes's
the supposedly revolutionary tack is that there's no reference to gender. It's sex with no body. The book becomes this vapor of extraordinary style, perfume.
is interesting, but pretty strange, too.
There's a fashionable idea now, especially among academic theorists, that the personor the subject, as they say these daysis totally culturally shaped. I don't believe that at all. I think somebody is born, that there is an organism that has functions. It can be twisted; it can be hurt; but there's still a specific person there. Every person is born with a certain complicated set of possibilities. Of course, there's a lot of breadth to that, but I don't believe that culture totally shapes the person. Individual people also shape culture, which is, after all, one of the functions of art. Those who have commented on the way in which dominant ideologies totally shape people often seem to assume
been able to escape that process. Very mysterious!
Philosophy has been very important to me: Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, many many commentaries like Havelock's
. One of my favorite books is Heidegger's
. I've read everything by Wittgenstein, I think. Derrida is very interesting, a kind of Hegel/Mallarme. Lacan is medieval Christian Zen. Laura Mulvey seems a university student in this context. Years ago I read a lot of Paul Valery and was quite affected by his writing, though sometimes he's arch in a way similar to Barthes.
My feminist reading is fairly wide. I've even read books by Andrea Dworkin! Joyce Carol Oates is terrific, Germaine Greer too. I like
