Was the greenish tone of the black-and-white imagery caused by printing black-and-white footage on color stock?
That particular tint was my choice.
You used some interesting music by Storm De Hirsch and others.
The section with Lucia Dlugoszewski is unique. I think she's an exceptional composer and performer.
is the film of yours I've seen most often. When I first saw it, I was conscious primarily of the diaristic aspects. But, more recently I've been just as aware of the changing film stocks and the different tintings of the black-and-white footage. It now seems simultaneously an exploration of your personal environment
of film materials.
Those are all controlled accidents. Some of the stock was used because it was available when I ran out of film. When I was filming the part now entitled 'A Visit to Brakhages,' I ran out of film, and Stan found some outdated Kodachrome under his bed. It was a very different texture than the surrounding material. Sometimes I ran out of color, so I used black and white. I had no plan to explore film stocks. But once you have all those different stocks, then you begin to structure with color; you pay attention to their qualities. The aspect you notice had also to do with my whole approach to film laboratories. You know how paranoid and careful some filmmakers are about labs. Usually the filmmaker tries to supervise the lab work closely, checking one print and another, refusing prints, switching labs. . . . I don't do that. I consider that whatever happens at the lab is what I want. I don't indicate that they should make this part lighter and that darker. I do my work in the camera, and all I ask from the lab is to make a straight, what's known as 'one light' print, with no special timing, no anything. Usually I get results that I like. I have never rejected a print. If something goes really wrong, then of course I indicate on the next print that it should be corrected. I think that I have complete control over my materials; I don't leave anything for the labs to do or undo.
You must have had a tremendous amount of diary footage by the time you made
. How did you come to make that particular film?
Page 98
The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo had a special celebrationI don't remember the occasionand they commissioned new works in the fields of music, dance, and film, and maybe some other arts. Film was included at Gerald O'Grady's request; he was the adviser there. I was invited to make a film and given ten months to work on it. I used the material that was easiest for me to put together. The gallery helped to make a print and paid the expenses. The version I screened in Buffalo had sound on tape; it was also slightly shorter than the present version. Later I decided to finish the film and to include some other material.
For me the strongest reel of the four has always been the first. Several sections from that reel are distributed separately.
Yes,
and
all filmed in 1966.
It led me to wonder whether you edited it reel by reel or . . .
I worked on the thing as a whole. I put those particular parts into distribution, however, before the rest was finished and before the invitation from Buffalo. Eventually I think I will pull them out of distribution, except for
which is different from the version you see in
and
which is also different.
When did you become familiar with Thoreau's
?
It's one of the books that Peter Beard is obsessed with. During the shooting of
he gave me a copy, and when I was editing
I always had it around. For a long time I thought that that was the first time I read it. But recently, while retyping my early diaries from 1948, I discovered that I was reading
then, in German.
It's sometimes thought of as a book about country living, but Thoreau was living just outside of town. In that sense your use of Central Park as your 'Walden Pond' strikes me as particularly appropriate.
Not only Central Park. To me Walden exists throughout the city. You can reduce the city to your own very small world that others may never see. The usual reaction after seeing
