pigs in that common sense of 'piggish' . . .
You mean you wouldn't insult pigs by comparing them with those guys?
Yeah. So I made a mistake there, because it's always taken that way. It was really just another one of many little devices in that movie to enforce the contradistinction between the guys back here in town, the City Fathers, doing whatever they do to perpetuate this characteristic defensive wall against nature. Anyway, Tseng Ching and I went out and had some adventures, and I recorded a lot of it. We found an old schoolhouse out in Arizona somewhere, where there used to be trails for the stagecoaches and the cavalry, and I found an old out-of-tune piano that she played and I recordedstuff like that.
Then Tseng Ching had to leave for China. I never saw her again. I went back to my folks' house for a while and winter came and that's when I went over the mountains and started the black-and-white section. I used film I had stolen in Hollywood: Tseng Ching and I had gone down to Hollywood before going to the Southwest and shot some film which I never used, and we found some stacks of that old film that Ron Rice used to use, in an alley in a big box. I immediately knew it was for me. So I hit the road with that film and over the mountains from San Francisco it was winter. I'd almost forgotten! I arrived in my Volkswagen with a weak battery, and it snowed and we were stuck in Nevada somewhere. The dog and I had to sleep together to survive! The next morning we ran into an Indian guy who was living with his pony in the basement of a hotel. He got a guy to come out and jump start us. There are so many stories in that film!
Technically speaking, I knew I wanted to have a more sophisticated way of combining imagery, which would somehow be accomplished
the original shooting. And I decided this was going to be a long film for two projectors. I didn't like the simple effect of in-camera superimposition. That was just too elementary. I shot a long section in the hills of the San Bernardino Valley one foggy morning. We were camped out. Later, when I started editing, it was used as a separate piece to be projected alongside the other material. I practiced that for a while, then I put it away. In the archives with the
material are long segments that were made to go side by side with the material that's in the distribution version of the film. But in the end I didn't combine imagery that way.
Page 128
Instead, to make a combined image, I used black Mylar tape. I'd lay stuff down side by side on a light table, and mask parts of the frame, so that later the frame would share two disparate scenes
the effect of superimposition. I had to do it manually because I didn't have access to optical printers. And a lot of that had to be taken off again, gradually, because it was a mess, but that's how some of those little effects were done. Lots of the material was put aside because it just wouldn't match up: lots of segments weren't used.
Finally I got the car running better and went north. I wanted to go up to Cutbank, Montana, 'cause that always had the coldest weather; I wanted to be there in the middle of winter. It was so cold that I broke the handle on my tripod while panning in a blizzard. It was crazy. I got up into the Indian reservations and then headed east. I wanted to do something in New York City, but Selma was happening, so I borrowed some money and flew to Selma. I was a day or two behind the terrible beating days that had sent me down there. I got what I could.
You had no sense at the beginning of the overall route you would take?
I went wherever my knight errantry took me, like Don Quixote.
It's like a feature-length newsreel. It seems to come out of
and the early Canyon newsreels.
Yes.
uses still another method of combining imagery.
took about three months of solid work. To go into the process at length would take us all day, but there are a lot of notes about the film, some at Anthology Film Archives. The notes were very important. After I had finished
there was a long period of going back to my tent at night and writing notes on the lessons I had learned from having made it. The film was still teaching me.
was made by the most horrendous effort of intellectualization and intuition combined, using the back and the front of the brain simultaneously, which blew my fuses for life. When I was editing
I would come out of my morning editing session around noon to lie in the sun and eat, and people I lived with in the commune would pass by, and I couldn't recognize them. I didn't know who they were. I was like someone with Alzheimer's disease. I just blew my brains out every morning editing that film. Now, I try to dissuade my students from this kind of suicidal single-mindedness!
Technically, when I made
I went into the field again with my 'weapon,' my tools. I collected a couple of prisms and a lot of
Page 129
