reversal. That was pretty decent. Nobody used it a lot, but it was real nice. And the Kodachrome before it was very interesting, but that disappeared right in the beginning. Then they got into these flat, uninteresting TV newsreel stocks and that's all they had left for a while.
This society has a way of homogenizing every goddamn thing. It's terrifying. I just can't tell you how I feel about it. When I moved to Olympia, there were a few little alternative corners left in town. Within five years, they were all destroyed, all the old docks, the alleys, the berry bushes, the crazy sailors, all gone. Horrible. And now we have the New World Order, the storm troops, a world of 'winners.'
When I interviewed Yoko Ono, she had an idea for a travelogue of Japan, where everything would be in super close-up: you wouldn't have to leave your room to make a travelogue. You could talk about noodles and have an extreme close-up of noodles . . .
[laughter]
Her idea reminds me of
.
Yeah.
Which is like an ethnographic film made up of textures.
That's right.
How did you end up in Mexico? Did you always carry a camera with you when you traveled?
That was one of the banners of the sixties, filmmakers carrying their cameras. They got too heavy after a while.
In
I just shot simply but used a telephoto lens with an extension tube on the back, which gives you a very limited focal plane, a few inches. No one I know ever uses it with a long lens, especially with a moving subject, but I really liked the way it looked. I had to get into the flesh of that town, with the merciless sun beating into the bricks of the
Page 132
street and all the deathevery night there'd be something or somebody killed, lying in the street in the morning. I had met up with this (archetypal) young girl, riding her pony. And I was afraid to meet her father. I'd sent word out trying to see her, and
sent word back to come meet him, and I thought, 'Oh, God!' But he turned out to be a very nice fellow: Manuel Sasa Zamora, of Jalisco. They were very poor and lived behind a big gate and had a horse and a dog named Penquina. That horse didn't like me and would not let me film. I had to give it up for a while. Later, I named my horse after the filmValentina.
When I was looking through your films, the biggest discovery for me was
. It's a pretty amazing film, and certainly begs for questions because it's so diverse. Reel one is very much about morning and creation.
I think that beginning section is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in the movies. I had to get out of bed to make every one of those takes. I was really sick, with hepatitis. Tulley would come over, and I would tell him what part of the house I had to go to, and he would help me up. I'd tie a knot in a big beach towel and pull in my liver with it. He'd walk me over to, say, the fish tank, and set the tripod up and load the camera. Then I'd do the take and go back to bed.
The opening shot of Part One is very mysterious. The spectator never actually sees anything, just a shade of pink that gets a little more dense, then less, over a period of about two and a half minutes. And I'm not sure what I'm hearing: sometimes it sounds like traffic, sometimes like the ocean.
It's the ocean. Later, there are the sounds of passing timber trucks.
That opening is supposed to be the highest moment of illumination in the whole work. I was following the Tibetan description of the time between life and death, and that's either the illumined memory of perfection or the illumined moment of discovery. It can go either way. I never played the film backward, but it was designed so it could run backward or forward.
You mean the whole film, all four parts?
Let's see, the last reel was in narrative form so that would always run forward. Then would come the end of Part Three, from the end to the beginning; then the end of Part Two would come, then the end of Part One. The end of the whole film would be the beginning shot with that pure light.
So that version would move from the mundanery of conventional narrative toward this moment of supreme illumination, like a journey up the chakras?
I don't remember the whole story. I was describing my own
