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death experience through the catalyst of hepatitis. I had studied
. There the deceased is on a journey, 'the time of uncertainty.' The specters come to us as our own personal cinema: we are obliged to confront the results of our own deeds. It becomes more and more frightening. As I pursued the experience, I found this delightful moment in the beginning which was so lovely; it degenerated into a terrifying but lovely cosmic storm. In
each moment has an opposite side, and there's a color for every aspect. I forget their phraseology, but green, for example, on the positive side might be the jewel from the knowledge of equality (or some such Buddhist term), and on the opposite, negative side, the fearful aspect, jealousy.
In all the segments of
I had a ruling form or deity. One was an old, wise horse named Amber that lived with us. I shot her mane against the black stormy sky. Then there'd be another form, another creature or person. Their opposite would appear in the second reel, all in the same order exactly, with the opposite meaning. So those first two reels were mates; they ran almost the same length. There's a continuing gradual degeneration, and the beasts of light become the terrifying beasts of darkness that are the guiding entities of the second reel.
The assignment the first time, given to me by the conditions of making the film, was not to make a beautiful film, but rather to make a
about this inner passage, a little-described, but very commonin fact universalphase of being human: the evolution of consciousness through which every man and woman eventually must go. There's hardly any information about it in our modern age, but it's common in some of the old civilizations, perhaps in all of them: information as to how to make that passage. In contemporary culture we have the ball-game or warfare scores on TV, the homogenized newscasters all reading the same news.
I think my concept for
is almost identical to Stan Brakhage's
[196770], which explores the 'scenes' prior to childhoodthe scenes so near that time between being and being. Brakhage was sending me those films at the time I was going through all this, and they were essentially identical to what I was making, I thought.
Do you see reels three and four at all as mates?
No. I just saw reel three through my own sequential experience, almost like lessons in a course. I went from presexuality into sexuality, using recollections of boys I grew up with, the athletes I admired so much, out of the yearbooks. That wasn't too well shot.
Were you an athlete?
No. I was underdeveloped in high school, this little punky guy with a cute haircut. I really admired athletes a lot; they were big, muscu-
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lar, and hairy. I was born to be an artist, and I had an artistic way of seeing. I looked at every basketball game as a great symphony: the changes of movement, the rhythms, the nice coordination and musculature young athletes have. That finally came out in reel three in that moment of the Bardo, No Man's Land. I was studying it all and putting it down as I saw it. The sun went down in the ocean at the end of reel three. And then reel four was entirely separate and different, but it continued the same themes. Paul, Charlotte, and I scripted this little story and filmed it as we went along. The film ended with the phrase 'Ever Westward, Eternal Rider,' a kind of Celtic farewell, which I have written into my willa tribute to myself, to life! One must do these things for oneself, I think, given the monumental indifference of the modern mind.
The beginning of reel three, the scene where you and the woman make love, is very sexy.
Oh, yeah.
I wondered if you were thinking of three and four as a pair because the personalized, direct experience of life at the beginning of reel three is the opposite of the Hollywood-ized Western in reel four, which certainly isn't very romanticcertainly not for the woman. Reel three puts reel four into a funny perspective.
A lot of people just
see that reel four belonged to the film at all.
It was nice to work that hard in those years, to have the blessing from the gods to allow me to manage it. That film just seemed to go on endlessly, like a pregnancy, and then the baby bursts out with such pain! Whew! It was so taxing, so that now, twenty-five years later, I'm living a half life.
I have to rest a lot just to get up and talk to people now. Many people just don't understand these things
haven't the
idea, with the longest unendurable explanation, what I'm saying: 'Oh, you mean you're retired!?' It's so far from the simple fact that you've used yourself so ruthlessly in order to be a channel for something beautiful. But it is wonderful that such a limited fragile creature as a person, a human being,
