a beautiful thing!
I'm puzzled about the numbering of the short, 'extra' reels of
. There are numbers fourteen, forty-one, forty-three, forty-six, forty-seven, and fifty-two. Is there a system?
I always just number the reels from one on. I shot
on ASA 25 outdoor Kodachrome, I believe. I think it was about the last they had. And I numbered the rolls from one on, just to keep track of them when they went to the lab. That sunlight image that opens Part One was the first roll I shot. I didn't use number fourteen in the film.
Page 135
Then I used all the rolls from fourteen up to forty-one. And so on. And I shot after I knew I was done making the main body of the film. I had to let it keep going since there was so much vitality in what I was shooting. Finally, it got to be like the Greek Golden Age passing when everything got too elaborate and touched up and didn't have the newness of the earlier stuff. So I stopped. Later, I selected the best 'rolls' and released them as such. I consider them as artifacts, essentially, as in an archeological dig.
is also made up of a lot of little rolls.
Yes. They're not all small, but generally they have the roll concept, or they're like 'postcards,' as the intro explains. They're all separate but have the basic connection of belonging to the Romance. I use 'romance' in the French sense, of story, and also in the sense that the human and mind seems to prefer inventing, rather than accepting, from moment to moment, the
of life/reality.
Roslyn, Washington, was one of the few remaining examples in North America of the kind of Old Europe village life that ended at the beginning of the twentieth century and was to a degree transported over here. I found myself in that town, with people from the 'Old World.' For them, reality was, 'Well, I'm here in this house and I have a job and I'm respectable and I feed my children and love and protect them; I built this house to defend myself, my family. and this town from others and from the wilderness around us.' That was the life I recorded in infinite detail in
and a major theme of
which preceded it.
I wanted to know, like Stendhal,
I did ask them this question constantly. Every day I would leave my house and walk down the street like anyone else in the village and be stopped and invited in for Italian pastry or some other treat and an hour's gossip, on the way to the post office. I would ask myself, 'Is it really true?'the subtitle of the work. The unanswered question works itself through lots of rolls and reels after the formal introduction, which I just barely managed to finish in the seventies while at Bard College before I had to move again. The rolls and notes to
remain in my Washington archivery waiting to be finished and released.
The concluding part, which is called 'The Cardinal's Visit,' is a narrative film, conceived with my close friend and filmmaker Elliot Caplan. I shot it with the last grant I had (an NEA) with the help of Elliot and a lovely apprentice and friend, Ms. Harley, who stayed in my little trailer in Upstate New York, between 1979 and 1981. We worked very hard for a while. I was the cardinal (I still have the costume). We shot about four hours of really pretty color negative with very elaborate lighting setups. We'd do two or three setups a day, just about like a Hollywood film. There were usually three of us: me, the young woman, and the man who
Page 136
played the young priest. I took a lot of the immediate dramatic detail from our everyday lives. For example, in real life the young guy fell in love with the girl. He didn't recognize the cardinal's interest in her, and I didn't want to tell him about it. There wasn't any reason to tell him. But he was getting romantic about her, and he would call every night, was rejected as often. The cardinal represented the church, but he was/is also a sensualist. His red cloth represents holy office
the fires of hell, the torments of time and mortality.
I spent a lot of money on the film. It's almost done. A friend of mine, Bonnie Jones, painted beautiful medieval title cards because there are a lot of booklike segments with chapter headings. I'm looking for a serious graduate film student who wants to finish the film as an M.A. project or something. We could select what goes with what and edit it. Or he or she could put it together. I don't want to do all that anymore. I'm too tired.
Because
are viewed as popular art and thus the property of the twentieth-century masses. Implicitly, it's part of our thinking that anyone who uses film seriously, poetically, experimentally is transgressing on sacred conventionlike asking the ''tree cutters,' who identify with 'free enterprise,' to use restraint in destroying our common environment. For the neighbors it can't be explained: 'Who are you: What do you
? You waste your time all day! Why don't you get a
? You've got a wife and children!' God, there's no
to it. Or you come into town and you're filming something, and you try to explain, but if you're not making a profit, it's inexplicable to people, it doesn't compute. It's so exhausting. It's like being a pugilist: you can only do it so long. And when you're finally broke and broken, no onetruly very fewcare at all.
