A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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Cone and with each other, crawling under the Cone, telling other viewers about particularly engaging spots to see it from, and blowing smoke through it. (In order to keep the Cone's thin shaft of light visible, McCall usually makes sure the screening space is smoky before the film begins, or asks that viewers smoke during the presentation.) Often, groups who experience the film lose their self-consciousness and, by the end, are interacting freely. As McCall explains in his program notes for

Line Describing a Cone,

the audience experience generated by the film is a way of throwing into relief the implied politic of the normal screening situation, with its rigid rows of seats and 'hidden' projection booth.

By the mid seventies McCall had become dissatisfied that the interactive process explored in

Line Describing a Cone

and other early films was available only to a very small audience in rather cloistered situations: colleges, art galleries in a few major cities. He began to consider the relationship of experimental art making to the larger, commercial society. One result was his involvement with

an anticatalogue

(New York: Catalogue Committee of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, 1977), an anthology of articles exposing the implicit political agenda encoded in the power structures of contemporary art museums and in the art shows generated by these institutions. Another result was a pair of collaborative films:

Argument

(1978) and

Sigmund Freud's Dora

(1979).

Argument

was a collaboration with Andrew Tyndall, who had come to the art world with a background in journalism and commercial film reviewing. Their idea was to use the fact that the audience for experimental forms of filmmaking was small (albeit educated, intelligent, sophisticated)

as a resource

. They proposed their ninety-minute feature as a catalyst for an extended discussion among the members of the Downtown art community (and related communities in other areas) about the position of such communities vis-a-vis Western consumer culture. In order to contextualize the plight of the serious film artist, they decided to use

Argument

to conduct a filmic examination of the aesthetic, economic, and political implications of using printed text and still photography in the world of mass-market commercial mediaas exemplified specifically by the September 18, 1977, issue of the

New York Times Magazine

(devoted to men's fashion), the November 14, 1977, issue of

Time,

and the July 1977 issue of

Esquire

.

Argument

is serially organized into five differently structured units, each of which presents the viewer with a different balance of text and imagery. These structural units are arranged A, B, C, D, E, A, C, D, B, E, D, C, B, A. For many viewers,

Argument

is a frustrating and annoying experience. We are asked to read and hear the same or similar information over and over, always in contexts that frustrate our ability to

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completely grasp it. During structural unit B, for example, we must read a text that moves physically while listening to a second continuous text read by continually changing voices. The irony is that the frustration

Argument

creates is an essential part of its central goal: to use the methods of commercial culture to provide a critique of that culture. Despite the information overload, we have a clear sense of the filmmakers' fundamental message by the conclusion of

Argument,

just as we always get the message of the commercial culture ('You deserve a break today!' 'Aren't you hungry?') through the barrage of conflicting and partial information that characterizes the commercial television hour and the newspaper and magazine page.

Argument

uses manipulative tactics, not to entertain and market, but to jar the intelligence into a more thorough recognition that our culture's most pervasive and powerful uses of 'communications' technologies have more to do with the maintenance of economic and political power than with the exchange of ideas in a free society.

McCall's second collaborative film,

Sigmund Freud's Dora,

developed out of the discussions that

Argument

generated. In fact, the two women listed along with McCall and Tyndall as directorial collaborators on

Sigmund Freud's Dora

Claire Pajaczkowski and Jane Weinstock (Babette Mangolte did the camera work)had written critiques of

Argument

that were published in the final edition of the workbook McCall and Tyndall designed for the seminarlike presentations of

Argument

. Like

Argument, Sigmund Freud's Dora

uses a complex balance of enacted imagery, still photographs, and printed text, but in this case to suggest that Freudian psychoanalysis functionsor in the particular case of Dora, failed to functionas a means of controlling female psyches in the interests of male ideological and economic goals.

McCall has not completed a film since

Sigmund Freud's Dora,

though he has written scripts for film and television, including a version of the Frankenstein story. My interview with McCall began in 1983, with revisions continuing through 1986. Our conversation covers McCall's films up through