(Tyndall was present when
was discussed).
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Where did your interest in film begin?
I went to art school [Ravensbourne College of Art], where I studied art history, graphic design, and photography. I was part of a mixed-media performance group called Jacob's Ladder: we used film and slide projections, live music, and dance within an open structure.
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There was a film department at Ravensbourne, but I didn't have much to do with it, except for a bit during my last year (I was there for four years19641968). For two years after leaving art school, I worked collaboratively with a friend (John McNulty) who was a computer scientist. Our work culminated in an exhibit for an international computer exhibition, which involved an interactive game and a 360-degree slide presentation. It might seem strange to be working with a scientist, but at that time we were quite captivated with the possibility of marrying art and technology. It was happening in New York [City], too: there were those nine evenings of Rauschenberg, Billy Kluver, and the Bell Telephone Labs. It's also around the time of Expo '67 in Montreal and the love affair there with mixed media.
Having completed work on this two-year project, I made my first film, a very short piece to open Bob Cohan's
a dance performance at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. That hooked me. I began to do photographic pieces based on performances, or, really, actions made to be photographed. One of those was an elaborate landscape event that took place in the middle of the countryside. It was too big to be still photographed, so I made a film, and with the aid of friends taught myself how to edit it. That was
[1972]. Increasinglyd partly because of my interest in the work at the Coop [The London Film-makers' Co- operative]I got more and more interested in film itself, and less and less in the events I was making to be photographed. I began to think about the possibility of a film that was only a film. What were the irreducible elements for a film? My interest in that question was certainly influenced by Peter Gidal's early writing about the films of Andy Warhol. Also, during the early seventies there was a stress on the idea of process and on the implications of the medium itself.
The specific question that interested me was, how does an audience look at a film? How does an audience relate to a film? Was sitting and looking at a conventional narrative film a passive or an active experience? At the time it seemed as if a conventional Hollywood film could be faulted for the way in which it constructed a passive audience. That position, of course, was later discredited, but at the time it did lend some justification to the quite pared-down films we were making. In any case, the question of how an audience relates to a film was one which I felt could be explored through the film object, with an audience. My particular circumstances, and those of friends, made it a given that this work had to be cheap, which tended to mean that the films were silent (8mm was not used a great deal at that time; we were mostly working in 16mm). The specific idea that I was working on was that the projector's light beam was not only visible, but physical and space-occupying, and it
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could be shaped, both in space and in time, using film as the medium. I conceived
in the mid-Atlantic, two and a half days out of Southampton, when Carolee [Carolee Schneemann, with whom McCall lived from 1971 to 1976] and I moved to New York. This was January 1973. I made the film in August.
I usually show
at the front of a movie theater, across the space, so that it makes a specific reference to the normal projection situation.
It was designed to be shown in an empty room, at an independent film showcase like the London Co-op or the Collective in New York or in a museum space or gallery. And always in an empty space, free of chairs.
There was never a showing of the film where it was necessary to do more than make a simple announcement, something like, 'This film asks to be viewed in a rather unusual way. You'll find out the best way for you to look at it, but I recommend that to start with, you stand where there would normally be a screen, looking back toward the projector.' People who weren't expecting this would be intrigued, annoyed, whatever, but usually they did what I suggested, and then, after ten or fifteen minutes, they'd be finding their way to look at it.
On one level, the film is a product of serious, analytical thinking about the structure of film exhibition. On another, it's close to a spiritual experience. Are some presentations of
particularly memorable for you?
I love
. I saw it for the first time in Sweden. Carolee and I had been invited to Fylkingen in Stockholm to do performances: I was still doing my fire performances at that time. I picked the film up at the lab the day I was leaving, threw it into the suitcase as I left, and had it tucked under my arm when I arrived in Stockholm. I hadn't seen it. I told people there about the film, and they arranged a screening. None of us knew what to expect, really. There was a polite audience of about thirty people. The room was darkened, the projector turned on, and the film began. I was astonished, mostly by the physical beauty of the shape that came into being. The film did all the things that I wanted it to do. I had anticipated that the audience would go about looking at it in a way that was quite different from looking at a picture on a screen. And I had expected to see a light beam shaped in space. But all that I'd expected seemed less important than what was going on in the room: the physical event seemed bigger than the idea. I was rather awed by it.
