I've only shown it once, but it has the same kind of impact that
has.
It's a simple film, and, unlike
easy to send through the mail with instructions.
A number of people have done work related to your projected-light films. Some of Taka Iimura's work in the early seventies is related in a general sense, as is Tony Conrad's
[1966], though in other ways,
is nearly the opposite of
.
I didn't see a lot of the films that, I suppose I could say, influenced me. I didn't see Michael Snow's
until 1976, but I'd read about it, and other films, in David Curtis's
[London: Studio Vista Ltd., 1971]. I was intrigued by his description of
. The idea of creating a rule that would generate a filma continuous zoom in this casewas fascinating. It was a surprise to me when I finally saw
because it didn't have anything like the precision and cleanliness I had assumed from Curtis's description. It stopped and started; it jumped; light came in and out; and people arrived and left. It's quite funny to think that one can be influenced by a description of something which doesn't accurately represent the thing itself.
I didn't see
although again I had read about ituntil 1975 at Anthology [Anthology Film Archives]. People talked as though
were a three-dimensional version of
. They are both about light, but, as you say, they're also very different. Tony Conrad rented
sight unseen from a description he had read. He was teaching at Antioch. Then he called me and invited me out there. We had a great time together.
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Sketch for McCall's
(1974).
When I showed
during the mid seventies, people loved getting into the mysterious smoky space it created. Now with the health backlash against smoke, many people won't stay in the room with the film.
Actually I consider the use of smoke a problem. But it's a necessary contingency. I've shown the film in city spaces where there's a lot of dust, and it works there. But I showed it in Sweden once without smoke or dust, and it was completely invisible. Personally I don't like the perfume smell of incense, which is the most convenient way to make smoke. Somebody at the Chicago Art Institute told me that when they decided to show it, they consulted their chemistry department and came up with a completely odorless, safe smoke. I wrote the method down and then lost it. It's always with a little regret that I use the incense method. And when you have a film as long as
cigarette smoke is a real problem.
With the later 'Cone' films it matters less; they're more visible without smoke.
When I drew the lines for those, I made them a bit thicker. The line of
is delicate; it could have done with a little strengthening.
In a sense there's an irony in the fact that the implicit politic of the filmthe idea of using film to communitize the film audienceis undercut by the presumptions of the spaces or the institutions in which it's usually shown.
Well, that's always going to be true. Every context you show a film in is always going to imply a whole set of assumptions. If Americ-
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can independent film has found a home, it's definitely in colleges. That's where it's still alive and viewed regularly. That's where the rentals come from. At this point, art museums have lost interest in avant-garde cinema,
