I had a CAPS grant in 1976 and with it I bought one of the first Super-8 sound cameras. I developed the idea of making Super-8 letters, where I could deal with a specific issue and a specific person very directly.
Also, I did a number of very short films during some of which I developed the formal ideas we began to play with in
like the device of printing a word whilst saying something related but contradictory. Also, I was the cinematographer on what I think was one of the first Super-8 sound features:
[1976] by the Australian Tim Burns. He was a friend, I had the camera, and he wanted somebody to shoot it.
was made over a year and was immensely enjoyable to me. I started to experience lots of pleasures that I hadn't experienced for a while, such as constructing a fiction out of photography: I suppose that's when I began to be interested in fiction again, and in acting.
Andrew and I met a year or so after this. Andrew had a strong background in commercial film. He had studied it formally and was beginning to get interested in avant-garde film just at the time when I was getting interested in narrative. Also, he followed political events quite carefully. We had quite a lot to talk about. We were just friends for a while, and then as we talked more and more, our talking turned into working together. One day we were looking through a color supplement about men's fashion in the
and we got caught up with how many things were conveyed in the supplement.
I was a journalist when I left school. I'd been very interested in film. I'd worked on a local paper, doing film reviews. I'm of the same generation that found
important when they were coming out of school. I had friends who were very interested in structuralism and in semiotic theory. In England I was aware of what was called 'independent cinema.' When I came to New York, I discovered what in those days was called the 'avant-garde' film scene, which was much closer to the art world than the British independent cinema was. Anthony and I started meeting during the summer of 1977, when all sorts of things in the art world and in avant-garde cinema and independent cinema and in the theory of cinema were being moved around and readjusted. We were in the middle of that readjustmentof people stepping back and starting to think about different strategies for making independent films.
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And of course,
addressed prescisely that problemand probably no other.
is a film about the strategies for making independent films.
And a film that was made to function as part of that discussion within the community of people who made films. It was a film that had no audience other than people who made films, which wa quite deliberate on our part.
was conceived as and analysis of the place of avat-garde cinema in the art world. As we saw it, avant-garde was a little ghetto, a very small group, and there didn't seem any way out of that. We decided to take that weakness, that problem, and turn it into a strength by making a film that spoke to that audience directly. Later,
was made specifically to bring together a number of different audiences that previously had had no connection with one another: an avant-garde film audience; a politically feminist audience; an audience interested in psychoanalysis; and, in addition, interested members of the public.
was extremely successful as a strategy. Ot has been seen a great deal. But actually where it led was out of the artworld and into the academy.
finds itself in the same circuit as other avant-garde filmexcept that it ends up in a different academic department.
I came to one of the seminaars you held at the Collective when you were first presenting
and at the time I was struck by what seemed aparadox: The film was made for an audience that already knew a good deal abut the way in which information was constructed in film and what its impact on audiences was. the audience most likely to benefit from
(an academic audience, classes in communications) didn't see it, and the audiences that ded seemed to recent it.
Looking back, I think we would locate the resentment at those early screenings not in what was being said by the film, but in the way the film was saying it. When I see and hear the film now, I find that it jars. Its tone is pretty strident and aaa bit smug. but I don't agree (although it's what people said; I remember Bill Brand saying it at the Collective seminar you were at) that everybody was familiar with all the issues the film raised. And even if the terms of the rgument were that organized a stuation where people could talk about them. I'm quite sure the resentment about the film was about the tone in which it spoke. You did geel assaulted, and with an incredibly dense amount of information. and it never let up, and it repeated itself, and it spoke very loudly. It didn't have very much light orl shadeit just kept talking.
I think there were people on the Left who went one step further than Bill Brand. They said, OK we understand all these problems you have in the area of and independent filmmaking practice and the politics of ideology, bu where's your program? This film gets turned in
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