describes can be worked on. That meant using the film as a way of bringing together the community of filmmakers we had found ourselves part of.
But you seem to have had it both ways in that decision. You wanted to show a ninety-minute film as a catalyst for a community dialogue about the issues raised by the film. Everybody was supposed to come in and watch
film, and
talk about the issues. Why not just hold the meeting and discuss the issues? And after the film, you two were in front to talk about it. The experience claimed to be about community, but it functioned more as performance.
OK, remember that at the time
was made, the usual model in the places where you showed avant-garde film was that the person stood up afterwards and answered questions. We said, OK, we'll show the film and then stand up afterwards and answer questions, but we're going to limit the number of people to thirty, give them a book to read first so they're prepared for the film, and tell them this is a
rather than a question/answer session. Our presentation was a reaction to
situation, rather than a reaction to the commercial cinema, where it would be a 'radical' idea just to bring the filmmaker in after the film.
Well, I respected and admired the idea thenand still doand yet as an experience
seems to have undercut its own modus operandi.
Yes. As a political project, I don't think it worked out at all. It caused us to revise our ideas about the way people see film.
At the time, I had what seemed like a common reaction.
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The film seemed strident, overbearing. Now it seems much less a polemic than a labyrinth. I find it poignant and personal.
In the credit sequence you mention that it's an autobiographical account of your years as avant-garde filmmakers.
That was one of a number of contradictory descriptions. They were all true.
I think it is personal myself, but we wouldn't have dared recognize that at the time we were making it. At the time, we wanted a film that would be
personal cinema. We wanted to look at cinema as a collective experience, not one where the individual artist donates his work to an audience.
I don't know any film that dramatizes more clearly how difficult it is to make a serious, meaningful, politically active film. Those conversations where the one person will go through this whole explanation/justification and then review how the person he was talking to responded with an equally convincing but opposite explanation/justification are tremendously revealing.
We were quite fond of those monologues. They're probably pretty close to everyone's experience, including our own.
The film that we quote the most from is Godard's
[1972], which has that same sort of tormented concern with how to make a politically correct film.
It may be that one of the problems people had with
is that it understood so completely, and rejected, the lines of defense for bodies of work that were popular in the mid seventies. In some ways, it's a remarkable chronicle of that moment in downtown Manhattan filmmaking. It's also gorgeous to look at. At the original screening all I saw was the information coming at me. Now the color and design elements are more obvious.
It is good-looking. It's got very rich color. We only have one print, which is too bad, because we can never make a print that looked like the one you saw. There's no Kodachrome printing left, so those reds are gone forever.
The whole minimal background that you brought to it works quite powerfully in the film. In the credit passage, the guy changes his clothing in a single, long continuous shot; there are long passages of clear leader, and so on.
Yes. In a way, nothing got left behind.
Even the text has a certain graphic elegance though the three texts we see superimposed on the advertisements are not exactly precise. There are slight inconsistencies, which give the film a handcrafted feel. It
