then, a long narrative film with sound, and
which still survives. I did several similar one-take thirty-minute films. One was an 'interview' with a former concentration camp guard; another was an interview with a pair of twin brothers who were idiot-savants; and a number of other things in that format. Also, a very long film,
which was made up of 'one-take,' three-minute, one-hundred-foot sections. This was the precursor of
and was inspired in a way by the Lumiere brothers, by Balzac, who I was reading at the time, and also by news reportage.
One of my first film fascinations was with newsreels. I was crazy about them. This was before television, if you can imagine that. I think what attracted me was that the people in them were not 'acting,' or so it
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was supposed to seem. This was the real stuff, a window on the way things really were in the Big World, which I was dying to get to. It was thrilling actuality, glares and flashes of 'reality,' what people really
. And I loved the stylesimple, straightforward, directand the basic idea of 'witness': eyes and ears of the world you might say, Buddhalike, nonjudgmental eye on suffering and on joy. Every conceivable human emotion would be engaged in the seven or eight minutes of the format. And they were strangely innocent, elegant, and severe. The cameramen and editors were studio-trained and knew all the tricks of classical composition and montage ('Russian cutting,' they called it). Newsreels were an endless source of innocent, unintentional surrealism. Sex, disguised, and death, made plain, were the great themes. Bunuel himself once said that on his best day he couldn't hope to create images as bizarre as one could see every day in the newsreels.
Of course, they were all produced and controlled by the major movie studios (Hearst Metrotone was the exception) and issued each week as part of an entertainment package, carefully calibrated to the comprehension level of some mythical hick in Indiana, and they were all hysterically patriotic, and fundamentally fascist and manipulative, but they were great all the same, and they affected me greatly. Not so strange that over the years I've always made my living working around 'news' in one form or another.
(There's an amusing passage in a novel by Harry Crews where the narrator delays orgasm by remembering newsreels he has seen of death, disasters, and various horrors. He recommends Pathe News as a specific for premature ejaculation and for birth control in general.)
What was
?
was meant to be a personal 'newsreel,' to document absolutely every aspect of my life, starting with the small domestic things and then moving out into the larger social context. I would try to shoot a one-hundred-foot roll each week, if I could afford to buy and develop a rollI was very poor. I filmed virtually every person that I knew then; I filmed family, landlord, employer, police. And I filmed myself cooking, eating, sleeping, lovemaking. I filmed in the supermarket, bank, and my workplace . . . you get the idea. Each roll was sort of a core-sample extracted directly from the heart of my life. The style was very simple and straightforwardminimum of artifice. I would simply focus on the situation, turn on the camera and let the roll run out. I was naive enough to believe that there was an objective 'truth' that could be 'captured' in this way. I later accepted ''version,' instead of truth. There's some commentary on this period in my life in the published screenplay of
by Jim McBride.
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Another project that occupied a lot of my time then was a script for a feature. The working title was
and of course, there was no chance of it getting made, but it still interests me in a way. The basic idea was simple enough: a movie crew shooting a movie about a movie crew that was shooting a movie about a movie crew that was shooting . . . film within a film within a film to infinity.
Another 'truth' operation. The cardinal rule was that every last foot of film that was shot would be used, and used in the order in which it was shot. For example, if the 'A' crew shot fifteen takes of Scene 7A, in order to get the 'right' one, then all fifteen would be included in the final film. If the 'B' crew shot ten takes of the 'A'' crew filming the fifteen takes of Scene 7A, then all of those takes would be included, and so on. If a total of two hundred hours of film were shot, the final version of
would be two hundred hours long. Mind you, the 'A' crew would be filming actors pretending to be filming other actors who would be pretending to film other actors, et cetera. Much use was to have been made of 'takes' and 'mistakes' and 'out-takes.' Everything would be included. I've always been fascinated by out-takes, by what goes 'wrong.' An actor forgetting his lines or looking at the camera by accident, one fiction collapsing instantly into another; the shot at that moment changing from an 'acted fiction' into a document, which of course it was all along; all narrative films are really documentaries about actors pretending. Anyway, it was to be about the impossibility of ever getting 'behind the scenes.' I was working on several other scripts at that time as well. It was the next best thing to actually making the films.
Were there other kinds of work?
I worked with loops for a while, using found footage. I did some cut-up films under the influence of [William S.] Burroughs/[Brion] Gysin. I would raid the waste containers at the Film Center Building on trash pickup day. There were a lot of film labs in the building and you could find thousands of feet of imperfect prints, rejects of all kinds: 'educational' films, nature documentaries, pornography, military training films, everything. So took all of this material and cut it up at random into uniform lengthsI think it was twenty-four-frame sectionsand then put the pieces into a large box and tossed them until any selection would be totally random. Then without looking to identify the pieces, I would splice them all together and recut the whole thing, starting in the middle of the original twenty-four-frame piece, jumping the first splice, and ending in the middle of the next twenty-four-frame piece. Then I would recut and retoss these pieces and randomly splice them together so that each piece was now twelve frames long and so on. I ended up with shots that were about four frames long and thousands of splices. When it
