over the use of 'Kodak.' I'm sure they would have won, since they did invent that word. After that, the film was referred to as
for a while, until it became
Part One of
. This would have been 1974, I believe. There was some feeling that I should have resisted and gone to court over this, but of course, those who felt that way weren't about to pay the legal fees, and I wasn't about to be a martyr over it. I could hardly pay the rent at the time. Actually, the title worked better without 'Kodak,' anyway, because it reflected my feelings more exactly.
I wonder if the second title was a pun, on the 'huge pupils' of the filmmaker entranced with light and the sensuality of things, and the 'huge pupils' of the viewers in their surprise at the film's openness about things normally kept personal. In one sense, the film seems a quintessential sixties filmsexuality, the human body, become subjects to be revealed, reveled in, explored, whether they're one's own body or the body of one's lover or those of others.
It was a pun, sure, many of my titles are. I enjoy ambiguity. The erotic aspects of the film now seem incredibly innocent and naive in view of what has happened in the intervening years, but life has a way of doing that about everything.
How did you decide on 'The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse' as a title?
I first used that title in 1972, and later Part Two was shown at the Whitney under that title in 1974. As you know, it was the name of a parlor game popular among the surrealists in the twenties, although it has a long occult history as a divinatory tool. The game takes a number of people to play. The trick is that a piece of clean paper is given to one person who draws a human head on the top, and then folds that over so that it can't be seen. The second participant then draws the neck and shoulders and folds that over and passes it to the third person, et cetera. At the end, the paper is unfolded and behold!the exquisite corpse. Of course, any imagery can be substituted for the human body.
I was attracted to it as a title, first of all, because it's a perfect analogy for my own process of working: shooting 'blind' without really consciously knowing why, or knowing how what I'm shooting connects with material already shot, or what I will shoot. Seeing the material assembled chronologically, I see many connections and couplings I might have been unaware of earlier, and by repeating this process, the shape of the finished film is finally 'revealed.'
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When I first saw
I was jealous of the erotic pleasure you seemed to be having!
Carnality was most important to me then, as it is for all healthy and amorous young animals. And, of course, it is the most important part of the 'trick' that life is: it's the lure, the bait. What animal can resist orgasmic pleasure? We don't learn until later that the other part of the trick is more sinister and ominous, at least as far as our cheerful and bright-eyed 'personal identity' is concerned. If we could see the entire trick from beginning to end, we wouldn't play, would we? The bad news is revealed in stages, broken to us gently. The trick has fatal consequences.
I had moved from uptown bourgeois restriction and rectitude down to the Lower East Side and
. Life more abundant! I imagined myself to be free, as we all do at that age. I lived with the Canadian actress Margaret LaMarre on Essex Street above Bernstein's Kosher Chinese Restaurant and made the film there. Big windows that got the morning sun. We were lovers in the way you can be only when very young, and I wanted to celebrate this. So, very simply and in the most straightforward fashion I could manage, I made pictures of my strongest delights and joys, reveling in flesh and in light with great appetite, and in the ghost of flesh on film. No one really seemed to be dealing directly with erotic matters in film at that time. The general psychic climate was still very repressive and puritanical. Brakhage was working with sexual imagery, of course, and Carolee Schneemann, but they both seemed to be disguising the substance of it with 'art.'
I thought that perhaps more honesty and directness were possible, and I tried to work along those lines. Someone once described the film as being in 'beast language,' which I took as a compliment, and still do. And, of course, the mythic 'beauty and the beast' elements are now quite evident, although I wasn't conscious of that at the time. You might even say that the film is the beast's version of the story. You will find echoes of this near the end of
. It was made in a state of innocent wonder and even joy, much in the spirit of Blake's painting 'Glad Day,' the human beast in unashamed glory of body.
Looking back, I can see lots of influences, although I was unaware of them at the time. I discovered [Gustave] Courbet and Kodachrome II simultaneously. Courbet was very important to me. I still think highly of some of his work, but seeing
and
for the first time really knocked me over. I also admired [Pierre] Bonnard and Stanley Spencer. I'd seen Spencer's various
at the Tate in 1964 or so and was very moved by them. I'm still in awe of them. Kodachrome II was wonderful; it was the only film stock ever made that could render flesh with any kind of accuracy. I'm told that Kodachrome I was even better, but that was before my time.
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I remember that Christopher Smart was on my mind. I found out about him from Benjamin Britten's working
