So, yeah, Neuma and LA are structural films, or so-called, because they have some things
in common, like the support film in a genre in a material way, the length, the take, share
it, pull share it, it's made of film, very close to film, which is called axiomatic granularity.
It's called axiomatic granularity.
Well, it has film with film grain, and you know, Ernie Gare made a film called History,
which is just one black, just the grain, there's no montage, it's just one char, which looks
very good when he shows it with, before a serene velocity, because you spend maybe a
half hour just on the gray, charcoal gray of the screen, and so that you're in this
green world with a perspective, you know, it's a nice combination, I once saw him show
it together, I thought it was very good.
So, do you feel attuned to this female character's work, who, breakage, make-and-share it, okay?
So, what is, in simple language, what is, you just want me to talk about my relationship
to these different tendencies in film?
Well, when I've, structuralism, so to speak, which I guess one associates, like with Charis
and Gare, really came in, what, about the very late 60s, early 70s, so it didn't exist
when I first started, as such, as such, you know, so that my first, my first influences,
the most, you know, the, I think, the, you know, I think Stan, a breakage, is what most
impressed me.
I also loved a film by, have you heard of Ron Rice?
Yeah.
A film called Chumlum, have you ever seen that?
Yeah.
It's very beautiful.
You've seen the actual film, how?
Was it shown, did you, what someone showed it here, or, Chumlum, oh, the real film is
worth seeing.
But the Chumlum affected me a lot, and, and breakage affected me tremendously, because
I didn't really, I didn't even understand it completely, and I didn't even like it completely.
It's sort of like, maybe the first time you have a, a younger, when you have the first
beer, or your first coffee, and you go, uh-oh, this is what I'm supposed, this is what the
future of life is going to be like.
You know, there was, you know, it was more, breakage, almost an acquired taste.
You know, I didn't quite get it at first, and I, I should say, I, I got that was great.
You know what I'm saying?
I got that it, that, that this is for real, and this is to be respected, and this is overwhelming.
Right?
And, and it was intriguing, but I didn't, so I didn't get it in terms of what you might
call pleasure at first.
You know, in that sense it was an acquired taste, maybe like a, you know, like grapefruit
or an olives.
I'm just trying to think of something that isn't immediately pleasurable, you know?
And, um, and what intrigued me, I know I've said this kind of thing many times, but what
intrigued me with, with the breakage obviously was that one person could go out with a camera
and declare, and declare a film language, you know, and declare some kind of lyric sense
of existence.
I'm going to use a camera, I, uh, last, well actually talked about that last night, huh?
About break, breakage, huh?
And the thing is that the, the, the beauty of someone just going out and being a, saying
this is existence, I'm going to be a poet of existence and having a camera and doing
that, and, uh, and that the fact that, that breakage, it might not, it may be hard to
appreciate at this point, he made up a language of film that was based on everything that
was taboo.
It was everything that was not allowed, let's say jump cuts, flare outs, shaky camera out
of focus, overexposed, underexposed, uh, everything, everything that was, uh, out of bounds, everything
became the actual language.
So in a way it was kind of shocking and thrilling, the, the, the revolutionary nature of anticipation
of the night.
Have you seen that?
Yeah.
Which he made, I think he was 24 years old when he made that.
The level of, of revolution in, in, in that film is, I don't, I don't think there's been
a greater revolutionary gesture in cinema in terms of like someone going, you know, with
confidence, you know, in determination.
I think it's like the greatest moment of revolution and he was 24 years old and to accomplish that.
And I asked him once, I said, Stan, you know, I knew him all my life when I was, uh, 20,
I made this, my first film called In Green, which was affected by his films and by Gregory
Markopoulos and by, actually by the Chumlam Allot, you know, and the, some degree in Marie
Mankin, but, uh, more brackage and, um, and, and Markopoulos, and, uh, and, and so I invited
Stan over to my apartment when I was 20, it was a smaller world then.
And, um, he was visiting New York and I said, I want to show you my, my, my film and he
came over and actually just, just came over and looked at it and it was a sound film.
And at one point he says, why do you have sound?
I said, oh, I thought it would make it more powerful.
And then he says, well, then go to Hollywood, you know, you know, that kind of thing.
But he liked, he liked, he loved the film, you know, and it affected him and, uh, and
the, the, the day it premiered, um, at, uh, at a little showcase of a cinema tech that
Jonas was running at this gallery called the Washington Square Gallery.
I was just 20.
Oh, I should tell, maybe this is a little interesting.
I made the film and I was living with about four other filmmakers and we were squatting
in a building that was going to be sold, but we have free, so it was one of these, uh,
thing, uh, households where everyone just had mattresses on the floor.
But we had project, you know, but we had projectors and, um, you know, I've been to households
like that in San Francisco of kids now, what are we going to be, what do you think?
So I finished this first film I made, I was 20 called In Green and at that time I just
saw Jonas and I said, uh, I made a film, do you want to come over and see it, Jonas
Meckis?
You know, his brother just died yesterday, yesterday, or the day before, and, um, uh,
so he just came over and of course he was very impressed seeing this, this household
of, of everyone having projectors and, and every room there were projectors and rewinds
and rolls of film on the floor and, you know, you know, it was very nice.
And I showed him the film and he, uh, and he said, well, I want to show it on whatever
night it was, the night of the screening in, uh, at this, at that time it was the Washington
Square Gallery they were using for screening.
And, uh, my, my later, my, my friend to be named Jerry Jerome Highler came to the screening
with, um, Gregory Macopoulos and, uh, and I remember them all applauding very, you know,
very much and I think Gregory could probably see to what degree it had been affected by
twice a man a little because it had to do with a triangle with a mother and, uh, you
know, and it was, uh, obviously you see twice a man was very strong at that time for, for
a young person when, when he, when Gregory first showed it, have you ever seen it?
Twice a month.
Yeah.
When he first showed it, it didn't have sound.
It was better.
It was more open, you know, in other words, the sounds kind of overly over, over, over
declared the film, you know, and, uh, when it was silent, it was much more mysterious.
I don't know, uh, people have told me that the music is horrible in this tree of life
and that it, that it's, that it's so overstated that it, you know, that it shows a lack of
trust and mystery and cinema.
You know, I don't know.
I haven't seen it.
You know.
Yeah, people like, I always find everything he does, I, I, I always see, I always see
someone being sensitive.
I always see a person being sensitive when I see his notes.
I don't actually experience the sensitivity.
I see someone being sensitive.
Do you know what I mean?
Yes.
Oh, this is, with me, other people love it, but I just, it's always self-conscious to
me.
I never like just, wow, you know, I'm going, oh, wow, I mean, I just see like someone showing
me all the time that they're being sensitive.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Just, but other people are crazy about it, but the point is that Brackage was very most
intriguing because of everyone because she realized he was trying to find a film language
by using all these elements that were taboo and creating a syntax with, with all that
was taboo.
That was actually, that was the most exciting thing and for me, the most exciting thing
about experimental film was not being, being bad, films that expressed bad behavior or,
you know, radical, radical, you know, you know, and so forth.
I mean, you know, let's say, let's say I would enjoy flaming creatures, which is also
shown at the time, or, you know, you would enjoy films that were being bad boy films,
so to speak.
But it didn't have the intrigue of someone who was trying to discover a way to actually
speak with images, you know, in a way that was new and poetic.
That was, that's, you know, that, that was the real thing to me.
And then the, and that's, and that's, that's the thing, that was the seed that was planted
in me when I was 18 or 19, which is still growing in me today.
I still, I still feel that there's no end to that exploration of a possibility of, of
a silent film language.
I mean, it's hardly been touched, you know.
I mean, I'm doing, I'm doing something came about in my own life, which no, no one else
had done in a way.
I mean, P Adams, in his article in Art Forum, said that, I had said to him informally that
Phil Solomon, you know, of him, that Phil Solomon had said to me, that I had found a way around
brackage, that everyone else was sort of stuck, either reacting against brackage or going
toward brackage, but he said, you found a way around him.
And I mentioned that to P Adams, and P Adams said, no, no, you found a way through brackage.
And he mentioned the film, you know, Riddle of Lumen, which was made out of outtakes from
previous movies, you know.
And there was, I think it was Stan's first film that wasn't autobiographically, and
lyrical, but it was based on just using images and so forth.
So, but I think my own films, which are primarily visual, I don't know if you say, primarily
visual, there's a fellow named Steve Anker, I don't know if you know of him, he ran the
San Francisco Cinema Tech for about 20 years.
And he said to me with my films, he says, he found it shocking that up into the point
that my films existed, no one actually thought of making a visual film.
It seems so obvious, and others, other people made films that were visual, but the primary
through line wasn't visual, do you know what I'm saying, we're meeting the primary through
line, he says, it seems so obvious and yet no one, it didn't occur to anyone, you know.
And it only occurred to me over a number of years of trying to work with the idea of,
you know, a polyvalent montage, you know, which came from reading poetry when I was
19 or 20 and wondering what it would be like to make a film that progressed from shot to
shot only for the necessity of the film, not for any agenda outside, allowing the film
itself to have its own necessity, you know, there are earlier indications of that.
There are earliest indications of what I'm doing, I think came from small sections of
the Vertoff, a man with a movie camera, there's an area in the first third of the movie before
it gets sort of lost, you know, the film, before it gets lost in the superimpositions
of the trolley cars, that goes, I must go on for a half an hour, that kind of thing.
There's an area of real, genuine mystery montage, in and around the area where they
go out to the railroad tracks, and there's a dream within a dream, a car pulls up, there's
a woman with coffee, there's an area where, and then suddenly it cuts to a moving forward
toward this building that's on the corner, and you cut to this park with just these trees
blowing, is that whole area of the film is the time where the film went into pure poetic
mystery of montage, I've never seen that before, there are other areas of it which are kind
of more mundane, where he does, for instance, he'll do parallel cutting between a woman
washing her face and someone hosing a cyborg, where that's kind of conceptual, you know,
once you get the linkage that there's a parallel, then there's no more mystery after that, it's
just the cleverness of a parallel situation, but there's an area of man with a movie camera
where it goes into pure floating mystery, you don't know where the point of view is,
is this the dream, or is this the dream, is this, you know, and I think that was the first
real scene, and I don't even know to what degree Veratov recognized that because he didn't
build on that, you know, at all, and of course that film is very corrupted by the sociological
agenda, the film, the film is kind of torn between wanting to be a pure poet and wanting
to be a Marxist, you know, doesn't know which, you know, you know, so do a little of each,
you know, but he didn't seem to let that aspect which to me was the most magical flourish,
it didn't flourish, and then it wasn't picked up by many people, you know, at a certain
point the films of P. Adams, Sidney in a sense discovered of Joseph Cornell, like Thimble
Theatre and so forth, where there's a progression of images that are quote unquote surreal,
right, you know, you go from, you know, maybe a ballet dancer to an alligator or, you know,
but it wasn't, it was more like the montage of juxtaposition, of surreal juxtaposition
than it was an actual syntaxual montage, you know, the Veratov was closer to where the
actual syntax of moving from this to this to this was starting to be, starting to float
and become all inspiring, you know, this is more like the more typical thing of a surrealist
juxtaposition of odd relationships rather than it's actually growing, you know, and,
you know, and then, then of course there's Warren Somburt, you know, of him, who I knew
since he was like 17, at that time, you know, all these people like Robert Beaver's I knew
since he was like 16, you know, he came to live with Gregory and so forth, so, and I
was maybe a few years older, I was maybe, I don't know, 21 or something, but, but we
would discuss amongst our group, which Warren would be privy to, these are issues that were
very, we were very, we were all very serious, not very serious, I don't mean like that,
but we took the filmmaking and, and the idea of where this exploration could go very seriously,
you know, you know, I mean, we, you know, we love to smoke hay ash and go to regular,
you know, regular films and be stoned to the point that you couldn't remember anything
when, every time the film cut, you couldn't possibly remember, there's a film critic
at the time named Ken Kellman of that period, I don't know if you've ever heard of him,
and I remember going to a pirate film with Ken and, and Jerry and about half way through
I turned to Ken and I say, can you remember anything in this film before this shot?
You know, anything, he goes, you know, and, but from that came the real, you started to
go experience the real primordial aspect of cinema, you know, what happens with a shot
and cut, what, what, what the magic is of that thing of popping from one image to the
next image, you know, so it, it, it's partly being a youth and enjoying all that kind of
thing, but it really, it was also, it was humorous, but it was also serious, you know,
like, what, we would have discussions for instance, if you cut from something, if hard
to something soft, was it the subject matter in the image that made the cut effective,
or was it the quality of the image?
You know, in other words, if you took a picture of, let's say the sidewalk, and then a picture
of, what should we say, I don't know, let's say water, you know, if you cut from the water
to a sidewalk, was it the, the picture within the frame, or was it the actual quality of
the screen?
You know, of course it, ultimately it's really a marriage of those two, you know, but all
these issues we were very serious about, you know, and, and it was very important to us.
And to back up a second, with Stan's revolution, with, participation of the night, I asked
him, I said Stan, that was so revolutionary, where did, where did that come from, right?
I said, I know some places I think where it came from, where I've never heard anyone mention,
and I started to mention some things.
I mentioned this film, do you ever know this film that Eisenstein did called Romance Sentimentale?
Do you know that?
Yes.
Romance Sentimentale.
In a way, it's the first music video, if you think about it, you know, I mean, it has
a performer, and you see the performer, and then it cuts away, and then comes back to
the performer.
It's really the seminal music video, but it has this prelude, right, of shooting winter
trees from a moving car with all these jump cuts, intercut with waves crashing.
I think the sound is very concret at that time, in that part of it, before the piano
music begins, but that seemed like anticipation of the night, the jump cuts of the winter
trees.
I said, did that affect you?
Yeah, he said no one's ever mentioned that.
And I said, where did you see that?
He said, well, there was a film society in Los Angeles when he was there.
So I think there is a number of things that's, in a standout, attributed to Marie Menken,
all of it.
But I think part of it came out of that Russian filmmaking, I mean, to see those kind of jump
cuts.
And that prelude to Roman sentimentals, I think, is very important.
So Stan grew in that direction and then made this one particular film, the middle of Lumen,
which opened up, in a sense, the polyvalence, which, in a way, echoed back to that little
moments in Veratov.
And then I came upon it through all these influences, and essentially, it came out of, again, like
being 19 or 20 and smoking weed and reading poetry very slowly and realizing that a great
poet, as you read one word and then the next word, it would be like Mozart or something.
Every note that was hit was very important.
You know, he didn't just go five notes from here to there, but each note had a psychological
and emotional progression to the psyche, you know, each step in itself is completely profound.
And that's when I began to wonder, could you do that with film?
You know, I remember asking my friend Jerry, could you make a film where with each shot
it kept opening up without any other obligation?
And Jerry was already doing this in a way, though he wouldn't admit it.
He was showing these 400-foot films just that were never printed and never solidified with
names.
It was just camera rolls which were re-edited, and people used to come over to his apartment,
you know, like, you know, Gerard Malanga, you know, who was the Warhol Assistant, you
know, this was around 1964, 65, and because there was no video as such, you know, the
idea, it gave the filmmaking a lot of vitality because filmmaking was so straight in the world.
You know what I mean?
So if you went to see Marie Mankin, and all of a sudden there was a handheld film with
jump cuts, that was like a radical thing to see.
It wasn't just, and now you might, you know, just another home experiment, oh, there's
a, you know, we've seen that now on, you know, on MTV, we've seen it, you know, and so forth.
But it was a generally radical thing to see someone use the film medium in a radical way.
It's very, very exciting.
So everything, coming over to people's apartments and having projectors and projecting, and,
you know, there's something very, you know, vital about them, you know, and also, like,
because it was way before the Internet, and one thing that you may not actually be able
to experience in your lives because of your late birth and relationships with the Internet
is how mysterious the world was before the Internet.
In other words, you couldn't just, you wouldn't know about me, I mean, there are advantages
of it, for instance, that we know about each other, right, and we can share our world together.
But at that time, there's also that excitement about coming upon other people, actually coming
upon them, that added a certain, you know, a certain vitality, I mean, anyone will tell
you in any area of interest that it was more vital before the Internet.
I mean, there was that thing of real discovery and esoteric knowledge that, oh, if you all
go over to this person, you know, so, I don't, so, I don't know, these are the, these are
the kind of various influences, and structuralism as such happened after this point, you know.
So everyone had structuralist ideas, you know what I'm saying, you know, could you make
a film, you know, okay, here's another influence at that time, let me start, is the first time
I saw a Warhol film was at an open screening, this was before he was known as a painter,
certainly not as a filmmaker, and every Thursday night or something at the Cinematheque was
an open screening, anyone could bring a film and you would show it.
And he brought a film that was made of three black and white camera rolls called Haircut.
Haircut.
Yeah, there may have been other later haircuts, but this is maybe the first one, and it was,
it was shocking, it might be hard to understand, it was shocking.
He took three black and white camera rolls of someone getting a haircut.
The gimmick was that the person was naked, would have his legs crossed, and then during
the third roll, the fellow uncrosses and recrosses his legs so you see his dick, and that was
like the little, you know, like the little, but that wasn't, you know, that was that,
but the shocking thing, the really shocking thing, believe it or not, was not the dick,
it was that he let each camera roll flare all the way in, then flare all the way out,
and then, so that the entire materiality, and to say that was shocking may seem odd,
but the first time you saw someone be, you know, you said, well, that's a taboo, oh
right, there are taboos, there's still some taboos, one is you wouldn't just like declare
a film where the entire, going all the way to white, and then back, you know, and I'll
never forget that in a way.
It's just like with Jack Smith at Claiming Creatures, he had those little white holes,
you know, near the end of a camera roll, there's those holes that are punched in, which is
the code of the film, and they put little white, you know, hole imprints, like he had
those white holes playing in the film, I mean that was like a, I don't know, it was like
sort of eating with your hands at a state banquet, you know, these are things you just
didn't do, I mean you would do something, but you wouldn't do that, you know, and now
it sounds silly, but when the first time these things happened, so in a way there was something
exciting about how straight the world was, therefore the breaking of the straightness
had a kind of energy, you know, like younger people in America will ask me, why was on
the road so powerful, the caroluck, or how, you know, I said the thing you don't understand
is how straight the world was, I mean I read on the road when I was, in the summer I was
maybe 15 years old when it came out, I said what you can't comprehend is how straight
the world was, you know, I mean it was really, you know, and so that of course releases this
other kind of energy, you know, so that period had, because there was so many, the taboos
in way are helpful, you know, the taboos, there were so many taboos to break that it
gave this energy in different directions, you know, so I would say like haircut for
instance, you could call that a kind of structuralist film, you know, I mean the fact that, you
know, that's the first time I saw someone do a gesture in that direction, but on the
other hand, because, you know, one of the obvious things as a filmmaker you would think
of, the extreme to say, oh can I make a film which is just one shot, can I just set up
the camera, well of course Lumiere did that and the first films were that, you know, sometimes
you go into an art gallery now and someone has this kind of radical film called the study
in duration, it's what the Lumiere did in 1890, you know what I'm saying, but if you don't
know film it seems like a radical idea, but you know, so structuralism may have started
with the very, the first films are structuralists, the very first ones, you know, before there
was even the radical idea of montage, you know, well one thing is, I know that P. Adams
in the art form article decided to call it open montage, right, but maybe that's a better
term, I don't know, I know that Warren used, or someone in talking about Warren Somburt
used the word polyvalent, which is actually I think a term from biology, but it does have
to do with that same thing, Warren's films by the way, they're quite, he was influenced
or inspired by our discussions, but he used that instinct in a different way, it wasn't
really based on the visual reality, it was based on using the language meaning of images,
you know, in a way that I didn't feel was completely successful for other people that
like it very much, there are puns based on language ideas, but it wasn't actually about
a visual kind of language, you know, and one, part of the visual language, I know I'm not
quite answering your question, I will get to it, part of the, actually I am, is there's
a, you know, Freud has a very famous book, it wrote in the year 1900 called The Interpretation
of Dreams, and in it there's some very interesting sections about dream language, it's very interesting
to read, because what we're really talking about in this question has to do with dream
language, you know, what are the connectives between individual images that start to create
a kind of syntax, you know, of their own, and one thing that Freud said, which is very
interesting, he said that we project our dreams on the inside of our eyelids, right, so the
images are there, but they morph, do you know the word, so that you could project an image
and then it can sort of go like this, and then at a certain point the shape would trigger
your conceptual mind, and the dream would go in that direction, just like a cloud suddenly
could look like an animal or something like that, you know, so that something that was
this shape would go like this, and then, so that's very, very important to this type of
syntax and this type of montage, that the actual shapes move you, and you know, and
the thing with the kind of montage I work with is when I was first trying it, you see,
you had mentioned the films Ale and Numa, are we going to see Numa tonight, have you
seen Numa, no, but those films in a way were the beginning of what we're talking about,
in other words, to learn to do this, to learn to make a film that move from one thing to
the next to the next, for no other reason but that, I started with one subject, and
I went all the way back to the most primordial subject of no image, you know, and just film
grain, and tried to move that in that direction, then I added the element of sand, you know,
for the alia, right, and then became, you know, like a juggler who might juggle, you
know, like this, then they might light the torch with a flame to add to the, right, so
adding subject matter, a multiple subject matter to the single subject matter, it would be
like lighting the torches, so the possibilities in the polyvalent montage increase because
of the varied subject matter, but there's also an equal chance for disaster, because
an idea between two shots could be corny, or something distracting, like it's visually
successful, but then the relationship is corny, like in other words, something is visually
successful, but it means something that's, where your mind, it immediately means something
to your mind, which that takes over, so the idea that I'm working with in my films is
to not create a montage where your mind can take over the situation, right, because in
a sense what I feel is that, like through all our lives as human beings, we have this
huge world that we don't talk about, which is our kind of emotional world, right, on
top of that we put all the kind of concepts and ideas of the day, you know how you might
have a very strong dream, wake up and forget about it, have a busy day, do all this stuff,
you turn out your lights, you go to get back in bed, and all of a sudden you remember that
dream, you know, and you realize that everything you did during the day was just an obstruction,
was in the way of what your psyche really was interested in, you know it was waiting
to go on, it was waiting for you to get done with your survival game, so it could go on
with its own needs, right, so there's this whole world within human beings, which is
underneath the kind of practical world, and almost all cinema deals with the practical
world, the world of image ideas and concepts, meanwhile there's this whole area of the human
psyche which cinema hardly ever addresses, so this kind of montage begins to address
that whole area of the psyche, and I think one of the reasons people like it is because
suddenly this huge part of them is being addressed where they've never been by a film, you know
not in the way of idea of that, but actually, you know, there's a very big difference in
art, in all art, all the way through western history, between there's certain art that's
actual and other art is the idea of something, no matter what it is, and then when you come
upon an artist who does the actual, it's thrilling compared to someone who does the idea of things,
you know, like there's a difference in the sense of taking a picture of something, or
actually having that thing become present, you know, there's some artists who could just
show you the world, but then there are other artists where the painting, let's say, is
the world, you know, that's what I mean, that kind of lead.
So this is kind of what the validity or the necessity for this kind of montage, right,
so at the point I lit the torches had to do with making this film treased, so that took
me, believe it or not, four or five years to edit, where now it might take me a month
to edit a film like that, right, it's because I was just starting, and also it was footage
from about 15, 20 years of projects that had fallen apart, and so I was gathering a lot
of scraps, you know, from different films, and I think one of the reasons it was difficult
to shoot is to edit is that I hadn't developed the shooting style which was appropriate for
this kind of montage, I had just footage and I had the idea for the montage, so it was harder
to get it, where tonight we're going to see variations, have you seen that, no, okay,
that'll be very interesting, that's the first time I in a way brought everything into the
present tense, where I began to shoot footage which was appropriate for, I started to understand
what kind of shooting worked for this kind of montage, and you'll see it's the first
reel, it's a very enjoyable film, it's the first kind of blossoming, it's like when
it all comes to, like treased is the first like a seed, you know, in the ground, and
then this is like the flower, right, so what I discovered with treased is that if you just
opened up, you know, the film was just opening up, after about five or six shots, the whole
thing would collapse, you know, it would become meaningless, you know, it would be intriguing
maybe for three or four or five shots, but then around the sixth shot, it would, like
a house of cards, it would just collapse, so what I began to discover is that as the
film opens up, it also has to echo back, and so I started to learn relationships, and you
realize that if you put two shots together that were similar, that wouldn't work, because
it was, the mind would conceptually say, oh there's a parallel between these two things,
you know, this red shirt and this red flower, the idea is red, and then that would, so but
if you took them and you move them like this far apart, it wouldn't work either, but if
you found the right distance, just like a spark, right, let's say there was two shots
between them, that when this red came on, and then two shots said that this red came
on, it would echo, and it's not a conceptual idea, there are people, excuse me for sounding
presumptuous, but like Eisenstein has a lot of montage theory, and Tarkovsky has a lot
of montage theory, but I don't think they actually manifested, the theory is interesting,
you know, both of them are obviously very talented filmmakers, you know, but I don't
think they necessarily manifest what they talk about, right, so I don't know, it's
not important what I think of them, what's important is that what I'm saying isn't like
a theory from some kind of secondary theorists about montage, it has to do with the actual
knowing that if I took the experience, if this shot were not or here, it doesn't resonate,
you move it one, you know, or let's say you're working and you decide after a while, oh this
shot wasn't, maybe I don't like it anymore, you pull it out, all of a sudden this shot
doesn't work, that all these, that these things are working maybe over a four or five shot
period, so when you see like variations, tonight you'll see that in a way the film moves, let's
say there's 75 shots in the film, a group of maybe four or five shots, it moves along
like this and a cluster in others, it's like four or five shots move through the entire,
so it keeps, you know, as it goes forward it echoes back, when it does that, then the
film begins to deepen, you know, at the same time it has this freedom, it's deepening,
you know, if it just had the freedom, so to speak, it would be like some montage at the
beginning of a television news or maybe something that would be done for, you know, a music
video or something, where there's no accumulation, there's no meaning, there's just, you know,
there's just the various, so it doesn't really help you that way, and philosophically, you
could call it nihilism, do you know the term nihilism, you know, so in other words in philosophy
there are two extremes, there's nihilism which means things have no meaning, and then there's
something called eternalism, which means things have an ultimate meaning, right, so in art
if it's too eternalistic or too nihilistic it doesn't really, you have to be somehow between
these two, so that it's, you know, the eternalism would have to be some filmmaker who's really
taking themselves seriously, so seriously that the film in a way starts to get dead in
its seriousness, I don't want to name names, and then there are other filmmakers where
it's meaningless, and the avant-garde is very, one big problem in the so-called avant-garde,
the genre of avant-garde film, which is the topic in itself, you know, when it began it
was not a genre, it was genuine explorers, and the first generation that had to take
to the machete and hack way through the jungle, those people were maniacs, you know, like
Stan, you know, no, Brett Stan, Anger, Connor, what Harry Smith, whom I'm leaving out, so
important, I mean Gregory, you know, these are people, when I say maniacs I'm not being
facetious, I mean, they had to elbow their way into the world, they couldn't just walk
into the world, they had to have manifestos, it's just like in the history of poetry every
group has to have a new manifesto, in a way the manifesto is almost like chopping the
thing, we are the real thing, you know, and so forth, so those people had to really, when
I came along the next generation there's already a way to walk, they had already done this,
so my generation didn't have to be as violent, you know, but then after my generation the
path got covered over with asphalt, with pavement, right, and soon there were McDonald's and
the whole thing got, you know, very kind of, the avant-garde thing became, to me, very
middle class, you know, and now, at least like in America, you go to these film shows
and there's a lot of pretty mediocre movies, and everyone just sits there and, you know,
you know, I mean the worst possible movie, everyone just, you know, and you think, and
then you think you're in a madhouse, you know, like an insane asylum, I do, I said,
wait a minute, this is crazy, because when I first went, if something came on that was
not, you know, it was questionable, people would, you know, every film was ended with
a combination of applause and sss, you know, you know, there was a, you know, it was more
like for real, where it became, it was like anything, then the first people, the maniacs,
then, I mean, I feel I was in a fortunate position, you know, you know, I didn't have
to be a maniac, but, you know, but I also didn't, but it still was vital, it still had to do
with a serious, a serious need to do this, not the serious need to participate in avant-garde
genre, but a serious need of the psyche to use, to use cinema as some kind of purification,
self-purification, or some kind of pointing towards some kind of truth, you know, a truth
of cinema, you know, but we're somewhere, I can't remember, oh, this all has to do
with the polyvalent montage, you know, so there's that, so in a sense, so, you know,
as it goes forward, it also has to echo back, you know, and so in the, and if something's
too literal, then it collapses into that, the whole idea is you don't want the everyday
mind to take over, you don't want to feed the everyday mind, you don't want to be aggressive
toward the everyday mind, because then the everyday mind then gets angry back, you want
to actually diffuse it, you know, so that this other part starts, the other part that
needs nurturing can come up, you know, like I've noticed like with people who have babies,
if a baby's crying, you just give it something new to look at, you don't say, don't cry,
stop crying, it doesn't work, you just give it something else, right, and then it, you
know, it's happy, so that's what the polyvalent might, you just keep giving the audience something
else, but it's, you have to give them the right thing, you know, you know, where it's
very baby, it's very infant in a way, or it's the same principles as being in a super position,
and film implies that it's two exposures, where I think layered means that I think it's
within the reality, one is that since I, my films are more about a progression of a state,
they're about a progression of a state, states of mind, yes, yes, you know, the first films
I've made, which you probably haven't seen, because there's, the prints don't exist in
Europe, because there's only one or two prints of it, the first three films I did, when I
was 20 years old, had superimpositions, I cut two layers, I was very affected, you know,
very affected by Chung Lung, which has the supers, and other people were doing things
with supers, in that kind of floating world, you know, it's immediately very attractive,
because when you have two layers, there's, the gravity disappears, you know, when you
have one layer, there's gravity, when you have two layers, as soon as there's two layers,
there's no more gravity, so this screen is floating, right, so that's very attractive,
you know, to lose the obligations of gravity, right, but I made a number of films with supers,
and it's also great for stream of consciousness, because you have this coming, and then that,
you know, weaving in and out, it's wonderful, you know, it's wonderful, and at a certain
point, I did that, and then I got also, because I was pulled by various forces, then the other
part of me respected just the simplicity of seeing the world, you know, the image, so
I was pulled in that direction for a while, but as I developed the film language, it started
as when you see trees, which you saw trees, there there's not that much layering in the
shots, the shots are pretty much just there, when you start to see variations, like tonight,
I'll start to see that all of a sudden I introduce layers, you know, I mean natural layers, and
that sometimes when you cut from one thing to the other, there's a shot that has two
layers of activity, and then you cut to another shot that's totally different that has another
two layers of activity, that happens a lot in the film, you know, that intrigued me that
you could cut from these two layers to those two layers, you know, so what I began to realize
is that if that the images that work in the kind of polyvalent montage, because we talked
about dream, the dream, and also the nurturing unconscious, that if the shots were more expressions
of state of mind, they work better for this kind of montage, if the shots were states
of mind, it worked better than if they were pictures of the world, the variations is sort
of wonderful because it's also really pictures of the world, I wish I could get back there,
I moved from variations slowly toward the quartet of films you saw last night, you know,
where, well, for instance, Jaime was saying how he didn't recognize one image and complain,
which I don't know, of course he was exaggerating, you can recognize some images, no, do you
want to know?
I don't know.
There are car lights on raindrops and out of a car window, very close, you know, I think,
so one basic instinct was to start to take shots which were states of mind rather than
pictures of the world, right, so if you think of states of mind, you know, as I think I
said to the audience, all of you four are seeing me, right, and I'm seeing you, so we're
all here together, but it's, there's a very different experience, it's kind of amusing,
you know, so behind, so you see me, I'm seeing you, when you have shots of the world, then
it's harder to go from one image to the other without the conceptual idea of what the objects
are dominating, you know.
