i've worked out of a kind of abstract intuition. i couldn't defend it. i couldn't explain it. i've worked out of love. i've worked to get closer to what i know in what i love. my judgment in film just formed. it was there when i began. i knew what i wanted to do. trapline was my first film. i didn't make student films. i wasn't trained. the question of judgment, which is another way of saying vision, goes deep. deep into the brain i think. the landscape i grew up in is what formed me. it is what my films are about. they are all landscape films. and yet that isn't all they are. they are mathematical too. they are about principles. they are geometrical. math wasn't what i was best at, but i think the intuition in my work is mathematical. and yet that isn't all it is. my films have been beyond me. they are made blindly and with my best most universal intelligence. they are my best work in any medium, and yet i have thought much more about writing, and i've been much more noted for making gardens. in film i have been as if respected and suppressed. i've been easy to suppress. it's as if the work most of the time is nothing. then sometimes there's a moment when i'm in awe of it. i've worked so simply that there might be nothing there. it is always that i want to show something i love, or show my love itself, but even for me i can never know it's really there. at public screenings, i might feel it, or i might find the film unbearable and empty. it's not robust work. and yet the sort of liking there has sometimes been for it is very satisfying, as if it is an unfailing test both of people and of moments. i don't know whether anyone has ever disliked the films for good reasons. they look artless. in a way they are artless. the art in them is very obscure. it's that judgment formed as shapes of shapes right through the brain. maybe trapline is about the brain. maybe i'll never understand it. or maybe the brain is what else trapline is about. notes in origin is finer-tuned, not as deep. notes in origin is chalky. it is of a piece. it is about grain. it's as if one aspect of trapline taken further. current is grand. it's stately and monumental, it's elegant. they are all elegant: that is true. it is surprising how diffident i've been. the diffidence must be related to the elegance. i am elegant even in my bearing, but i don't know it, the way when i'm working i don't know the nature of what i know. there has been no theory defending what i do. i haven't been worried about the mainstream stealing my work. i've had the opposite worry, that no one would ever use my work, that i'd be unusable, that i was too isolated in my intuition to be taken up at all. i have sometimes seen films, even commercials, i could see trapline in, and i liked that. i'm quivering now. is it fright? i don't think there's anything in my work that's stealable. i would like commercial movie makers to copy my work, because then there would be more people like me, i'd feel more at home. i could say a lot about marginality. i don't think i want to complain about financial marginality. i've always supposed i could make money if i chose to. it is extraordinary privilege to have been able not to choose to. the margins have been livable. even the margins of the margins have been livable. i've been poor. i have sometimes actually starved. i've lost teeth. but i've had a lot of freedom. i've had time. i've been able to track things in myself. every once in a while there's been a little burst of money from a grant; or a trip somewhere to do a show. i haven't been able to imagine being more famous. i don't like being booked up. it spoils the day. i feel quite rich. i'm rich because i can go places i know no one has been able to go. i'm well-stocked. i have my own life probably more than any woman in the whole of the history of my family. it is amazing to have been able to choose the margins. i don't like the mainstream. i can't stand the conversation. i don't like how people look. i don't like the houses. i haven't wanted to make terms with it, and i haven't. and i haven't had to. i would like more money. i'd like to be able to buy land. i'd like to be able to work more. and i'd like to have more influence. i think for that it might be worth making inroads. i'm not just marginal in work. i'm personally marginal. i can't separate the two kinds of marginality. i might do marginal work because i'm used to the margin. my work might not be seen as marginal if i weren't personally marginal. i'm marginal because i'm a woman too. the boys of the community haven't taken me in. but i'm not sure the boys are a community. the girls of the community haven't taken me in either. and i haven't taken them in. i don't have the social complexity to be able to schmooze. what i'd most want to talk about is the working process, but there isn't much to say about it. making films is stressful, handling machines is stressful. making films is machine-based to a horrible extent. the machines are so ugly and the images are so beautiful. the projected film image is the most beautiful image there is, pure colored light. the colors of reversible stock like ektachrome. clean color is heaven. colored light is just bliss. projected light is like light in the sky. composing an image is a strange knowledge, you have it or you don't. i know i can compose. i think cinematographers are born, you see it in the image as a kind of authority. when you are setting up a shot it's by feel. you feel the balance in the frame. it's very precise. you can't approximate it. i learned something odd about composition: i've always shot with my right eye. when i tried to shoot with my left eye i had no sense of composition at all. i had no feel. i don't know what it means. i have always shot on reversal. it comes from shooting color slides, which i have liked for the discipline. framing of a slide is absolute. you can't fix it later. you only have once chance. people have said they can see in my work that i'm coming from still photography. i can see that too, but i think the fixed frame is appropriate to the kind of film i make, that sense of someone standing and staring. the fixed frame says that i've given the stage to the thing i'm looking at, i'm letting it take me. it is a kind of erotic. i think my films are erotic. or maybe my sense of erotic, which is that kind of complete attention, entranced attention, to nuances of contact and motion. my films when i am able to see them are total pleasure. they're light-fucks. david rimmer talks about the erotic quality of the film image and the way people often can't stand it to be that, basically can't stand to be fucked in so tender a way. they keep themselves busy having theoretical thoughts about the work. there is theory to be found about this work, but not that kind of theory. i'd like to know more about the body's relation to a film. that's like wanting to know more about the feel i have for a framing, or why color has to be just right or else. a film is so vulnerable to print quality, for instance. seeing a bad print is appalling. we all know about that but we don't know why. i've had a sense that we get entrained by seeing something on the screen. we become what we see. obviously it's true that when we see anything our brain, probably our whole body, is set up one way rather than another. but there's much more to know. why do we like certain sorts of natural motion more than others? all my films are about natural motion. do we like to see shapes of motion that are like shapes of motion in the nervous system? it's occurring to me that i was a child who often stood still watching other people move. i couldn't skate. i'd be standing on the edge of the lake filled up with the beauty of other people's motion and the pain of not being able to do it myself. i took a strong imprint of those shapes of motion. i can unreel them at will. this is to say that maybe my films are marginal because people feel too much of the isolation in them. its sting as well as its gifts. i think there is that in them, but the question of form empathy goes on past personal history. coleridge was interested in it. it was a question about how cognition is formed by seeing. what seeing is, what it does, how deep into the nervous system it actually goes. there's something reciprocal about seeing motion. it's like moving. the way watching la region centrale hour after hour is the most perfect experience of free motion. it is like being counterpoised on an axis with the screen at the other end. i remember hazrat inayat khan saying people shouldn't move to music; they should listen to it motionlessly. i thought i understood that. it makes a fixed frame of them. colored light. natural motion. composition. fixed frame. mathematical intuition. erotic attention. what else? well, duration. two-minute shots. duration has something to do with erotic attention; you don't want to hurry. everything depends on whether you're relaxed. duration can have the opposite effect . it can make people very tight, and if they are tight they can't stand it. it's like being confined with their anxieties and twitches. i do like the risk. i like the way people can like it and come out of it fresh and delighted. and i like the way it tortures people who can't trust it. technically duration is something quite particular. when you keep seeing something that doesn't change very much you stabilize into it, you shift, you get sensitive, you cross a threshold, something happens. it's useful for anyone to learn to do that. it's an endless source of pleasure and knowledge. and yet it's often what's hardest for people who don't know it as a convention. it's as if the central sophistication of experimental filmmakers. we all had to learn it. we probably all remember what film we learned it from. i learned it from hotel monterrey, which babette mongolte shot for chantale akerman. almost an hour, extremely slow. i made the crossing. it was ecstatic. what it is, is this: deep attention is ecstatic in itself. experimental film, alternative film, personal film, there's no such thing. as if the mainstream exists. i guess the mainstream is the middle of the river: the part where most of the water is. then the contrasting term would be the margins, the edges. if i put it that way the mainstream seems the place to be. it's faster and deeper there. but that doesn't seem right, because in all the ways i care about, it seems faster and deeper where i am than where they are. i probably think of the mainstream as my relatives. but "alternative" is a euphemism. we're not alternative to gun-wank movies. nobody goes to ours instead of theirs. we do keep some sense of possibility alive. maybe there are a few people in each generation who see something they want to be. there were people who gave me that. it seems worth doing it for that. i've often been puzzled by this question of what the difference is between us and them. it's more than a difference between kinds of work. it's a difference between kinds of people. there are minorities of judgment. in terms of work, i think the relevant difference is who our work is for: whether we're speaking to majorities or minorities of judgment. populist work isn't necessarily bad work. the piano was populist work. so the question isn't simple. my work isn't popular work and never will be. it's research work. it's a way of living. it's marginal in the sense that it's on the edge. i think i began making films on my own because it was the only way i could work. i couldn't work in a crew, because i wouldn't have been able to know what i wanted, i'd never have found anything. and then it was the things i found, working on my own, the satisfaction of really learning, that made me want to go on working that way. but then, when i've found things, i want other people to see them too, i want to share my pleasure in them. and mostly people can't see them unless they've gone through something like the same process. that's what it's like to be a research filmmaker. |