A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

makes a comment on language-based approaches to film. The formal design of showing one word at a time with the same margins, regardless of the size of the word, results in the little words being large, which of course grammatically they often are in the language, and the big words being much smaller. This is precisely the opposite of what a lot of academic writing does. At academic conferences, using complex vocabulary often becomes a performance.

So Is This

seems to critique that kind of linguistic performance with a different kind of performance.

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Snow:

It does, yes.

MacDonald:

There's sometimes a tendency in academe to see filmmakers as laboratory animals who don't really know what they're doing, but whose doings can be explained by theorists. Have you read much theory?

Snow:

I've read lots of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard. Some of those people have become deified. I think Derrida is one of the most interesting.

Barthes's writing is unctuous. He seems often to be defining a new category of the object under observation, but when you start to examine what he says, you find that it isn't as essential as the revelatory tone of the writing suggests it is. And some of the ideas are really ludicrous. "The Death of the Author" [in Barthes,

Image-Music-Text

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, translated by Stephen Heath)] is this essay written by a very distinctive stylist, with a name, and

he

says that the individual writer is subsumed in the totality of writing, that there really is no writer. It's an arch little essay by a famous author! A lot of "theory" is like that. And in Barthes's

A Lover's Discourse,

the supposedly revolutionary tack is that there's no reference to gender. It's sex with no body. The book becomes this vapor of extraordinary style, perfume.

Mythologies

is interesting, but pretty strange, too.

There's a fashionable idea now, especially among academic theorists, that the personor the subject, as they say these daysis totally culturally shaped. I don't believe that at all. I think somebody is born, that there is an organism that has functions. It can be twisted; it can be hurt; but there's still a specific person there. Every person is born with a certain complicated set of possibilities. Of course, there's a lot of breadth to that, but I don't believe that culture totally shapes the person. Individual people also shape culture, which is, after all, one of the functions of art. Those who have commented on the way in which dominant ideologies totally shape people often seem to assume

they've

been able to escape that process. Very mysterious!

Philosophy has been very important to me: Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, many many commentaries like Havelock's

Preface to Plato

. One of my favorite books is Heidegger's

Early Greek Thinking

. I've read everything by Wittgenstein, I think. Derrida is very interesting, a kind of Hegel/Mallarmé. Lacan is medieval Christian Zen. Laura Mulvey seems a university student in this context. Years ago I read a lot of Paul Valery and was quite affected by his writing, though sometimes he's arch in a way similar to Barthes.

My feminist reading is fairly wide. I've even read books by Andrea Dworkin! Joyce Carol Oates is terrific, Germaine Greer too. I like

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Fernand Braudel, Norbert Elias, George Steiner. I'm reading Mandelbrot on fractals and Jack Chambers's

Milestones

(on Miles Davis) right now. I read

October

and

Critical Inquiry

and other journals, and various art and film magazines. I've thought of my film work as a kind of philosophy.

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Jonas Mekas