A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

That's why I wanted to film it. It could be treated as reality, though actually the play was not as intense as the film. I intensified it by picking out certain details, by cutting out dead spaces, and by the movements of the camera. Still, for the theatergoer of that period,

The Brig

was a very intense experience. In 1967 or 1968 I was invited to the University of Delaware to see their production of

The Brig

. Kenneth Brown, the author of the play, was there too. The production, from all I remember, was pretty intense. But it didn't have the same impact on the audience as the original performances did. To have the same effect in 1968 you had to be two or three times more shocking. Society had become more brutalized.

I should add another footnote here. In the late sixties, a TV station in Berlin did their own version of the play. They planned it all very carefully, spent a lot of money on it, took a month to make itand it was a total dud. It didn't work.

MacDonald:

The sound in the film is somewhat rhythmic. Over and over it starts relatively quietly and then builds, finally going past the point of audibility. Was the distortion done on purpose?

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Mekas:

In one track there was distortion because I was too close to the sound with my camera mike. Also, one camera distorted the sound when it slowed down. But I decided to keep the distortions. More than that: I combined the tracks to intensify it. That was one of the major objections at the time I made the film, and I had to overrule it. Noise is very much part of that film. The noise is more important than what's being said.

MacDonald:

It's like some kind of horrible music.

Mekas:

It's not a pleasant film to see. You don't want to see it twice. You might say, "Oh, I liked it," but you don't want to see it twice.

MacDonald:

What was the nature of your collaboration with Markopoulos on

Award Presentation to Andy Warhol

[1964]?

Mekas:

I wanted to give that year's Independent Film Award to Andy Warhol. I had arranged a series of screenings, including Warhol films, at the New Yorker Theater. But he said he didn't want to be on stage or do anything as public as that, so I suggested that we make the award in his studio and that I'd film it. He said that would be okay. We collected some of his superstars of that period and two rolls of film and set it all up. On my way to the studio, I suddenly remembered that I would actually have to award him with something, so I bought a basket of fruit at the corner store. During the actual presentation, I needed someone to operate the camera, which was a motorized Bolex. Gregory happened to be there and said he'd do it. Much of the time he's actually in the film, on the set; and the rest of the time he was operating the camera. I slowed down the film in the printing as a form of tribute to Andy: most of his filmsactually all the films from that periodwere projected at sixteen frames per second, though they were shot at twenty-four. I did the same thing, but I had to do it by means of optical reprinting because I wanted to have the sound on the film.

MacDonald:

How did you get involved with

Show Magazine,

and

Film Magazine of the Arts

[1963]?

Mekas:

Did you see that one?

MacDonald:

Yes, it's a nice little film.

Mekas: Show Magazine

needed a promotional film, and somebody suggested to them that I make it. I agreed to do it. They paid well. I conceived the film as a serial film magazine that would come out once a month, or once every three months. We shot a lot of footage, with

Show Magazine

people always present, taking us to various places. When I was shooting, I noticed that they were always dropping issues of

Show Magazine

on the floor everywhere. When I screened the first draft of the film for them, they were shocked to see that I had eliminated all those magazines and much of the footage of fashion models they had me shoot (although you see some of that at the very end of the film). So that was the end of that project. I think that the concept of a film magazine, had

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they really supported me, was a good one and would have received much better publicity than the kind of thing they wanted.

MacDonald:

I think that's the first film of yours I saw.

Mekas:

There are some parts I like very much; I like the whole thing, really. They seized the original right after the screening. They were planning to hire their own editor to reedit the film their way. They also took all the outtakes, but decided finally not to do anything with it. All my prints are from the work print.

MacDonald:

Was the greenish tone of the black-and-white imagery caused by printing black-and-white footage on color stock?

Mekas:

That particular tint was my choice.

MacDonald:

You used some interesting music by Storm De Hirsch and others.

Mekas: