A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I did ask them this question constantly. Every day I would leave my house and walk down the street like anyone else in the village and be stopped and invited in for Italian pastry or some other treat and an hour's gossip, on the way to the post office. I would ask myself, "Is it really true?"the subtitle of the work. The unanswered question works itself through lots of rolls and reels after the formal introduction, which I just barely managed to finish in the seventies while at Bard College before I had to move again. The rolls and notes to

Roslyn Romance

remain in my Washington archivery waiting to be finished and released.

The concluding part, which is called "The Cardinal's Visit," is a narrative film, conceived with my close friend and filmmaker Elliot Caplan. I shot it with the last grant I had (an NEA) with the help of Elliot and a lovely apprentice and friend, Ms. Harley, who stayed in my little trailer in Upstate New York, between 1979 and 1981. We worked very hard for a while. I was the cardinal (I still have the costume). We shot about four hours of really pretty color negative with very elaborate lighting setups. We'd do two or three setups a day, just about like a Hollywood film. There were usually three of us: me, the young woman, and the man who

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played the young priest. I took a lot of the immediate dramatic detail from our everyday lives. For example, in real life the young guy fell in love with the girl. He didn't recognize the cardinal's interest in her, and I didn't want to tell him about it. There wasn't any reason to tell him. But he was getting romantic about her, and he would call every night, was rejected as often. The cardinal represented the church, but he was/is also a sensualist. His red cloth represents holy office

and

the fires of hell, the torments of time and mortality.

I spent a lot of money on the film. It's almost done. A friend of mine, Bonnie Jones, painted beautiful medieval title cards because there are a lot of booklike segments with chapter headings. I'm looking for a serious graduate film student who wants to finish the film as an M.A. project or something. We could select what goes with what and edit it. Or he or she could put it together. I don't want to do all that anymore. I'm too tired.

Because

movies

are viewed as popular art and thus the property of the twentieth-century masses. Implicitly, it's part of our thinking that anyone who uses film seriously, poetically, experimentally is transgressing on sacred conventionlike asking the ''tree cutters," who identify with "free enterprise," to use restraint in destroying our common environment. For the neighbors it can't be explained: "Who are you: What do you

do

? You waste your time all day! Why don't you get a

job

? You've got a wife and children!" God, there's no

end

to it. Or you come into town and you're filming something, and you try to explain, but if you're not making a profit, it's inexplicable to people, it doesn't compute. It's so exhausting. It's like being a pugilist: you can only do it so long. And when you're finally broke and broken, no onetruly very fewcare at all.

I heard Peter Kubelka talk about it at Bard College. He's standing up front, and an innocent young man asks him, "Gosh, Peter, it must be fun to take a camera out and turn it onto the world and make art and show it to people." Kubelka's quiet for a minute, then he says, "Well, on ze contrary, it's

zo

exhausting, I cannot tell you!"in that high voice of his"To take a heavy camera out in the world and carry the bloody thing under your arm for twenty years and be obliged to

record

everything instead of simply living itit's zo telling on your soul, zo exhausting in your bones and muscles. It's impossible to do it,

impossible

the places it takes you, into the nether world constantly. It's zo distressing to your merely human frame, I can't tell you. Don't do zis thing!"

I was once a free-wheeling artist among other artists, all of us on the move, giving everything we could, taking a lot as well. In those days Ann Arbor was one of our centers, because of the Film Festival and George Manupelli. We'd all stay at his house; and then later, Sally

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Dixon made a center for us in her house in Pittsburgh and arranged many shows. I usually stayed, by preference, in her basement, by the washer and dryer. I've always preferred small, private spaces (I still hanker for the simple life in a cardboard box). Later, Sally moved to Saint Paul. I haven't heard from her in years.