A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

During the years Anthony McCall has been living and working in the United States (he moved from Great Britain in January 1973), he has made relatively few films, but those he has made are dense with idea, particularly about the construction of the film audience and about the situation of independent filmmaking within the larger commercial culture. McCall's filmwork can be divided roughly into two periods.

During 197375, he completed a series of "solid-light" films, which seemed a natural development of his earlier interest in environmental sculpture. The first of these was

Line Describing a Cone

(1973), which was followed by three other "Cone" films

Partial Cone

(1974),

Conical Solid

(1974),

Cone of Variable Volume

(1974)and then by

Long Film for Four Projectors

(1974),

Long Film for Ambient Light

(1975), and

Four Projected Movements

(1975). The solid-light films were attempts to provide a new form of thought-provoking film pleasure. They are presented in an open gallery space, not a movie theater, and viewer attention is directed not to imagery on a screen (no screen is used), but to the light beam between the projector and the wall. During the thirty minutes of

Line Describing a Cone,

a single strand of light slowly grows into"describes"a hollow cone. Perhaps the most obvious dimension of

Line Describing a Cone

and of the other "Cone'' films is their simple, beautiful elegance as light sculptures. But for McCall this beauty was as much a means as an end. By presenting the "Cone" films in an open gallery space, McCall means to instigate a new kind of interaction between members of the film audience. As

Line Describing a Cone

develops, audience members don't merely look at it, they interact with the

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Cone and with each other, crawling under the Cone, telling other viewers about particularly engaging spots to see it from, and blowing smoke through it. (In order to keep the Cone's thin shaft of light visible, McCall usually makes sure the screening space is smoky before the film begins, or asks that viewers smoke during the presentation.) Often, groups who experience the film lose their self-consciousness and, by the end, are interacting freely. As McCall explains in his program notes for

Line Describing a Cone,

the audience experience generated by the film is a way of throwing into relief the implied politic of the normal screening situation, with its rigid rows of seats and "hidden" projection booth.

By the mid seventies McCall had become dissatisfied that the interactive process explored in

Line Describing a Cone

and other early films was available only to a very small audience in rather cloistered situations: colleges, art galleries in a few major cities. He began to consider the relationship of experimental art making to the larger, commercial society. One result was his involvement with

an anticatalogue

(New York: Catalogue Committee of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, 1977), an anthology of articles exposing the implicit political agenda encoded in the power structures of contemporary art museums and in the art shows generated by these institutions. Another result was a pair of collaborative films:

Argument

(1978) and

Sigmund Freud's Dora

(1979).

Argument

was a collaboration with Andrew Tyndall, who had come to the art world with a background in journalism and commercial film reviewing. Their idea was to use the fact that the audience for experimental forms of filmmaking was small (albeit educated, intelligent, sophisticated)

as a resource

. They proposed their ninety-minute feature as a catalyst for an extended discussion among the members of the Downtown art community (and related communities in other areas) about the position of such communities vis-à-vis Western consumer culture. In order to contextualize the plight of the serious film artist, they decided to use

Argument

to conduct a filmic examination of the aesthetic, economic, and political implications of using printed text and still photography in the world of mass-market commercial mediaas exemplified specifically by the September 18, 1977, issue of the

New York Times Magazine

(devoted to men's fashion), the November 14, 1977, issue of

Time,

and the July 1977 issue of

Esquire

.

Argument

is serially organized into five differently structured units, each of which presents the viewer with a different balance of text and imagery. These structural units are arranged A, B, C, D, E, A, C, D, B, E, D, C, B, A. For many viewers,

Argument

is a frustrating and annoying experience. We are asked to read and hear the same or similar information over and over, always in contexts that frustrate our ability to