A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The specific question that interested me was, how does an audience look at a film? How does an audience relate to a film? Was sitting and looking at a conventional narrative film a passive or an active experience? At the time it seemed as if a conventional Hollywood film could be faulted for the way in which it constructed a passive audience. That position, of course, was later discredited, but at the time it did lend some justification to the quite pared-down films we were making. In any case, the question of how an audience relates to a film was one which I felt could be explored through the film object, with an audience. My particular circumstances, and those of friends, made it a given that this work had to be cheap, which tended to mean that the films were silent (8mm was not used a great deal at that time; we were mostly working in 16mm). The specific idea that I was working on was that the projector's light beam was not only visible, but physical and space-occupying, and it

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could be shaped, both in space and in time, using film as the medium. I conceived

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in the mid-Atlantic, two and a half days out of Southampton, when Carolee [Carolee Schneemann, with whom McCall lived from 1971 to 1976] and I moved to New York. This was January 1973. I made the film in August.

MacDonald:

I usually show

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at the front of a movie theater, across the space, so that it makes a specific reference to the normal projection situation.

McCall:

It was designed to be shown in an empty room, at an independent film showcase like the London Co-op or the Collective in New York or in a museum space or gallery. And always in an empty space, free of chairs.

There was never a showing of the film where it was necessary to do more than make a simple announcement, something like, "This film asks to be viewed in a rather unusual way. You'll find out the best way for you to look at it, but I recommend that to start with, you stand where there would normally be a screen, looking back toward the projector." People who weren't expecting this would be intrigued, annoyed, whatever, but usually they did what I suggested, and then, after ten or fifteen minutes, they'd be finding their way to look at it.

MacDonald:

On one level, the film is a product of serious, analytical thinking about the structure of film exhibition. On another, it's close to a spiritual experience. Are some presentations of

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particularly memorable for you?

McCall:

I love

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. I saw it for the first time in Sweden. Carolee and I had been invited to Fylkingen in Stockholm to do performances: I was still doing my fire performances at that time. I picked the film up at the lab the day I was leaving, threw it into the suitcase as I left, and had it tucked under my arm when I arrived in Stockholm. I hadn't seen it. I told people there about the film, and they arranged a screening. None of us knew what to expect, really. There was a polite audience of about thirty people. The room was darkened, the projector turned on, and the film began. I was astonished, mostly by the physical beauty of the shape that came into being. The film did all the things that I wanted it to do. I had anticipated that the audience would go about looking at it in a way that was quite different from looking at a picture on a screen. And I had expected to see a light beam shaped in space. But all that I'd expected seemed less important than what was going on in the room: the physical event seemed bigger than the idea. I was rather awed by it.

I suppose

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achieved its most perfect scale for me when, after seven or eight screenings in friends' houses or in screening rooms like Artists Space in New York, a joint presentation was

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arranged by Film Forum, which at that time was on the Upper West Side in a small upstairs screening room, and the Collective, which was also on the Upper West Side. The two groups decided to have the event at the Collective's screening room, which was larger: a hundred feet long or so and fifty feet wide, with a high ceiling. There was an audience of 120, and the projector had an extra-bright bulb. The distance from the wall to the projector was about eighty feet, and the height of the circle on the wall was about ten feet. It seemed to me like a hymn; it did have a spiritual qualityand absolutely

nothing

to do with the work I had consciously made. I felt as though I was seeing the film for the first time.

MacDonald:

Is

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shown a lot?

McCall:

It's rented a few times a year, and I do get orders for prints. It's in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and in the Royal Belgian Film Archive's permanent collection, and in the collection for the Arts Council of Great Britain.