A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

MacDonald:

To an extent, the consciousness of audience and the willingness to confront audience expectations give

Line Describing a Cone

and

Fuses

[Schneemann's landmark erotic film was completed in 1967] one common dimension. Both create a new audience space, where people are very conscious of each other.

McCall:

The brilliant thing about

Fuses

is that it's silent. My memory of seeing that film in an audienceis the constant sense of tension created by the subject matter of the film. One can feel and hear the tension because there is no sound track to cover it. However, the word you used was "confront," which is something I never felt in terms of the "Cone" series. The "Cone" films are rather ethereal in a way. If they're aggressive and confrontational, it's because they're

passive

. They ask to be found; they don't set out to root you to the spot.

MacDonald:

I know you do free-lance design work. Is that how you've supported yourself?

McCall:

I have a small graphic-design business with which I've supported myself since I left art school. These days it's more full-time than it was when I first was here.

MacDonald:

Is it fair to ask you what sort of clients you have?

McCall:

Sure. A large proportion of them are galleries. What I do for them is design their general look and everything they need, including announcements, posters, catalogues, the ads they put in art magazines, business cards, stationery . . .

MacDonald:

Which galleries?

McCall:

The Mary Boone Gallery, the Delahunty Gallery, Blum Helman, Sherry French, Pace, Rosenberg, and many others.

MacDonald:

Do you think of your experience as a designer as separate from your films?

McCall:

I'd always considered it to be completely separate from my filmmaking, a way of filling in the gaps between grants. But gradually my attitude toward it changed. You begin to feel very strange if you spend three-quarters of your time doing work to make money, but describe yourself in terms of work that only takes twenty to twenty-five percent of your time.

The relationship between money and the making of art is complex. Grants were supposed to work like this: You got grants as a young artist to help you through that difficult period. By the time you were in your thirties, you were supposed to have a gallery to sell your work and give you a living. But though painters and filmmakers in New York shared a social and intellectual space in the seventies, their economic structure was utterly different. Painting is supported by a smaller number of peo-

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ple paying large sums of money; filmmaking is supported by large numbers of people paying small sums of money. So as a filmmaker one had to make a choice: you could teach, you could enter the film industry proper, you could make your money in some other not-film-related area. I did teach for a semester at NYU. I enjoyed it, but I don't feel particularly comfortable teaching. What I finally didwhat I do nowis to think of graphic design as my business and of filmmaking as my career.

It's very difficult to make film independently. One could conceivably write the great American novel while working in a bank; one could conceivably paint a painting whilst doing other things. But filmmaking requires not just money, but capital, quite large sums of money. Another advantage of the minimalist aesthetic was it aesthetically justified making films that were very cheap. Since I've become fascinated by storiesnarrativethings are very different. You can work pretty cheaply in Super-8. But it takes so long to make a narrative film and requires so much effort and the assistance of so many people, that to make it in Super-8 seems absurd to me. It was thinking like this that led Andrew [Tyndall] and me to consider ways in which we could make our work viable commercially on some level. I look forward to the time when my filmmaking can take a place next to my graphic-design work and be self-supporting.

MacDonald:

One thing I've noticed with

Line Describing a Cone

and other minimal films is that they do create a narrative experience, but they change its location:

Line Describing a Cone

takes the narrative off the screen and locates it in the theater space.

McCall:

Yes,

Line Describing a Cone

is a type of narrative film.

MacDonald:

And not only narrative, but structurally conventional. There's a sort of climax of activity and then a period of denouement near the end.

McCall:

When one looks again at the films that at one point seemed so radical because of their structural rigor, one invariably finds other elements at work. When I finally saw

Wavelength,