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force. He was so sure of his continuity that he didn't have to see it, though he must have played it back to himself on a viewer or something.
MacDonald: Fist Fight
seems like a personal scrapbook.
Breer:
It started out as an openly souvenir film, using family memorabilia. I had seen some of the personal films people had made, and I decided I could deal with my own personal material unsentimentally, that it would be a challenge to use family snapshots and items from my own life and yet to keep the film cold and publicto have it both ways, in other words. Then I got sidetracked by [Karlheinz] Stockhausen. He wanted me to make a film for his theater piece
Originale
. I'd shot and edited most of
Fist Fight
by then. He had a scenario that required a little preface to the film which would consist of snapshots of the people in the theater piece, so I decided I would turn this film into his film. I asked all the participants to send me snapshots of themselves, and that's how the finished film starts, with Stockhausen himself upside down on the screen, then all the people in the performance: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Alvin Lucier, David Berman, and Mary Lucier, all in bed together with a blanket pulled up to their chins, Letty Lou Eisenhouer, Max Newhaus, Alan Kaprow, and Olga Klüver. I made a composition out of all those stills, moving them and blowing smoke across them, spinning them around and so forth. That preface stopped the film from being a personal film in terms of content, although snapshots of my brothers and myself appear later.
At the Stockhausen performance, my role called for me to open up the scene with closed-circuit television. I had a video camera, and we had two monitors in the audience. As people came in, I shot them so they could see themselves on the screens. That got the audience involved right away, or at least self-conscious. This was at the Judson Hall across from Carnegie Hall, in a kind of arena theater. Later on, in the middle of the piece (all kinds of things were going on: there was even a chimpanzee in it) I turned on a projector that was hidden in the scaffolding on one side of the set and it threw the image onto a screen on the other side of the set, across all the actors, who by that time were directed to lie down on the floor. Around six minutes into the film (which lasts about eleven minutes) I walked over to the screen with another screen, a hoop, and carried the image back to the projectorput it away in a sense. We did this for five evenings, I think.
Fist Fight
is almost twice as long as any film I'd madebecause of John Cage. I'd been going to Cage concerts. Cage didn't cater to the public at all. Whatever his program for the evening was, it went on interminably. He didn't seem to have any theatrical sense of time or timing. I found that very refreshing and thought maybe I could apply it to the film. It was one of the few times I deliberately did something that
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wasn't an aesthetic reaction to the material I was working with. I made an arbitrary, intellectual decision that the film would be twice as long as I thought it should be. I figured that for the first six minutes people would be resisting the onslaught of imagery, but if I kept on going, they'd give in and relax and begin to look at it the way I wanted them to. I think it's a specious bit of theorizing, but that's how the film got to be so long. I thought I could drive it home by dint of overkill.
I'm uneasy when I see the film now, since most people project it at its full length. Kubelka tried to solve the same dilemma by showing his films over and over. Kubelka's obsession is that people have to know everything about his work. It's a little totalitarian to insist that people look at your work over and over, but that's a matter of style. I'd like the same thing, only I wouldn't want to force you into it.
To get the audience to look at films that are proposing different conventions, you first have to disabuse people of their ordinary conventions. Then you have to introduce them to the new conventions. Only then can they see the film the way the artist expressed it. Filmmakers of our ilk have to wait for the public to get educated to the conventions of this kind of filmmaking, but while we wait, our conventions are usurped and absorbed into mainstream cinema. I think most of the pioneer filmmakers of this kind of filmmaking have been fucked. They were pioneers and didn't get to cash in. Some of them are bitter and disappointed.
On the other hand, I think it's fatuous to set yourself up as a pioneer and point at yourself narcissistically and assume everybody's going to congratulate you. It's a self-serving attention-getting process that doesn't guarantee good art. You just look around, see what nobody else has done, and do it. In itself that's not something to be appreciated.
Another Cage idea I picked up on and have used as moral support is that you have to do what you perceive to be the
next
thing. That can get you into the position where you're doing something that nobody's ready for, so that you get dumped on. But it's excusable that way. If it's just an attention-getting process, you deserve oblivion.
MacDonald:
I think the problem with setting oneself up as a pioneer is that so much is always going on in so many places. There are precedents for just about everything.
Breer:
Absolutely. There's always a context for what you do. Ideas float in the air like the flu, and a lot of people get them at the same time. The reason for doing something new is the simple excitement of getting new life out of an old form. And that's enough of a reason.
When I said that I thought that many film artists have gotten fucked, I was referring to the enormous power of consumerism. Take the use of dense groups of different single frames that I came up with in
Recreation
. I've never claimed any firsts for that, and I became aware of
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precedents maybe subconsciously before and consciously afterward, in Leger and [Dimitri] Kirsanov, and occasionally in [Dziga] Vertov. I've never made any case for that device in itself. It's basically a gimmick, but if you carry a gimmick as far as I did, it becomes a style of sorts. In the sixties I was watching the Smothers Brothers on TV. On one of their shows they introduced some guy who then proceeded to show the history of art in thirty seconds with a single-frame kaleidoscope of images of paintings. Well, I had done that in
Jamestown Baloos,
specifically with art history and a series of images of landscape paintings. It was just one ingredient of
Jamestown Baloos
. But here was the device on the Smothers Brothers show, with some kind of crappy music to go with it. The whole thing was one big joke, and it made me very unhappy. It wasn't so much an envy/greed reaction. It was that the newness of that feeling had been simultaneously introduced and disposed of, totally thrown out the window and on a grand scale. I could never imagine myself reaching all those people across the country with more serious work using that device, so it was depressing.
Recently a case has been made on our behalf. Birgit and Wilhelm Hein put together a show of so-called pioneering films and special effects for the Berlin Film Festival, to show how these special effects have been absorbed. I haven't seen any program notes, but they asked for