MacDonald: TZ, LMNO, Swiss Army Knife,
and
Trial Balloons
seem to be blends of collage and animation with bits of live action. Do you still see each film as a new experience or is the newness now in the particular mixes of techniques you've already explored?
Breer:
You didn't use the word "rehash" but that might be your question. New wine in old bottles, or is it old wine and new bottles? I forget. I'm always hoping for a totally new kind of image, but I've been around long enough to know that repeating myself is something I can't help. I don't think you fall into ruts; I think you're born into them, but that every effort to break out is a healthy one and should be nurtured. When I was a kid, I thought style was going to be forever elusive, and that it was something some people had and others didn't. Now I realize that style is something everybody has in spite of themselves. Anyhow, the way I'd put it is that in those films I was looking for a maximum range of technique.
MacDonald:
Have you ever thought about making a feature-length animation? That's been the fantasy, and in some cases more than a fantasy, for a number of serious animators.
Breer:
To do an animated feature is reminiscent of fakirism, beds of nails, and other activities where you try to extend your normal capacities beyond the ordinary. The idea of filling up twenty-four frames every second for an hour or two hours sounds pretty dreary to me and, unless it was one of these full-blooded collective efforts like the Disney features were (which I'm not interested in anyway because in the long run that sort of collective process usually takes all the corners off the film so that it's no longer very expressive), everything would get stretched thin, and you'd see the stretch marks. At the rate of ten minutes a year, it would take me six years. So, no, I don't have any feature film yearnings, certainly not for films that would look like the shorter films I've made.
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MacDonald:
What else have you been working on?
Breer:
Well, I've been sawing wood and painting window frames for what seems like years. I have six hundred feet of new material I haven't told anybody about; it hasn't congealed into a film and might never. I play with words on the screen and do some rotoscopingusual techniques, but with a different look maybe. I got interrupted so many times last year in the middle of this film that it might be lost forever. I do have plans to make a new film dealing more with the soundtrack-picture relationship than I have in the past. At least that's my concept now: anything can happen to change my mind. As far as how the future looks: from where I sit it looks compressed. As a little kid, I was told there was a Beyond, but I never got a convincing picture of it. So without a Beyond, I have a kind of trapezoidal vision of eternity. It's like looking at the table I'm sitting at; the table tilts away in perspective, but it's sawed off at the end: it doesn't go to an infinity point. My sense of time compressing does make life a little more savory, though I don't know if it was ever unsavory. Right now I've got a couple of shoe boxes full of index cards and half an urge to go up and fiddle them into a sequence, and I follow my urges pretty much. They don't always take me into doing a film, but I'll return to the euphoria of putting out a work of art because it's a high you can't get any other way that I know of.
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Michael Snow
Very few filmmakers have had as powerful an impact on North American independent cinema as Michael Snow. Indeed, five of this volume's interviewees (Ono, McCall, Noren, Benning, and Mulvey) talk specifically about him, as do several of the interviewees in Volume 1. The impact of Snow's workand of the breakthrough
Wavelength
(1967), in particularis a function of the fact that Snow came to filmmaking, not with extensive experience as a moviegoerconventional cinema never seems to have been of particular interest to himbut as an accomplished musician, painter, sculptor, and photographer, for whom the movie camera and projection space were new artistic tools to explore. While it was not his first extended filmthat was
New York Eye and Ear Control
(1964)
Wavelength
established him as a major contributor to the development of critical cinema.
In
Wavelength,
Snow demonstrated a new approach to cinematic space and time, and, at least by implication, declared his independence from the reliance on narrative in both conventional and independent cinema, as well as from the exploration of the personal that was characteristic of so many of the films of the sixties.
Wavelength
defined a new kind of ''plot," one closer to the geometric sense of the term than to its conventional meaning in film. Snow divided the focal length of his zoom lens into approximately equal increments and zoomed, at intervals, from the most wide-angle view of a New York City loft space to a close-up of a photograph on the far wall. The relentlessness of the viewer's journey across the loft is wittily confirmed by periodic nods in the direction of conventional narrative: near the beginning of the film, a woman (Amy
Page 52
Taubin) directs two men who move a bookcase into the space; they leave and the woman reenters with another woman; later, a man (Hollis Frampton) staggers into the loft and falls dead in front of the camera; he is discovered by Amy near the end of the film. This series of events allows
Wavelength
to critique the cinema's traditional reliance on story. While a mysterious death in a film would normally be a lynchpin for melodrama, in
Wavelength
the death is enacted precisely so that it can be ignored during the remainder of the film. Not only does the camera fail to stop for the death, the film overwhelms whatever interest we might have in the fledgling narrative by providing the eye and ear with continued stimulation of a very different order: as we cross the space by means of the periodically adjusted zoom lens, Snow continually changes film stocks, filters, and the camera's aperture, so that the loft becomes a visual phantasmagoria. And after the opening passage during which we hear "Strawberry Fields Forever" ("Living is easy with eyes closed") on Amy's radio, the sound of a sine wave increasingly dominates the soundtrack, ironically building toward the "climax" of our recognition that
this
film relentlessly refuses to conform to the "rules" engendered by the tradition of narrative cinema.
In the years since
Wavelength,
Snow has continued to make films that defy conventional expectations (and he has continued to work in a variety of other media). In film after film, he has explored the capabilities of the camera and the screening space and has emphasized dimensions of the viewer's perceptual and conceptual experience with cinema by systematically articulating the gap between the experience of reality and the various ways in which a film artist can depict it.
In
Back and Forth
[
«
] (1969) the pan is the central organizational principle. The continual motion of the camera from right to left to right across the same classroom space (during the body of the film) becomes a grid within which Snow demonstrates the wide range of options panning offers.