Back and Forth
have often been called mini-
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mal,
One Second in Montreal
really is minimaclass="underline" you subtract out almost everything except duration itself.
Snow:
I have been influenced by reductive workmaybe that's not the right word. I like Mondrian a lot. And I like Donald Judd's first work. In fact, I had a piece from his first show.
In
One Second in Montreal
I wanted to concentrate again, and I was interested to see what it would be like to live through a film that, as purely as possible, had to do with duration. I didn't want what I put on the screen to be too interesting, which is a funny situation. I wanted each image to be differentotherwise there would be no measurement. But they couldn't be
too
different because I didn't want to have any peaks or checkerboarding of interest: I wanted the viewer to be aware of the time passing, of how long the shot was there. I finally decided on these bad offset-printing images I'd gotten years earlier for a competition to put sculpture in parks in Montreal. I'd put them away because I liked them, though I didn't know
what
I liked about them.
MacDonald:
On a certain level they continue the idea in
Back and Forth
of making the figurative action that happens in front of the camera refer to the process of the film itself. The viewer is looking at spaces that are there because they're empty of what they're trying to draw into them. They're places where sculptures
could be,
just as the photographic imagery in your film is where action or event would be, were there any.
Snow:
I suppose that's true, though you wouldn't know that from the film itself. They're just these bleak photographs of parks and public spaces. It is Montreal, but you don't need to know that either.
I think the film worked very well. And I think that people do recognize after a while what it's about. Yvonne Rainer told me one time that she got very, very fidgety as the shots got longer and longer, and was really mad. And then, when they started to go fast and the film ended, she was really mad that it ended. She wanted more. I'm happy that the film could do that. It's an interesting range of response that's
not
produced by an imitation of real life as in narrative film.
MacDonald:
There was a period during the early seventies when there was some acceptance of the idea that film is a temporal space within which you can meditate. This film has that dimension.
Snow:
Also the silence is interesting. It's a silence that I don't think I've ever felt before in films. Sometimes silence is beautiful, and everybody's concentrating. That happens with some of Stan Brakhage's films. In this film the silence is almost meditational, partly because the snow-blanketed scenes have a mute quality. The imagery affects your feeling about the silence.
MacDonald:
It's a pun, too, in that we're sitting in the audience
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"frozen" within this experience. In that way,
One Second in Montreal
prefigures
Seated Figures
.
Snow:
I just remembered that originally I had the idea to mark the cuts with sound. I didn't, but I used that idea later in
Presents
.
MacDonald: Dripping Water
is another reductive, "minimal" film, though it's more complex, more subtle than it first appears. It seems to be one shot long, but if you're watching and listening carefully, you realize that it's not a single shot. A drop of water sometimes doesn't make it to the sink, for instance. And a multilayered space is created outside the frame by the soundtrack.
Snow:
I made the tape first as music. I just happened to notice this drip, and started to listen to it. And it's really fantastic. So I made a tape just to listen to that sound amplified. The original tape was longer than the film. Mike Sahl, wonderful guy, a composer who at that time did a new music program on WBAI, played the entire tape on the radio. That dripping sound on the radio: fabulous! Joyce had the idea that maybe we should make a film of it.
MacDonald:
There's an irony in the fact that
Dripping Water
announces that it's a collaboration of two filmmakers, and yet there's precious little to collaborate on.
Snow:
We just set the camera up together; and I guess we put the dish into the sink together [laughter].
MacDonald: Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film
has grown on me. It's a quirky film, but very interesting. If I remember the photographic piece
Glares
[1973] correctly,
Side Seat Paintings
has in common with it the idea that the process of recording something inevitably creates interference, which everybody normally labors to avoid, or at pretending it can be avoided. In
Side Seat Paintings
the many levels of interference, of distortion, become the primary subject of the work.
Snow:
That's certainly true. I think you could say that representations are all abstractions from some original given, whether they're photographic or verbal or whatever.
Side Seat Paintings
is a Chinese box, one abstraction within another, within another . . . until you get a new form. I've always tried to make the recognition of exactly what's happening part of the experience of seeing a film. In this case, the projection of the slides of the paintings becomes the film, and I think it really
is
transformed into a film.
MacDonald:
Of the films,
Back and Forth
seems the furthest from the other arts that have fascinated you.
Eye and Ear Control
combines music, painting, sculpture, photography
in
film.
Wavelength
has a musical element and, at the end, references to photography and
The Walking Woman
. By
Back and Forth,
you're really into film at a very intense level with, at most, vestiges of music on the soundtrack. Then with
One
Page 70
Second in Montreal,
you move back toward photography and with
Side Seat Paintings
you combine photography (in the slides) and painting and sound in a kind of artist's autobiography.
Snow:
Yes. It's not exactly autobiographical, since you can't really see the paintings. It's really a redigesting or a recycling of earlier work. But it is true that other kinds of work come and go during various periods.