MacDonald:
I think of
Side Seat Paintings
as autobiographical in the sense that, as a
visual
artist, you were first a painter, then a photographer, then a filmmaker. In the film, the paintings are recorded in the slides, which are recorded in the film. Did you and Hollis ever talk about the similarities between that film and
nostalgia
[1971]?
Snow:
Well, actually
nostalgia
is more similar to
A Casing Shelved
[1970], a slide and tape piece, my only 35mm "film." It's a slide of bookshelves I had in my studio, loaded with all kinds of stuff. And the sound is a voice, my voice, discussing what's on the shelves from various points of view: what it is or what it was and where it came from. The bookshelf has many small things on it and the text is written to move your eyes around on this big image. There's a plan in the text that moves you over the whole space of the image, and through time, because some of the things and events referred to are recent and some are older. Some are art related and some are related to my so-called private life. But it is very autobiographical. And it's similar to what Hollis did in
nostalgia,
although there's no destruction involved.
MacDonald:
What strikes me as similar in
nostalgia
and
Side Seat Paintings
is that both are look-backs at the past, and in both the earlier work is "destroyed." In yours the destruction isn't literal [actually, it isn't in
nostalgia
either, since only
prints
are being burned and since they're exhibited in the film before the burning "destroys" them], but because of the processes of recording those paintings have gone through, there's no way to know what they actually looked like: what we know is that we
can't
see exactly what they were.
Snow:
That's interesting. And in both films, the works discussed are two-dimensional surfaces.
MacDonald:
There's been a tendency, at least among some people I talk to, to think of you as an old-fashioned guy who has a problem accepting women and women's independence and that this problem is embedded in
Presents
.
Snow:
Well, I am an old guy, but I've never had any problem accepting women's independence. In fact, I was very much interested in women's independence before this current wave of feminism. I was always very supportive of Joyce in her work. Everybody should have the possibility of going as far as they can with whatever they do. It's not an
Page 71
Nude in opening section of Snow's
Presents
(1980).
issue for me. However, exactly how ''independent" anyone can be is a question we'd better not try to get into now.
MacDonald:
I suppose it surfaced in the case of
Presents
because the film came out at a time when everyone was talking about the eroticized female body as the subject of the male gaze. This film seemed to rebel against that concern: it focuses in on a naked woman's body at the beginning, and then in the third long section where you jump from one shot to the next, naked women's bodies are used often. Were you addressing that issue or . . .
Snow:
Yes, I guess I was. It was probably the first time I'd done something specifically as a means of entering a current dialogue. The way you said "rebel against that concern" is interesting. It reminds me of that horrifying phrase "politically correct." Is having
some
differences of opinion with
some
feminist/social theory "rebelling"? Is the "concern" so defined that it can't be discussed, only approved?
Looking for "what does this mean?" first and not experiencing what is happening in its sensual complexity is a terribly wasteful, ass-backwards way of experiencing my films or any other work of art. I have never made a work to convey
a
meaning. I work with areas of meaning and know that there are as many meanings as there are viewers. What is
there
in the concrete, phenomenological sense is of first importance. You seem to see all my other films, except this one, that way and I appreciate your observations. The problems here seem to be as much yours as the film's.
Page 72
On one level I was asking the spectator to consider the relationship between separate, or seemingly separate, parts of this one film to each other, and in that light to consider the relation between the two parts of the human species. After the opening where the image, which is electronically shaped, focuses on the nude woman, there's a section that's totally staged: there's a fixed camera and the set moves. The longer, third section is the opposite of the first two in terms of what is done to make the image.
The first image sequence is made by shaping, molding, manipulating the entire frame. In the second, what was photographed was staged, constructed, the way a play or most narrative fiction films are made. The camera is fixed on a tripod and what one first reads as a series of side-to-side trucking shots is soon revealed as the opposite: the entire set is being moved. This sequence is audibly directed by the director. Then the camera dollies into the set, destroying it and knocking down a wall, which starts the third and longest section: a montage of images taken from life that's quasi-documentary and diaristic. It's important that I shot all these images: the surgery, May Day in Poland, the Arctic hunt, et cetera. All the shots are hand-held panning shots, the movement of the camera always being derived from an aspect of the scene: following a line, moving with, or against a motion . . .
I wanted to make a dialogue between these systems. Aspects of the film are male: it's made by a heterosexual man. Some of this is conscious, for
this
film, and some of it's inevitable. Aspects of the film have to do with experiencing the inherent nature of the camera, and then, seeing with the camera within the different systems used in the film, which includes man seeing women with the camera. It so happens that I do occasionally lust and while I didn't try to shoot only that way, I do
see
women. I noticed in working on the film that women's magazines always have women on the cover, which is very. interesting. There are a lot of photographs of women's magazines in the film. There's some so-called pornography. And there's some intimately personal stuff.
These images involve my sexual life as an artist in some respects, but they're interwoven with many, many other things that are all thematically announced in the first section. For example, the room is pink and the film gradually develops into a discourse on red: the symbolism of red, which, at least in the West, has to do with "stop" and red-light district, blood, sugar, passionall those things and, of course, communism too. That's all in there. It demonstrates the multiplicity of readings there can be for any word or image.