The word "presents" has incredibly varied meanings and uses, including the use in zoological literature that females
present
to males. Biology is as important to the film as psychoanalysis. Entertainment advertising
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says So and So Presents Such and Such. I like that my title is an abstraction of this. It doesn't say who presents what, it says that "Presents" will be the subject of this film, so "presentation," then ''representation," is invoked. A mostly feminine use is: "is so and so presentable?" But of course the film is also "presents" or "nows," and also "gifts."
Interwoven with all
that
is this business about how things are made. There are three different ways of making things. You can shape something, squeeze material into a certain form. Or you can add this to that. Or you can subtract this from that. And those are the
only
ways you can make anything. The film is involved with those options, and with a latent aspect of them, which is the unfortunate truth that in order to make something, you have to destroy something else, or at least change its form. And that crisscrosses with the sexual themes in some ways, but again, it doesn't attribute any one way of making to one gender or the other. So much is interwoven in the film in so many ways that it's almost the opposite of
Wavelength
.
Presents
' references get wider and wider. It closes with the fading out of the red and a drum roll, which is either military or funereal, the death of the film.
MacDonald:
I understand that
Presents
had some hostile audiences, at least at first.
Snow:
One of the worst was at the Collective in New York, where some women were furious in a way I found really obtuse. One question was, "How come there's so much tits and ass in this film?" I was tempted to say, "I can tell from your voice that you are the possessor of tits and ass." The assumption seemed to be that tits and ass
can't be seen
. It was brought up that you
can't
photograph so-called pornographyfor
any
purpose. That's amazing. I don't necessarily have anything against so-called pornography. I'm aware that there are aspects of it that are extremely questionableinvolving children and cruelty for examplebut I like, sometimes, some of what's called "pornography." I say "so-called pornography" because that's always a question, too. What do you mean by "pornography"? You mean it's what doesn't turn you on? Or what does? Another amazing question that night was, belligerently, from a male voice, "How come there's no men's asses in this film?" I thought the discussion at the Collective didn't have much to do with the film.
It's true that
Presents
was prompted by the debate about eroticism and the depiction of women that was going on. I had been thinking about those issues for quite a while.
I think it was at that Milwaukee conference [Cinema Histories/ Cinema Practices II, held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, November 1982] that, after the screening of
Presents,
Christian Metz asked, with a certain amount of puzzlement, "What is the relationship between the two parts?" What
I
want that film to do is to force the
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spectator to
think
about the relationship between the two parts. All I could say to him was, "The relationship between the two parts is a splice." How
do
they relate? How are they part of the same organism? The point is that there are
a lot
of answers.
MacDonald: So Is This
has been very useful for meespecially in thinking about the relationship of film experience and film criticism. Film criticism is almost always considered to be a
written
text about a
visual
experience. But there's an inevitable gap between what writing can communicate and the multi-dimensional experience of film. It strikes me that a lot of what passes for complexity in writing about film is interference that results from the inability of the word to really come to grips with the visual/auditory experience of film.
So Is This
is about these issues; it turns film onto language in the way that language is normally turned loose on film.
Early in the film you pay homage to independent filmmakers who have used text in inventive ways: Marcel Duchamp, Hollis Frampton, Su Friedrich. . . . Had you been thinking about working with text for a long time or did the recent spate of this kind of work inspire you?
Snow:
I wrote the original part of that text around 1975 and made the film almost ten years later. It came out of the text for the Chatham Square album [
Michael Snow: Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder,
Chatham Square, 1975] and out of
One Second in Montreal,
as another way of controlling duration. Since then, I've been asked whether I knew Jenny Holzer's work, but I didn't at that time. The things she's done have some relationship, although there's no timing involved in her work, as far as I can tell.
MacDonald: So Is This
is poetic justice for people who make a fetish of the ability to write and read sentences. Is that what you had in mind?
Snow:
That's part of it, yes. Another thing is the business of using the art object, in this case film, as a pretext for arguments that the writer considers of more interest. That's valid in some senses, but sometimes it seems like a misuse of the stimuli, the film. It's as if you're producing these things for other people to advance their own interests and arguments.
MacDonald:
The way in which text is used in
So Is This
makes a comment on language-based approaches to film. The formal design of showing one word at a time with the same margins, regardless of the size of the word, results in the little words being large, which of course grammatically they often are in the language, and the big words being much smaller. This is precisely the opposite of what a lot of academic writing does. At academic conferences, using complex vocabulary often becomes a performance.
So Is This
seems to critique that kind of linguistic performance with a different kind of performance.
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Snow:
It does, yes.
MacDonald:
There's sometimes a tendency in academe to see filmmakers as laboratory animals who don't really know what they're doing, but whose doings can be explained by theorists. Have you read much theory?
Snow:
I've read lots of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard. Some of those people have become deified. I think Derrida is one of the most interesting.