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Floe Interruptions to a conversation between filmmakers Henry Corra, Charlene Rule and Grahame Weinbren Henry Corra is a New York-based filmmaker originally from Virginia. He specialises in "direct-cinema! style documentaries such as Umbrellas (on Jean-Claude + Christo), George (on his autistic son George) Frames and most recently, Same Sex America. His company Corra Films is based at Mulberry St in New York!s Little Italy. Charlene Rule is an editor, filmmaker and video artist. Originally from Canada, she has lent her editing skills to Frames and Same Sex America and runs the ongoing video-blog project, Scratch Video (www.scratchvideo.tv). Grahame Weinbren is an interactive film artist whose work has appeared in installations and exhibitions worldwide. Originally from London, his experiments with linear and non-linear narrative, interactivity and audience expectation frequently challenge the limits of existing audio-visual technology.
Fictional stories are much closer to the truth … are much closer to the truth than documentaries are, you know. I mean a documentary and a fiction on the same subject – the fictional film is more likely to stick to the facts than a documentary. Henry Corra
Stop = Motion We all know (surely?) that in the modern world, form follows the function. Aeroplane wings scoop up air, housing schemes for the underclasses do indeed look like the cages they are secretly intended to be, Patrick Swayzes! hips are made for the merengue (see Elke Weissman!s The Male Body if you don!t believe me…) and fat floats. This last truism forms the premise of Julie Wyman!s avant garde short Buoyant (2003), which as its name suggests, bobs along on its exuberant experimentalism and a disdain for either personal or artistic modesty. Wyman weaves into a fairly standard fly-on-the-wall documentary about fat synchronised swimmers (The Padded Lilies) a pseudo didactic voiceover on diagrams, the scientific study of the body and some unique properties of fat. The good-humoured, self-aware joshing of the Lillies anchors the many wry
observations and jokes based around scientific exposition. The effect is not quite so absurd as it sounds – rather, it is absurdist in the best of sense. It is strangely moving when they waddle into the water and become graceful and liberated from their physical forms. Best of all, there is the Heath Robinson touch of a "body harness! – a "Drystroke Swimulator! that creates a living diagram of a swimmer, using Wyman!s own rounded frame and earth-goddess thighs. The effect is as humorous as it is meant to be but also creepy, strangely sinister; for it does not take much to reduce a living human body to a diagram – a flowchart, a mere process – or indeed a figure of fun. Wyman is an assistant Professor of Cinema at the University of Hartford and is currently carrying out research into the "Fat-Suit! comedy in Hollywood, something in which she identifies both America!s anxiety over its expanding waistline, and the use of shape as an excuse for a cheap laugh. Form follows function, but before the former could, obligingly tag along with the latter the eminent brains of the times had to agree as to the how of those functions. This was understood by the early photographers such Eadweard Muybridge, (18301904) an inspiration for Wyman!s Swimulator and a real life maker of living diagrams based on animal and human locomotion. He is most famous for isolating the moment when a trotting (not galloping) horse is suspended in mid-air with all four hooves off the ground (The Horse in Motion, 1872). This settled any debate on the matter and confirmed photography as the first major amputation (as McLuhan would put it) of the human eye since the invention of the telescope. McLuhan identified "amputation! wherever technology compensates for natural limitations – and becomes the preferred method of experiencing phenomena. Only the camera shutter could fully appreciate the horse at a trot, and it did that through breaking the body up into fragments. The art critic Linda Nochlin has remarked that the modern era made its business the disaggregation of the body, the mark of modernity in painting and
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of photography existing as a form in itself. The "crop! thus finds its way into Manet!s paintings, where feminine legs appear at the edge of the frame, or makes up Eugene Disderi!s erotic montage of ballerinas! feet. The step from scientific marvel to fetish is easily taken, never more apparent when Manet had his prostitute look straight at him. Degas! Woman with Binoculars (1875-6) was much more tasteful, using the amputation to respectably but disconcertingly, stare us out with insect eyes and gainsay any accusations that she might be a prostitute. Muybridge!s rotoscopes would soon be outpaced by the 24 frames per second of cinema; but what is most interesting here is photography!s early attempt to function as a stand-alone scientific method, not so much making light of evidence as evidence of light. It is his fragmentation that makes him modern in a twentieth century sense (although it is debateable as to whether he truly was a Modernist). Muybridge!s modern sensibilities lay not only in his interrogation of how a form functions but his fragmentation of the phenomenon itself – the running horse into a strip of poses. In doing so, he found a root (or route) to a modern understanding of the dramatic. How much more impressive are Muybridge!s suspensions of the trotting horse than watching its idle progress in "real time!? Yet how mundane is the overall activity? It!s unconscious actions outperform any romantic sense of exercising its willl (or its owner!s) will. It just exists, pose by pose and piece by piece, trotting from left to right. Muybridge also cajoles us into substituting our previous faith in the whole for faith in the sequence; to believe that it represents a logical order. We find the same confidence trick played in comics and much more deceptively in film, where speed melts the frames to give the illusion of a single image in motion – of a flow that makes sense, (the amputation of a cine-projector). Muybridge isolates the unthinking – or unconscious? movements of an animal. Does this then elevate that unconscious to new degrees of surface significance? Steady on there Sigmund! Before our claims for Muybridge become overly-grand, it is enough to say that his ingenuity in capturing the unposed and accidental still intrigues us. He engages directly with the moment in a fashion similar to the "direct cinema! style documentaries inspired by the Maysles brothers (and this before cinema was even invented!) in that he focuses his energies on being
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there to record the action, rather than controlling it himself (true to an extent; many of his human projects were clearly contrived or staged for his benefit – but he has nothing to do with how the subject itself unfolds, pole-vaulting or falling onto a mat is what it is) If there is an obvious difference between Muybridge and contemporaries such as Nadar, it is surely the former disinterest in the ego, or the spiritual centre of his subjects – they are simply movers, specimens, forms that follow an interesting function. Nadar!s subjects deliberately pose, make every effort to embody their sense of self, what they do and ergo, who they are. He focuses on angles and viewpoints, but most of his subjects remain suitably still (or even dead). Manet, for example, is trying so hard to look artistic he runs the risk of at least a minor hernia (his form will follow his function, damnit, with or without the incontinence…) Manet was at least, an artist who tried to come to terms with photography. He made much of the frame!s ability to cut and tease, while Degas learned a lot about composition from the photograph but stubbornly insisted on the value of paint. Either man was in any case, being outdistanced by a newly -empowered class of amateur snapper who were developing a new form even as Manet and Degas updated theirs. The critic Allan Sekula noted of "Photography [that it] is haunted by two chattering ghosts; that of bourgeois science and bourgeois art! . Both spectres do indeed rattle their chains across the prints of both Muybridge and Nadar. It hardly is impossible not to come over all Marxist when discussing them. The Nadar headcount of Manet, Baudelaire, Dore, Millet, Bernhardt and Dumas records a meeting of starch-collared peers, while it is his faith in science that allows Muybridge to be so dispassionate about his moving targets and their partcular social origins. Which brings us onto the far stranger figure of Hugh Welch Diamond, resident physician at the Surrey County Asylum in Surrey. In May 1856 he presented a paper to the Photographic Society of London entitled: “On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomy and Mental Phenomena of Insanity”. He proposed that by studying the faces of patients in photographs, physicians could identify and diagnose mental complaints, the faces being representative of various classes of mental illness such as melancholia and delusional paranoia. He had taken
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patients where the condition was known, posed them and produced albumenised salt-paper prints that would, he believed, be a useful reference point in diagnosing conditions. He also reckoned that in nature, even at its most aberrant and dysfunctional, form (or its surface manifestation) followed function. This was in the very earliest days before Muybridge had really established the importance of the viewer in creating an impression of sequential reality. Diamond!s concept of interactive photography, which offered photographic solutions to real problems is both touching and sinister; a look at the often superb photographs he left us reveal a very different power dynamic than Nadar!s. The frame is controlled by a doctor!s hands, that also control the fates of the women (Diamond worked on the female wing) photographed. But it is a highly self-conscious process which is why, for all the horrors of what his theories might imply, Diamond seems more accessible than contemporaries such as Adamson, whose ludicrous Humanist fantasies (what might Sigmund have said about the big heads?) are difficult to take seriously, or Julia Margaret Cameron whose poses, unlike Nadar!s, reflect an almost tyrannical sentimentality. For while Diamond approaches his subject as a medic, his treatment is never antiseptic, charged as it is with concerns social, economic, ethical and idealistic. Delving as he did into a premonition of the unconscious that Freud would only later explore, he was forced into gestures and flourishes that can only be described as artistic. And this has subsequently attracted artists to Diamond!s pseudoscience, perhaps much more than to Nadar!s over-studied poses. An art-therapy website posits Diamond as a demented, deluded but well-meaning forerunner, while a variety of museums, from the NY Metropolitan and the Royal Society, retain a modest collection of his albumen prints. A book entitled Frames was also compiled from his work, to be picked up in a New York bookshop by artist and filmmaker Grahame Weinbren. Weinbren is an interactive artist, and his Frames incorporates Diamond!s photography, ingenious electronics, filmed sequences and the audience itself. It was installed at the Tokyo NTT Intercommunications Centre in 1999. By pointing through hanging gilded frames at projected video images, a viewer gradually transforms actors into
still photographs of Diamond!s patients – from motion to stop. Weinbren!s work is an engaging study of the power of the frame and its role in narrative. He has explored this themes in earlier works such as Sonata (1993), which permitted the audience to affect the narrative flow of a story. A frame focuses interest, but as in Muybridge, assumes a subsequent sequence of events. It also confers a judgement on what is important; Diamond regarded the image of his patients as a diagnostic tool; similarly, the subjects of the many "state of the (American) nation! documentaries (see Super Size Me, Farenheit 9/11, Corra and Rule!s own Same Sex America and indeed, Wyman!s Buoyant) become the epitome of some breed of psychosocial anxiety. Weinbren: Frames was one of a series of interactive film projects shot in New York, based on these photographs taken by Hugh Diamond in England in the late 1840!s and early 1850!s. And photography was invented in 1839, so it is only 10 years on from its earliest beginnings. And they are beautiful, beautiful photographs, very expressive, and I was interested in the relationship between the photographer and the subject, and so I made this piece where you, as the viewer become the photographer and transform ordinary people into insane 19th century asylum inmates. Could you say a little more about Diamond? Weinbren: He was an amateur photographer, but everybody was an amateur photographer in those days and he had to develop his own method – he collaborated with a chemist and a whole bunch of technicians so he could take the photographs. And he thought he had these built in subjects in his patients, so he just started taking portraits of them, but then he started to use them as a day to day thing, and then the next step was to collaborate with a psychologist friend of his who looked at the photographs and together they tried to read the condition of the patient out of the photograph; the psychologist, the photographer made these women pose and dress them in their best dresses and everything. Corra: And they diagnosed from these pictures‌ Weinbren: They developed a new science of diagnosis by looking at the photograph and reading the condition out of the photograph. So that would be a method of diagnosis and they thought they would photograph every person who was mentally ill and they would be able to use it as a reference for other cases. But on the other hand, and I always say this, I think it is really important to understand that these people were very well intentioned. This was done in a
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very positive way and mental institutions had just changed from being prisons to being places of treatment - enlightened places. I am most interested in exposing the ideology of places where it doesn!t look like there is ideology. So he transformed them into representatives of their own condition and then photographed them. But when you read that condition out of the photographs…you in a way, assume their persona. So responding to that was quite challenging. We used highly trained actors who studied Shakespeare and all this kind of stuff, and they really think of themselves as serious professionals - they don!t just go and lightly pretend to be somebody else. I got four of them and they didn!t like the idea of imitating a character from the outside, working from the outside in – because as actors they like to work from the inside out, they like to find the connection that expresses itself in their behaviour rather than looking at the photograph and becoming the photograph they look in from the outside. So it was a complex problem, but they all did it because they were actors. But I also cast them because they looked a little bit like the photographs and then amazingly, they transformed themselves more into the photographs – even their faces. It was quite amazing to me, to watch them actually become even more like the photographs than they were when they started. How much background did you give the actors? Weinbren: Well I gave them Diamond!s psychological descriptions and I gave them a photograph, I told them a little bit – but basically there was a collaboration with them. They developed their own characters based on this data. It is wonderful to work with actors who really have this deep set of technique and deep set of ideas, because they can make these things come to life. If it wasn!t for them the piece, I think, would have been much flatter than it was. What kind of relationship did Diamond have with his patients? Weinbren: Many of the patients were members of the lower class who were alcoholics or schizophrenics or, you know, they couldn!t quite measure up to the standard of behaviour at the time. There was one woman in there, for example, who has suffered from religious melancholy - she believes that God has taken a personal dislike to her and so she has to go to a home - she had rituals and practiced self denial and constant prayers to try to get herself back into God!s grace. When they photographed her they dressed her up and they gave her a bible as a prop to lean on, so you feel that they built up the set around her so you could really see in the photograph who she was. She had a huge crucifix, and there was no evidence that she wore that all the time. And of course looking at all the photographs, there are only four or five dresses that the women all shared because that would be their best clothes. There was a lot of manipulation
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on the part of the photographers to make the patients become who they believed they were. How would you characterise your work? Weinbren: Well (1) – I am interested in photography, (2) – I am interested in technology and I am interested in emerging technology and how people use it, because of course I am also working in emerging technology, and (3) – I am interested in interactivity and identification and the relationship between the viewer and the screen and how you identify with somebody from the screen, how that identification can change if you can manipulate what is on the screen. So in a way I was interested in making myself or the viewer in the place of the photographer, so as a viewer you direct the film by pointing at the patients through the screen, and direct the actors into becoming patients in the same way as I think the Director of the institution directed his patients into becoming representations of their condition. I am interested in the idea that you are in this kind of narrative space that you can manipulate and be useful and you are constantly in control of your own story.
Tales of Weinbren… For their film about Weinbren (also called Frames), Corra and Rule adopt a fragmentary approach that Muybridge-like, isolates the creative process into distinct stages or events, and Nadar-like, challenges Weinbren to make an account of himself to camera. They also, in a style that has become common in documentary and signature to Corra!s direction, lay bare much of their own methodology. Appropriately enough, their first scene has them fumbling and failing to frame Weinbren!s self-introduction. "Oh my God! is all that Corra says, and then cut to titles. There is also an entertaining sequence where Weinbren dons beard and tie to interview his clean shaven, rather more casual self, intercut with an on-the-hoof dialogue with Corra along a Manhattan sidewalk, discussing the technicalities of the conceit - eyelines, synching the questions and creating the illusion of being interrogated by his doppelganger. The process of creation (which also required some weeks for beard-cultivation) is revealed as such – there is nothing magical or mysterious about it.
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Ernst Theodor Hoffman!s original doppelganger was a moralising spirit, and there is a sense that for both the documentary makers and their subject, conventional narrative was an inadequate gloss over the truths they were trying to reach. It is a problem faced by most art documentaries that we do not see the artist at work – or when they make mistakes, or a breakthrough. Instead, the art documentary is an amputation for an actual museum visit – and as filming usually dispenses with the jostling crowds one that we, again, come to prefer. When not editing, Rule runs a video blog (www.scratchvideo.tv) where she uploads short videos and documentaries on an almost daily basis. Ways of Seeing is a micro-film that shows tourists engrossed in framing the paintings on display through their camera viewfinders, failing to take any time to actually look at the art on display.
Frames has the difficult task of cataloguing an artist!s work and giving an insight into that work as it takes shape. The most moving, and interesting moment in Clouzot!s classic art film Le Mystere Picasso, (see The Drouth, Issue 11) blurs the line between being about and being art to wonderful effect when Picasso fails, after repeated attempts to realise a painting – he does not get his frame right, achieve the correct eyeline or coax a satisfying performance at the right moment. Likewise, we see Weinbren struggle and fret within Corra and Rule!s frame as part of the artistic proves. Their "direct cinema! tribute to Weinbren opens out, superbly, the frame of both Weinbren (Corra/Rule!s subject) and Frames (Weinbren!s subject). A case of ever-decreasing rectangles that draws upon interesting thematic tensions; Corra belongs to the Maysles school, that set out "to record reality without controlling it! – that is, unposed and, as far as possible, unaffected. Diamond, who would pose his patients with crucifixes and dead animals they may mourn, but might just have easily killed, is thus an interesting subject for such a film. Weinbren, who attempts to realise the Diamond photographs, nevertheless allows his audience ultimate control over that reality. Is there not also, a shared assumption between Corra, who in Same Sex America attempts an insightful portraiture of the two sides of the Massachussets Gay marriage dispute, and Diamond, of the capacity of the surface image to reveal something of what is going on underneath?
That an outward persona illuminates rather than occludes? Perhaps that is a rather Socratic question, and thus inherently unfair (and likely to corrupt any young people reading this magazine). But whether as art or science, documentary and photography both function this way and both tread onto equally shaky empirical ground in doing so. Whether the frame exists openly and for all to see, or is blurred by a projector, it is a major step from analysing a sequence of physical events into the deeper psychological conditions of an individual. For that surely, requires some attention to language, thought processes and ergo, the subjects mode of self-expression. The danger of ignoring these is thee very obsolescence that consigns Diamond!s photographs to historical oddity. But Corra captures words as well as images, as they stream, sometimes unwisely, from the lips of his collaborators (now almost ubiquitously termed as "characters! in documentary circles, a terminology that introduces so many difficulties and tangents we will side-step it here). This is shown particularly In Same Sex America, (2005) where Corra films activists on both sides in their unthinking, unselfconscious moments, simply through being with them all the time. His filming is not an event, but a process. He does not need to contrive a Muybridge-style trot to get what he needs. When documentary makers speak of the "characters! in their films (an admission, perhaps of how much they manipulate their participants when on location) they will often allude to the importance of the editing process in creating them. Just as a character in fiction comes from an author!s selections and a degree of calculated omission, so too does the editor make judicious cuts to characterise another human being. Editing lending. Yet if Corra identifies characters and Rule cuts them into service, they do at least avoid making them objects of derision, mobility and dignity. Whether conservative or liberal the participants and the issues they stand for are permitted to be complex, their faces move from anger to sorrow, even compassion for the other side, equally. It is hard not to be moved when a conservative campaigner bursts into tears at the idea she actually hates gays – or not to shudder at some of the more sinister agitators on either side of the dispute. What Corra focuses on in both films, is how individuals respond to a narrative, a sequence of events, an ideology, a constitution, the frame drawn around them. Corra: Well what I think was most challenging about Frames was trying to paint a vivid portrait of Grahame through his ideas, not necessarily his personal story – and I think that was really the most interesting challenge of the film and what I found the most interesting was to actually draw people into who he was – purely through his ideas.
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When you see a film about a person like Grahame, the viewers! expectation is that they want to get close to that person, you know – there is this 10,000 year old emotion – there is something when a story or a portrait is presented to somebody and they want to feel like they are getting close to the person in the film. Weinbren: The other interesting thing was that the film was really about what was inside the frame. Maybe we should talk about the editing process, because that was captured through the editing. Rule: I was more interested in his ideas and I think we pushed that so far that we took the liberty to play with them ourselves, so the idea of even the … if I start with a huge diamond framed section of the clip work, the direct … because he played with the idea of becoming the director with the photograph and was manipulating the frames itself, then I thought it would be fun to play with that in terms of the film so we could go inside and out and show things like the setting up of the piece - show things that you normally don!t see in a screened film, in and out of the frame of Grahame!s piece. This was a good way to visually play with putting the film together and using things that you normally don!t get to see, you know, the craft behind it – talking about what the film might be or could be. The work is really about ideas and about travelling through it as an individual – and that meant we couldn!t just do a chronological, straight film.
Pose…Position? And what of the audience? In his work, Diamond assumed one consisting of fellow medics, Nadar, one of his peers and Muybridge, presumably, veterinarians, bookmakers and the interested public. Either way, the assumption was that the audience would be a bourgeois one. A peer group (the horse would not be invited to look at the pictures of itself. Muybridge!s fragmented image was shocking in its time because it offered a previously unimaginable view of the world. Such an achievement was a demonstration of power – arguably, the power of the male gaze, which redesigns the female body according to its desires. Not even the physician Diamond, is entirely free of this behaviour, for he utterly controls the reality his subjects exist in. Diamond!s "surface objectivity! assumes an audience able to determine the meaning of what they see antiseptically – to comprehend the life experience of the subject from a safe remove. It is something of a conspiracy between members of a class convinced of its own separation from such human spectacles and the voyeuristic impulse in
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us all, and is only exposed through what Diamond!s unconscious reveals. We know where Diamond thinks he stands – decisively beyond the frame, as a scientist and a benefactor. We must believe his sincerity, but these photographs put him in the frame as much as his patients, as it does anyone willing to be fascinated by these images, something Weinbren is able to at least poke a questing finger at when he makes the public become the patients. He and Corra have further questioned the conceit of being an observer. In 2000, they collaborated on George, a film portrait of Corra!s inscrutable twelve-year old autistic son. As with Frames, there are frames within frames – George is given a camera and records his own thoughts in a video diary. The result is fascinating, often moving, but because it puts the frame very much in the hands of its subject (a tactic consistent with both Corra and Weinbren!s larger body of work) it is a challenge for any audience that sees it – because for once, the "subject! is part of the conspiracy. Corra: I don!t really think about the audience until later in the process, you know, once you start getting rough cuts, start feeling how they are going to play. Up to that point you are just going with what interests you. It is hard enough to make an interesting film, so you try to focus your subject matter … Weinbren: I think if it is an honest piece of work, it has its own logic and has its own structure and construction and you, in a way, the artist or the filmmaker is able to separate themselves from themselves, and he becomes the audience. You try to see it as if it is not you … Corra: That!s not always true … Weinbren: Well mostly … because you don!t say “well how is this person going to feel about that subject … how is the public going to feel about it”, it is not an interesting question – unless you are trying to sell dog food or something, then of course it matters a lot – we have sold dog food, as a matter of fact. But you are forced into that moulding, but that is different, that is making sales, you know. Rule: Rather than saying “how are people going to react to this story”. I just want to know their story first,
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I think, we go in with that motive regardless of our own judgement. We leave that at the door and get the story and then start to think more about the audience. Weinbren: Basically you are ending up with characters and situations on film both ways, and you are telling a story and the truth of the story.
path you take through it. It would have very different meanings depending on how they went through the piece, because what matters is the accumulation of experience. I would design each corner, I would make each intersection, but I wouldn!t decide the path. I am not a preacher. I don!t have meanings to give to people.
Corra: I realised that I don!t direct people that much when I shoot – well, I don!t overtly direct people, but there is subtle kind of nudging, right? Rule: You have your own style of directing, yes.
Conversation Interrupted by Mitchell Miller for The Drouth
Corra: I never say “go out that door and walk back in”. Weinbren: No, but you just say “sum it up for me, sum it up for me”… When you are interviewing people. Corra: Yes, yes, but that!s when I am hanging out with these couples [the gay couples in Same Sex America], it is not interview driven… Weinbren: The point I am trying to make is that you are always pulling a performance out of your subjects, whether you are working with actors or not - you are always looking for surprises. I bet you fiction directors would say the same thing – you are always looking for surprises and looking for moments that couldn!t be repeated. What filmmaker wants to have some repeatable moment on film? Corra: But people do feel comfortable with the threeact structure. I have noticed when you go into movies, that they actually don!t want surprises. We pretend like we don!t know what is going to happen next, but of course we really do. Whereas you go into one of your pieces or the George film, and people really don!t know what is going to happen next, and they are a little bit lost, and it is a bit off putting to the audience. I actually watched the George film recently again for the first time in years in a cinema, full audience and everything – and I think it is very important that the film was made this way, but it is extremely rude to the audience, the first 30 minutes – it is very off putting to the audience for the first 30 minutes. It doesn!t open any doors, it doesn!t invite them in… Weinbren: Is that what it!s like to be trapped in a mind like George!s? Corra: Right, but still a film like that loses people. And without feeling … you know, that is the other big question I thought about your piece, when I saw people interacting with your piece, is that is there a part of you that is trying to change audiences, you know, the way they perceive – the way they interact with cinema. But you do, to some extent predetermine how they interact? Weinbren: The piece is pre-determined, but the meaning, interestingly enough, is not pre-determined – because the meaning is dependent on the track or the
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