Speaking Directly: Oral Histories of the Moving Image (excerpts) by Federico Windhausen

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Speaking Directly: Oral Histories of the Moving Image

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Erika Balsom, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Kathy Geritz, Sandra Gibson, Narcisa Hirsch, Peter Hutton, Jim Jennings, Chris Kennedy, George Kuchar, Kerry Laitala, Owen Land, Annette Michelson, Aily Nash, Tomonari Nishikawa, Elizabeth Price, Luis Recoder, Lucy Reynolds, Ben Rivers, Warren Sonbert, Kidlat Tahimik, Jonathan Walley, Mark Webber

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Edited by Federico Windhausen

SFCBooks 2013

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Speaking Directly: Oral Histories of the Moving Image (Cinematograph no. 7, 2013)

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. First Printing: 2013

ISBN 978-1-304-65302-4

San Francisco Cinematheque 55 Taylor Street San Francisco, CA 94102 www.sfcinematheque.org

Ordering Information: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, educators, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the above listed address. U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers: Please contact San Francisco Cinematheque Tel: (415) 552-1990; or email sfc@sfcinematheque.org. Book design by Brad Steinberg 4

Contents

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Foreword 7 Introduction 9 Annette Michelson by Mark Webber 13 29 Coleen Fitzgibbon by Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder Narcisa Hirsch by Federico Windhausen 47 62 Jim Jennings by Kathy Geritz Kidlat Tahimik by Aily Nash 74 Kerry Laitala by Jonathan Walley 89 105 Elizabeth Price by Lucy Reynolds Ben Rivers by Erika Balsom 118 130 Chris Kennedy and Tomonari Nishikawa Four from the Archive, 1976-1979 159 167 Notes on Contributors About San Francisco Cinematheque 169

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

by Mark Webber

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Annette Michelson

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“To write about, and in writing defend, the kind of cinema that I was becoming more and more involved in, involved a kind of political decision and a political act.”

For a number of years, I have been conducting research for a book that will chronicle the development of avant-garde film from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. Critical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond will explore the social and cultural context within which independent filmmakers redefined modes of production, distribution and exhibition, establishing cinema as an artform in dialogue with radical shifts in fine art, music, performance and popular culture. The events of this dynamic period will be uniquely told in the first-person testimonials of those directly involved in the movement. During the course of the project I’ve been fortunate to meet and record the memories of many significant participants, and have conducted more than 80 interviews to date. The following interview with Annette Michelson is an excerpt of a longer discussion that took place in New York on 8 December 2007. Annette Michelson is Professor Emeritus in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has served on the Board of Directors of Anthology Film Archives since its inauguration, often using Anthology’s cinema and library as venues for NYU seminars during the 1970s, and was the curator of “New Forms in Film,” a survey of New American Cinema at the Guggenheim (1972) and Museum of Art Montreux (1974). 13

ANNETTE MICHELSON BY MARK WEBBER

As critic and teacher, she has devoted much of her attention toward the study of the avantgarde. From 1966-1975 Michelson was a contributing editor of Artforum, during which time she edited the special film issue of September 1971 (including articles on or by Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and others) and the January 1973 special issue “Brakhage / Eisenstein”. On leaving Artforum, she co-founded the journal October together with Rosalind Krauss in 1976.1 Mark Webber: From 1950-1965, you were living in Paris. What were you doing there, and did you encounter contemporary avant-garde film during this time?

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Annette Michelson: I was working as an art critic for the New York Herald Tribune’s European edition, for Art International, and for Arts Magazine, which was edited by Hilton Kramer. I was living in Paris at the time of the florescence of the “new wave,” and I was very involved in it, not as a writer – I’d not yet began to write on film actually – but I was certainly caught by the freshness and vigor of Godard in particular and of Resnais as well, whose work I had known from his previously-made short films. In a sense I was bringing to bear, on the little I could see in Paris of independently made film, my training as an art historian, which had been under Meyer Shapiro largely in New York, and my interest really in the kinds of sea changes, or shifting of tectonic plates, which was beginning to happen in the New York art world. The little experience that I had with a truly independent and artisanalproduced cinema in Paris were the examples of Breer and Anger. That gives you some of the background of what became my project when I returned, having made a final decision to settle here in 1966.

What drew me back into New York was the multiplicity of what was happening in various fields, and although cinema was not yet what I had chosen as my life’s work, so to speak, I’d become more and more interested in it, and I also realized that there were potential and actual ties between the filmmakers and the various other forms of art and producers of artistic work, of art work. I also wanted to see, I think, if anyone was doing what Breer was doing or working in that line, since when I came back I was still writing art criticism, and I very much wanted to see if there was film that was in some sense being fertilized by what else was happening. I almost immediately came to see that it was being fertilized but not necessarily by what was happening in New York at that moment. I mean, I came to see how the work of Brakhage, Frampton eventually, many other filmmakers, was nourished, fertilized and supported by their experience of literature, drama and theatre – in Ken Jacobs’ case – and so on, but not necessarily by what was being done at that time in New York. They drew upon a vast and older body of work and tradition.

With thanks to Annette Michelson and Federico Windhausen. Initial research for Critical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond was supported by a grant from the British Academy.

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P ho to gr aph by Rob e r t Ha l l e r. Al l r i g h t s re s e r v e d .

Webber: So what were the films or filmmakers that strengthened your interest in the New American Cinema on your return to the US?

Michelson: Brakhage of course, and there was that.... Oh god, a wonderful film.... It’s a very famous film, and Taylor Mead was the performer. Webber: The Flower Thief (1960) by Ron Rice. Michelson: Yes, I was very struck by that, and it so happens that the performer, Taylor Mead, looked like the image of Noël Burch, who had been a close friend in Paris, and when I finally got him to see it, he was astounded as well [laughs]. There was something about the informality, the joyousness of that film, the gaiety of that film, and the way it seemed to break the rules of polite filmmaking, polite film acting and so on. What else was I struck by? Some of Jonas Mekas’ work, because he was doing his diary work by that time, and I was very struck by that way he had of, in a sense, duplicating with the camera what he himself tended to do when he was looking at people, this kind of fugitive, transitory way of engaging people visually. So I began to be very interested in his work, and of course I had I think already seen – well, in any case I saw it again when I came back here – the work that he had done with his brother Adolfas, and then a little later on Guns of the Trees (1961) as well, so I wanted to see more. The “more” that was forthcoming then was the documenting, the diaries that he was doing. It was not involved with narrative, either straight narrative or 15

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Coleen Fitzgibbon

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by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder

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“Film is not really nature, it’s a technical process created to mimic our biology of seeing, sort of the Frankenstein of human perception.”

Coleen Fitzgibbon was active as an experimental film and video artist under the pseudonym “Colen Fitzgibbon” between the years 1973–1980. Fitzgibbon was a student of Owen Land (aka “George Landow”), Stan Brakhage, and Carolee Schneemann during her years as a film/ video student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1971–73). She later attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program under the direction of Ron Clark (1973–74), studying with internationally acclaimed artists such as Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci, and Dennis Oppenheim. Between the years 1973–1976 Fitzgibbon made over twenty films, including some of her most rigorous experimental work to date. Films such as Found Film Flashes (1973), FM/TRCS (1974), Internal System (1974), Restoring Appearances To Order In 12 Minutes (1975), and Document (1975–76) screened at numerous international film festivals and museums, including EXPRMNTL 5 at Knokke-Heist in Belgium, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Hallwalls, Anthology Film Archives, Collective For Living Cinema, and Millennium Film Workshop in New York. Fitzgibbon’s experience at the Whitney’s ISP program exposed her to the emerging aesthetic practices of conceptual art, performance art, post-minimalism, and institutional critique. Between 1976 and 1978, Fitzgibbon teamed with artist Robin Winters under the collaborative name “X & Y” (1976–1978), creating a body of work spanning film, video, installation, 29

COLEEN FITZGIBBON BY SANDRA GIBSON AND LUIS RECODER

and performance. Fitzgibbon’s collaborative sensibilities continued when she co-founded the New York based Collaborative Projects, Inc. From 1977 through 1980, “Colab” was an organized group of up to sixty artists seeking an alternative practice that would call into question and challenge the emergence of the “art market” in their New York milieu. Fitzgibbon recalls: “The Colab period was an attempt at a non-hierarchical socialist art movement within NYC’s international capital finance system, and had been inspired by other earlier groups such as Oldenberg’s Store, The Fox publications, Judson Dance Group and the teachings of Ron Clark, as well as others.” The roster of artists in Colab included Robin Winters, Jenny Holzer, Peter Fend, Liza Bear, Betsy Sussler, Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness, Charlie and John Ahearn–to name just a few of the more successful artists.

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The following interview focuses on the conceptual ideas and exhibition history of Fitzgibbon’s structural film masterpiece Internal System. Film artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have written: “In one of her more minimalist films, the viewer is presented with nothing but a blank monochromatic frame slowly shifting through various intensities of color saturation, flickering/shuttering repeatedly from light-to-dark (and back again) for a duration of 45 minutes. The only hint of information we have to navigate through this complex and difficult film is at the head and tail of the film, in the rolling text “credits” introduced as positive at the head of the film and negative at the end. Technical information such as film stock, film speed, film length, camera, lens, shutter, projector, and a host of other data appear on the screen like hieroglyphs of some secret language to be decoded. Whether we know what this cybernetic schemata means or not, Internal System abandons us to the pure phenomenological ecstasies of cinematic temporality – the reveries of a radical filmic monochromism. At the end of the sojourn the titles repeat but in negative, as if the experience of their effects – purely visceral rather than analytical – offer no direct correlation to the mechanism they wield.” (Catalogue for the Independent Film Show 7th Edition, Naples, Italy) This interview was conducted by Gibson and Recoder at Fitzgibbon’s studio in NYC, December 6, 2008. Sandra Gibson / Luis Recoder: What is it like to be showing your early films again? Your films have been at the New York Film Co-op since the mid-70’s and people have been renting them on a sporadic basis here and there. We pulled them out to get them preserved, and are currently screening them. What is it like to revisit this body of work? Are there new experiences that emerge, especially in interacting with newer audiences? Coleen Fitzgibbon: There are always things you wish you had done, but then that would have been another film. Showing the films again does bring up some of the same thoughts I had when they were first shown, such as how audiences receive them, and it isn’t always, you know, happy. Internal System is not like showing an audience a Hitchcock film with a plot, an ending and great images in between. When the film was screened for the first time at Knokke-Heist, 297 people walked out of 300 people in the audience. Gibson/Recoder: But that’s the very crux of this kind of filmmaking. In other words, when 30

you were making these aesthetic choices it was somewhat of a critical act that deliberately applied pressure on audience expectation. You were obviously challenging your audience and didn’t care to appease them. Fitzgibbon: As you both know, experimental films can be aggressive in deconstructing audience expectation, and it’s usually filmmakers making films and videos for other filmmakers. That’s about as diverse as the audience gets.

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Gibson/Recoder: Was there perhaps a certain crisis in the air where you said to yourself: “I need a broader audience, I need to reach out to other communities because this one is too jaded?”

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Fitzgibbon: No, I think when filmmakers and artists show each other their work it has a very positive side. I also collaborated with other artists such as Christa Maiwald in Chicago 197273, Robin Winters as “X & Y” in Holland 1976-77, the Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince and Winters in NY/CA 1979-80, and the very large artist group Collaborative I Projects, Inc. (Colab) in NYC 1977-81. When I moved to NYC, I worked for several artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Gorden Matta-Clark, Les Levine, Jennifer Bartlett, Charlie Ahearn and John Lurie, and have had many friends who were artists help me with my film and video projects, such as Joanne Elam, Bill Brand, Louis Hock, Seton Coggeshall, Tom Otterness and of course Sandra Gibson recently. The 1970’s in lower Manhattan was in artistic ferment, with hundreds of people in all the arts, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, conceptual artists, performance artists, poets, musicians, dancers, most seeming to cross over traditional boundaries to work together. It was a time that offered grants (NEA, NYSCA and others) to individual artists to experiment during a time when there was a financial crisis in the city. Artists banded together to show work outside traditional galleries because the galleries could not afford to take on many new artists. Now film and video installations in galleries and museums attract a general public that was not really coming in the seventies. As younger, international artists you both (Gibson and Recoder) often have more diverse audiences when you present your films and installations. Gibson/Recoder: Coming back to Internal System, can you describe how it came about? Fitzgibbon: I graduated the Art Institute in the spring of 1973. Most of my friends went to NYC: Margie Keller, Saul Levine, Bill Brand, Christa Maiwald, Diego Cortez, Ilona Granet, Greg Lehman. Found Film Flashes was made that spring, and Saul encouraged me to show it at the ‘73 London International Film Festival in September. After briefly traveling in Europe, I moved to NYC to go to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program until the end of ‘74. During the Whitney I went back several times to Chicago to process reversal films, such as Internal System, [and to] print film tests and FM/TRCS because it was cheaper. Gibson/Recoder: Where did you get a hold of an optical printer for FM/TRCS ? 31

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Narcisa Hirsch

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by Federico Windhausen

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“At that time it wasn’t about writing. At that time it was purely images.”

Following her work in painting, performances, and happenings in the sixties, the GermanArgentine filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch (born in 1928) went on to make over thirty films and videos in Argentina. Often exploring gender identity and corporeal experience, her films also delve into spiritual and existential issues, within an abundance of visual lyricism. While Hirsch’s influences and interests are expansively cosmopolitan, her images are derived largely from her immediate environment: the interior spaces of her domestic life, the rural landscapes of Patagonia, and the urban environments of Buenos Aires. As this interview makes apparent, her artistic biography has intersected with such art- and film-cultural milestones as the happenings at the di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires and the early years of Anthology Film Archives. Yet Hirsch has generally avoided strong institutional affiliations, and this individualistic tendency, along with the lack of support for alternative cinemas in Argentina, often led her to participate in the experimental film and video scene in Buenos Aires in a more self-guided manner. For decades, as she was pursuing various artistic exchanges and intellectual dialogues, she helped to reinforce experimental cinema’s commitment to the small, intimate screening. In Buenos Aires, she has frequently showcased both her own collection of experimental films (from the United States, Canada, England, and Argentina) and the work she made before, during, and after her association with a loosely-knit filmmaking collective that is now referred to as the Goethe Group. This interview was conducted in her home in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires 47

NARCISA HIRSCH BY FEDERICO WINDHAUSEN

on December 24, 2009, at the outset of what would soon become a rediscovery, first in Argentina and later in other countries, of her oeuvre and of the work of her Goethe Group colleagues. Narcisa Hirsch: Argentina being what it is and especially Buenos Aires being what it is, cultural influence always came from Europe, and the underground cinema, the independent cinema, the experimental cinema, that came maybe a little bit from California, but mainly from New York. My first experiences and encounter with the cinema I was interested in was in New York. Wavelength (1967) was my first experimental film that I saw in the MoMA. Federico Windhausen: What year?

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Hirsch: Late ‘60s, early ‘70s. Windhausen: Was it the first screening at MOMA of Wavelength? Had it been shown before?

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Hirsch: That I don’t know. I could find out. I had a niece [Andree Hayum] who was an art historian, and at the time she was very interested in all the avant-garde that New York offered. She’d told me about Steve Reich and about all these people who came and made films. She said, “If you want to see something of an experimental film tomorrow, they’ll be screening a piece called Wavelength by Michael Snow.” At the time it didn’t mean anything to me. So I went and – I remember I was sitting there and there were very few people, and somebody left and ... I was feeling uneasy too. Then suddenly, in the middle of that, I remembered that she, this niece of mine, had told me that it lasted 45 minutes. And then I relaxed, and I said, “It will finish. At some point it will finish.” And then I started looking, and I saw it to the end. Windhausen: If I recall correctly, at the Museum of Modern Art there’s a recording from 1969 of a Ken Jacobs screening where Lawrence Kardish, I think, says that the previous week, or two weeks prior, there had almost been a riot when Wavelength was shown.

Hirsch: Well, that must have been it.

Windhausen: That might have been it. Because people had acted up, he warned the audience that the film they were going to see next, which was Tom Tom the Piper’s Son – [Both laugh]

Hirsch: – was worse!

Windhausen: So maybe that was 1969. Hirsch: It could have been easily that.1

According to Andree Hayum, the screening Hirsch attended probably occurred in 1971 or 1972. Hayum has clarified in an email: “I was in a women’s group at the time that included a couple of the young members of fi lm department at MOMA. None of them wound up staying there but I think I may have arranged a screening for Narcisa through them (Melinda Ward and Regina Cornwell). I think I myself became aware of Wavelength through Annette Michelson’s interest and soon subsequent Artforum article.” 1

Windhausen: Although it conceivably could have caused a commotion every time it showed at the MoMA because there are always the jubilados [retirees]. Hirsch: Yes, the jubilados. I remember one man getting up with an umbrella and sort of waving the umbrella and saying he was indignant and leaving the place in indignation. Windhausen: So you saw Wavelength. And what did you like about it? Had you been doing anything that attracted you to it?

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Hirsch: Well, the story – or at least my story – is that I started out as a painter in life. My father was a painter in Germany. I was born in Germany, in Berlin, and my father was a painter, and I had something which very few people had, I had relatives in Argentina. I had a grandmother born in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, but I was German-born. Usually, it’s the other way around, that all the immigrants had their grandparents coming from Spain or Italy or whatever it was, and then are born here. But with me, I came to visit this grandmother. That was before the war, in ‘37, ‘38. And then the war broke out and we couldn’t go back, so I stayed on.

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My father stayed on in Berlin, and my father was half-Jewish, and my parents were already separated. They hadn’t been living together. So we went first to Austria with my mother because she is a paradox also. She was very anti-Nazi, very much more against the regime than maybe my father was. As a painter and as an artist, for him it was more difficult for him to leave the place because he belonged to his pub and he belonged to his friends and he belonged to his painting. And so he stayed on, and we went first to Austria because my mother didn’t want to stay on in Berlin and we lived in Austria for awhile, like two years. And we stayed in Vienna for a year.

Then the idea came up to come for a year in Argentina and to have [something] like a sabbatical year in Buenos Aires. That’s what we did, and as I said, the war broke out and so we stayed on. This is important in the sense that I had this heritage of the painting of my father, and I was very nostalgic for this father whom I hardly had met because I was five when my parents separated. So the painting was something I picked up probably with the nostalgia of a revival of the relationship with a father who was not there, and I started painting and, well, that was it. I had a few shows, et cetera, et cetera, but I always felt that ... it wasn’t a very intimate, it wasn’t a very personal relationship with painting. I always thought it was something that I had taken on from somewhere else, and I needed the movement. And this is where film comes in. Then we – I say “we” because I was part of a group – we were three people. I had a friend who was a photographer and another friend who was just a friend who came from Colombia. And it was a time when here in Buenos Aires the di Tella started happening, which was a place, an institute, which gave room for the artists to do things which were very new and very unheard of for Buenos Aires, which was very traditional. The di Tella opened up the doors to this avant-garde which was fairly new in Argentina, but I didn’t belong to the di Tella, although I would have liked to. But for some reason I couldn’t get in, or – I don’t know what happened, but I wasn’t part of it, but I was part of the whole atmosphere that was happening then in the ‘60s in Argentina, and what happened then were the happenings.

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

by Kathy Geritz

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Jim Jennings

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“The editing in the camera is what my work is really all about, because I’m playing the camera like an instrument, like a musical instrument.”

Jim Jennings has been filming the streets and neighborhoods of New York City since he was a teenager. Early on he had teachers and mentors who were filmmakers themselves. Crucially, one emphasized the act of seeing with a camera, which set him on his course. Jennings’s films explore the play of light and shadow across the urban landscape and, although silent, the rhythms of the street life. He himself is on the move in the city, as his job as a plumber, a trade he took up to support his filmmaking, takes him to different neighborhoods. Wearing that hat, he often must observe strict protocols regarding what he does and whom he reports to, but when he films, his approach is intuitive and spontaneous. Jennings has said he wouldn’t be a plumbing contractor anywhere but New York City, where he can encounter the history of plumbing, and in New York, he has also found a city where his filmmaking flourishes. I first became aware of Jennings’s films in the late 1990s when he began working on a series of films, some in black and white, others in color, focused on different neighborhoods of New York. While these films elegantly portray the city, they also document his process of observing. This is in part because he usually edits in camera, creating a sequential record of what catches his eye. Through his framing, Jennings’s images may fragment the urban landscape, providing glimpses through openings such as a window or door, or flatten it as

when depicting shadows cast on a sidewalk. Other times the city is presented as a collage of simultaneous images, viewed in reflective glass panes and mirrors. In these and other ways, Jennings creates an abstract city that reveals its vibrant surfaces while plumbing its depths. Or should we say, he finds it, camera in hand, on his weekend journeys to neighborhoods he might never have discovered were it not for his day job. I interviewed Jim Jennings on June 28, 2010 in his plumbing business office on East 29th Street in Manhattan. I asked some follow-up questions in September of that year. Kathy Geritz: How did you get started making films?

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Jim Jennings: I started shooting film around 1967 when I was a teenager. My father’s family had a 16mm wind-up Keystone camera that I got my hands on. I made a film at a train station, in Connecticut where I grew up. I was attracted to urban landscapes even at that time. I was inspired by West Side Story, by the romantic idea of urban hoodlums.

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Around the same time, I made a couple of films with a friend (we lost them in Grand Central Station). Then, in my senior year of high school I had the opportunity to make another film. I had a very inspiring English teacher, John Clements, who was making 16mm films. He had gone to Bard College. In some ways it was my most elaborate film, in that I made an optical soundtrack. I ended up in someone’s film studio cutting a soundtrack for the film, which I have never done since. I still like the film. I lost the original but I have one print, which I show from time to time. It has lots of cuts in it, and I like the editing very much. It’s a psychodrama — if I have to put it into a category. I didn’t even know what a psychodrama was at the time; but when I look at it now, it definitely is one. It has to do with coming of age and sexuality. My English teacher was blown away by it. He encouraged me to go Bard College. And I got in. I didn’t think I was going to because my SATs were horrendous. I was a sculpture major at first. Then John Rubin showed up; he was some sort of adjunct. He was a very important person for me, because he started a class on experimental film. He showed experimental films and brought people up to screen their films — Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, all sorts of experimental filmmakers — and that really got me started. My sculpture teacher wanted me to continue with sculpture, but I broke away from that. I kept making films, and I kind of got carried away with it. Ernie Gehr started teaching there a year later, and so he was my professor my senior year. He was a great teacher because he didn’t try to push me in any direction. He encouraged me to try to see what I was doing with these short little films I made. I think he sensed that I was being inventive — that I was connecting with myself somehow, doing something that was unique to me. He never told me I should do this or do that. I made three films my senior year that I liked, and I still like them. 63

JIM JENNINGS BY KATHY GERITZ

I graduated and moved to New York in 1973 and have been here ever since. To me, it was the place to go. When I lived up in Connecticut, on a very dark, moonless night, I would look out and see the glow of the city, sixty miles away. When I came to New York, the film world was a tiny little world. It was very friendly, accessible. Since Ernie Gehr had been a teacher of mine, I immediately made contacts. Ken Jacobs was also a very, very important figure to me. He was never formally my teacher, but he’s been an underpinning for me. It was a lot harder to come here as a painter at that time, or a photographer or a sculptor; you had that whole monumental art system. But film was like a little beatnik group. It was very easy to get recognized in film because there wasn’t that much competition. I immediately started showing films at venues like the Collective for Living Cinema.

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Geritz: How did you also come to be a plumber?

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Jennings: There were artists who were plumbers down in SoHo, in lower Manhattan, when they were doing all those illegal renovations. I was doing other jobs — I drove a cab, I worked in a nursery, I worked at the Film-Makers’ Coop. Then this guy said, “Why don’t you try plumbing?” and I did and I was good at it. I’m dexterous and I’m good at figuring things out in three-dimensional space. I was making $20 an hour, which was like a fortune. I got jobs and started to be able to pay rent and to survive. Most people I work with don’t know I make films. The guys that work for me, they don’t know. To them, I’m just a plumber or their boss. Most of the customers I work for have no idea. Some do, because some of the people I work for — some of the contractors — are actually artists too. There is a lot of that going on in New York; artists who can’t make money with their art end up in the trades.

Geritz: What is your approach to making films — do you carry your camera around with you every day, or do you bring it out when you’re working on a particular film project? Jennings: I carry a camera more project-wise. My time is always being interrupted by work during the day, so I go out on weekends to shoot film. For a while I was carrying a camera around with me daily, as long as it wasn’t too hot, but that was when I was driving a van — about six, seven, eight years ago. In the winter I would leave a camera in the van. A van is a great way to shoot; I would shoot as I drove. Very often the truck was parked, or I was stuck in one these hideous traffic jams where you are hardly moving. My favorite shots are those slow dolly shots taken when I am in congested traffic. Geritz: Do you have a project in mind when you start shooting or do you gather shots and then “find” the film? Jennings: The film I’m working on now is about a specific location in Queens. Silvercup is an earlier example of my going back to a location over and over and filming. If I’m inspired, 64

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

by Aily Nash

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Kidlat Tahimik

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“When you work with the cosmos, suddenly you get ideas for how to treat some visuals, like some images that had no intention of being in the film. That’s the freedom of the independent.”

Distinguished by their playfulness, exuberance, and relentless questioning of the status quo, Kidlat Tahimik’s films function on many fronts—the cosmic, the personal as political, and as advocacy for the notion of the indie-genius. Tahimik was raised in the Philippines during the US occupation, and his work teases out the complexities of a formative condition: namely, participating in a rich cultural heritage that is in danger of being degraded by the hegemonic effects of American culture. Yet his films manage to never polarize, polemicize, or simplify; rather, they exhibit a generous and gentle wisdom, offering incisive observations about the ways in which the political impacts all of our lives. Tahimik’s first film, the groundbreaking Perfumed Nightmare (1977), impressed international critics and filmmakers such as Susan Sontag, J. Hoberman, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola. He went on to make several other acclaimed works including, Memories of Overdevelopment (1980-present), Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? (1980-94), and Turumba (1981).

Kidlat Tahimik was in New York for his US retrospective tour in New York in the fall of 2012 during his US retrospective tour, which was organized by Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives, and myself. It took place at Anthology, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Pacific Film Archive; it also included visits to the New Orleans Film Festival, Tulane University, Bard College, Ramapo Collage, and Basilica Hudson. 74

This interview was conducted over a series of meals during Kidlat’s stay in New York—long breakfasts and dinners in Hudson, and a lunch in Brooklyn during the Sandy black-out. Special thanks to Ted Kennedy and Ben Rivers for their presence and input during some of these conversations. Aily Nash: How did you end up living in Paris and Munich in the late-sixties, early-seventies, and what led you to filmmaking?

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Kidlat Tahimik: During my undergraduate in theater at the University of the Philippines, I was a really happy and carefree guy, but then I was accidentally elected the president of the student government. First, I was elected one of the representatives of the college of arts and sciences. On the first Saturday after the elections, representatives from the different colleges get together and select a chairman. Usually it’s a law student or business student who runs for that position because they know their ambitions when they’re in school. But that year, my fraternity saw that the law student was very weak. So they maneuvered, made some alliances, and suddenly – ahhh – I’m speaking in front of 18,000 students, talking about nationalist policies, and leading rallies to Malacanang, the equivalent of the White House in the Philippines. By year’s end, I began to see myself as “presidentiable,” since lots of campus leaders in my school eventually ended up in national politics. It’s not that it was my ambition, but I thought maybe I was a potential president.

There was this little voice, from I don’t know where: “A developing country needs economists, not artists!” So I shifted majors and went for an MBA in finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Thus, I ended up in Paris as an economist at OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) an organization of the rich countries to coordinate aid policies. I worked there for five years — in a three-piece suit! Maybe it’s good to get to know the enemy inside you, what you don’t want to be. But I still had this inkling to get back to theater. I joined the OECD theater club. I wanted to write this play, so one summer I took a break from my job in Paris to [go to] a farm in Norway. In the mornings I would pitch hay, and in the afternoons I would write my play on my little typewriter. But when I returned to Paris, I realized, to finish the play, I would have to take a sabbatical, a year or two. But I didn’t have enough savings. Nash: When was the point of no return, when you realized “I’m going to be an artist and I’m not going back to OECD in Paris”? Tahimik: After working at the OECD, maybe my next career stepping stone would have been The World Bank, the dream of many Philippine economists. Either I was crazy or something flipped. I realized, “I don’t need this life.” You become dependent on your economist payroll so you can buy many bottles of champagne and Pierre Cardin suits, and live the comfortable bourgeois life in Paris, in your 16th arrondissement flat. One thing that 75

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KIDLAT TAHIMIK BY AILY NASH

P ho to gr aph of Tahimik by Ai l y N a s h .

helped: I met this old French actor who was a really funny, nice old Jewish man. He had acted in one film, Borsalino (1970). We’d gotten into a friendship. I moved into his big flat in the 16th. It was a way to meet non-economists. I was the boring economist at cocktail parties, compared to the crazy artists who didn’t care what time it was. It was cosmic timing. As I was getting uncomfortable with “fertilizer distribution studies,” I was meeting a lot of artists in Paris, and I began seeing possibilities outside the box. It was beyond my expectations that I would give up my job. But because I started writing a play and getting focused...just at that moment I was able to cut the cord. And jump out for a free fall. I had written my play, and it wasn’t getting anywhere. I met this Swiss fashion designer who was interested in doing fashion from Philippine shells. We flew home. I introduced her to some shell makers. She made a cocktail dress collection de nacre (mother-of-pearl). On our way back at Schiphol airport, I saw a Munich Olympic announcement with cute souvenirs displayed. I realized I could make these Olympic souvenirs. That was the turning point. By helping a fashion artist, I’d made contact with Philippine shell makers. So now I had the exotic materials and a global event. My bridge to becoming a playwright. Each Olympics allow merchants to exploit their mascot. In 1972, it was the Dachshund, the sausage dog of Germany — on key-chains, T-shirts, throw-pillows — any conceivable kitsch. I proposed a dog mosaic out of mother of pearl, from which hung twenty-five shells. When the wind blew, it would make a nice sound. This was going to be my bridge to 76

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Kerry Laitala

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by Jonathan Walley

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“The whole process of making art is about transforming ideas into matter. It can be seen metaphorically as a form of alchemy.”

“[T]he Bay Area quietly groomed many of the finest experimental filmmakers to emerge in the 1990s,” Brian Frye writes of San Francisco’s film scene on the brink of the new millennium.1 He adds that these filmmakers “once again…explored the plastic qualities of motion picture film,” and took up “long-deferred aesthetic questions…about film, what it looks like, how it works.”2 But this rediscovery of film’s unique visual, tactile, and technological qualities took place during a time of rising anxiety about the medium’s very future, particularly in light of the spread of digital technology and corresponding decline in availability of materials and services for filmmakers. Compounding this was a sense among some experimental filmmakers that their accomplishments were being increasingly eclipsed by the rising profile (and financial success) of “moving image” work in the art world.

Brian Frye, “The New Science of the Cinema,” in Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, Steve Seid eds., Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 290.

Ibid, 290. 89

KERRY LAITALA BY JONATHAN WALLEY

These are the circumstances under which Kerry Laitala began her filmmaking career in the early 1990s. Laitala moved to San Francisco in 1994 to attend the MFA program in film at the San Francisco Art Institute (1995-97), having received her BFA in Film & Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1992.

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In an early work entitled The Retrospectroscope (1996), Laitala’s background in still photography passed through the looking glass of pre-cinematic history, which Laitala found a fertile source of forgotten technological, aesthetic, and cultural “essences” of cinema. The Retrospectroscope is a large Plexiglas disc mounted vertically on a stand, and covered with concentric circles of serial photographs printed on transparencies. When spinning, and illuminated from behind by a strobe light, The Retrospectroscope creates the impression of movement in much the same way as a phenakistascope or zoetrope.

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Far from a cinematic nostalgia trip, however, Laitala’s pre/para-cinematic device elegantly embodied the contemporary experimental film zeitgeist: a quasi-scientific approach to the materials and processes of film, a new fascination with illusion and visual pleasure, a celebration of cinema history, a foregrounding of the interplay of film’s materiality and ephemerality, a DIY spirit, and an embrace of the mechanical and electro-chemical soul of cinema before the digital turn (Laitala’s bio claims a “chronic passion for old things”).

But Laitala’s frequently noted analog ethos may be more complicated than sheer celluloid luddism. She has indeed expressed pro-film, anti-digital sentiments: “Cinema as a medium of reflection worthy of the same consideration that one would pay to the ‘plastic arts’ is in immediate danger as too many think that there is no difference between light sensitive mediums and digital or electronic mediums.”3 But she also writes in a more accommodating way about the relationship between the cinematic history reflected in The Retrospectroscope and the emerging history of digital cinema: Currently, a shift in our perception has already been dissembled and fragmented through computer based technology in the ways in which spatial temporal realms are challenging our views about how space is constructed. I hope [The Retrospectroscope]…provides a link to this evolving, perceptual trajectory.4

This interview, conducted in March 2012 and revised via email, explores all of these themes and more, through a reconsideration of The Retrospectroscope and what this turning disk still has to say about experimental film culture since the digital turn, the medium-specific turn, the gallery turn.... Kerry Laitala, “Cinema as a Material Presence,” unpublished essay (2004), http://kerrylaitala.net/cinemamaterialb.html.

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T he R et ros pe ctros cope ( 1 9 9 6 )

Jonathan Walley: I don’t want to be reductive, but The Retrospectroscope is a nice key to your body of work. It’s an early piece, and foreshadows many of the features that developed across your subsequent work. So I’d like to focus on it as a “way in” to your career. My first question, then, is what led you to make it? What were the specific circumstances, and what was going on in your work and your thinking about cinema at the time? Kerry Laitala: I had just graduated from Massachusetts College of Art, and I found this little book in a used bookstore. It was called Magic Shadows, by Martin Quigley, and another book I came across, Archeology of the Cinema by C.W. Ceram, was inspirational to me. So I was reading about phenakistoscopes and all of those early optical philosophical toys that people were using to try and create motion pictures before cinema was invented. This research inspired me to try to make my own type of device. I read about an early chronophotographer and inventor named Ottomar Anschütz, who invented a motion picture device called the electrotachyscope in the late Nineteenth century. Anschütz used a Geissler Tube to illuminate the succession of images in his optical device and so I thought, maybe I can use the modern day equivalent of a strobe light to illuminate the images. I got 91

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SPEAKING DIRECTLY: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Elizabeth Price

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by Lucy Reynolds

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“One of the things I really try and do throughout a film is bring many voices together so they speak to you as a manifold voice, a multiple voice: many people speaking to you simultaneously.”

If a common thread can be found in the sculptures, drawings, installations and videos of Elizabeth Price, it is an abiding fascination with the language of organizations, whether that might be an archive, an advertising company or a benevolent society. Her art assumes the forms with which these diverse groups address us to disseminate their function and purpose, and in this way her work draws out a subtle revelation of their more covert purposes. In Small Gold Medal (2002), for example, she revisits the awarding of a wealthy individual’s bequest for culture in East London, allowing the implications, historic and contemporary, of charitable funding to the arts to seep through the formal language of administrative paperwork and correspondence that the award process generated. In her exhibition Denness (2006) “found texts” from a newspaper, a public radio broadcast and a placard for a protest, are treated as an arcane out of context set of texts or instructions for new interpretation, and in the process return us anew to the implications of the original event and its reportage. More recently, the temporality and spatial and acoustic convergences offered by the moving image have offered Price a fitting medium through which to further develop her interests in the institutional structures of language and the cultural artefact. Here, as this interview unfolds, the presentational address of Powerpoint in video works such as The House of Mr. X (2007) and The Woolworth’s Choir of 1979 (2012) has provided the starting point, not only for 105

ELIZABETH PRICE BY LUCY REYNOLDS

her to pursue her fascinations with structures of power, language and the voice, but also to create an aesthetic in which digital surfaces, whether simulated or retrieved from the internet, layer and unfold with an eerie and unnerving precision. In this way, I would argue, she creates a unique moving image form, distinct from the indexical characteristics associated to celluloid or video or the camera apparatus, and more related to computer software and its corporate address.

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My interview with Price focuses on four key video works. The House of Mr. X, which mingles the language of an archival collection of mid century modern architecture and furniture with the language of advertising which first provided the funds for the collection. User Group Disco (2009) is set in a ‘Hall of Sculptures’, but one which occupies a space outside any conceivable architecture setting, and features rather than conventional sculpture, a debris of ‘mundane and ubiquitous objects, utensils and ornaments.’ In West Hinder (2012) the loss of a cargo load of luxury cars at sea provides the impetus for a video which scripts the language of car advertising to bring back to the surface the drowned vehicles, and the implications for masculinity and commerce which they embody. Finally, we discuss her Turner Prize winning video Woolworth’s Choir, with its complex play in three parts of multiple voice and archival texture, which navigate the questions of belief and loss through the architecture of a burning building, pop performances and a cathedral choir. Lucy Reynolds: You worked with a lot of materials before you started working with video, but I don’t think you’d necessarily see yourself as someone who’s particularly media-specific - or would you?

Elizabeth Price: Well, I never did, but I suppose once I started working in video I found it so interesting and liberating in a lot of ways. I felt like I was able to use all these different kinds of knowledge that I had from being involved in music when I was younger, to making sculpture. Lots of different things seemed to kind of coalesce. It was very exciting, and I seemed to have some fluency in it. So, since I started, I haven’t stopped, but I don’t know whether that’s a permanent situation. Reynolds: So how was it at the beginning? You were in a band, weren’t you? Price: Yeah, we had a couple of minor indie hits, and we made some records and did some radio sessions. That was when I was 18. But I suppose that whole period of being involved in music, post-punk music, from my late teens through to my early 20s – not just being in a band, but being part of a whole world of people making stuff – I think that was the first art (and I’d classify it as art) that I was ever really involved in and participated in. But I didn’t really like performing, so I stopped that very quickly. When I started working in video, all the stuff that I knew and [which] had made that music scene meaningful for me became usable in a way.

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Reynolds: Can you elaborate a bit? Stuff that you knew, do you mean, quite literally, putting together a score, writing songs, and how those structures might be adapted to video?

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Price: Yeah, I suppose it was some technical knowledge, but I think it is more the kinds of experiences of musical performance and of sound, qualities of sound, and a kind of literacy with that, I guess, and a sense of its pleasures, was something that I felt able to employ. In a way, I don’t think the provenance of my work is experimental film. I think I started using video as a form of publishing, as a way to combine image and text temporally. I realized that after the fact. I started making Powerpoints, and then I started using Final Cut Pro as a way to make more sophisticated Powerpoints. That’s really how I started making video, but then once I did that, I realized how much more I could do. So my use of video really came out of doing things that had a Powerpoint lecture format and were pedagogic in style, combining found text and image, and my interest was in organizing these things temporally. I’d been working with things and, in a sense, had a narrative structure for quite a long time sculpturally – you know, objects that got bigger and bigger or series of drawings that chronicled development.

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Reynolds: There’s was always very much a temporal aspect to your sculptures and your drawing anyway, so maybe this became a way to make that more predominant in your work.

Price: Yeah, I think so. I think it was also an opportunity to organize time more precisely. I could introduce things, like pacing, that might come with a time-based narrative but don’t necessarily come with a chronology. Surprise can be emphasized. Also, that sense of being able to establish one thing and then reverse it or alter it. This was a really different possibility of narrative form that emerged when I started making video, compared with the kind of rather straightforward materialist kind of sequential narratives of previous work. Reynolds: I didn’t realize that you were working with Powerpoint before but looking at The House of Mr. X, and also the recent piece West Hinder, you can really see that derivation. So, in a way, it’s not like you began using a temporal medium you might connect to film or video, but it was a temporal medium that we might connect to the presentation of a Powerpoint. Price: I think to Powerpoint and also to publishing, to magazine formats, to text and image because in a sense, the way I organize the screen is often as much to do with things being placed on the surface of it as it [is about] having a depth. So quite often I use it as a page or a surface upon which things are juxtaposed. Very rarely is there very much depth spatially, too. Reynolds: In User Group Disco particularly, it’s almost like you’re playing with the ideas of depth. With a digital window it’s simply not possible to create a convincing sense of depth, but actually that doesn’t mean that it’s clumsy. What’s interesting about the way the objects in the video occupy space is it’s very slick, but in the way that images segue from to another in a 107

by Erika Balsom

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Ben Rivers

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“What’s utopia to one person is maybe not to another, so that’s why utopia is no place.... The closest you could get to utopia is probably being alone.”

“Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.” –J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962) In the wilds of Aberdeenshire, a factory in Buckinghamshire, on the islands of Lanzarote, Gunkanjima, and beyond, Ben Rivers has used the moving image to imagine ways of existence that at once recall vanished ways of life and look forward to post-apocalyptic possibilities. Boundaries between fiction and documentary dissolve in Rivers’ intimate portraits of individuals and places that exist far from the metropole, somehow out of time. In these non-chronological excavations of the future (to borrow a phrase from Mike Davis), one finds a structure of feeling in which a poignant melancholy mingles with the persistent hope that the spark of an alternative future might already lie in our midst. I Know Where I’m Going (2009) and Slow Action (2010) are journey films, roaming through a world that ceaselessly protests the arrogance and cynicism of believing in the stability and permanence of our present. Both recast documentary actuality as the remnants an unseen

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catastrophe. I Know Where I’m Going is a road movie that pulls away from an anthropocentric scale of time to instead consider the long now of geological time and the questionable place of the human within it. The film opens with an image of an abandoned car, its interior covered with rubbish and snow, while an atonal drone rises on the soundtrack as if a portent, or perhaps an afterimage, of calamity. Rivers travels through landscapes at turns foreboding and fascinating, visiting a series of individuals who, it seems, might be the last men on earth. In Slow Action, the human presence recedes even further, as the film offers four island utopias from a future in which the water level has risen so high as to engulf much of the world. Unseen narrators describe these societies that follow after our own and yet are for them a distant past, their study entrusted to individuals known as “curators.” The film continues Rivers’ interests in isolation, landscape, ruin, and world-making, but moves into an explicit consideration of the concept of utopia, that no-place whose imagination has historically animated dreams of social change but which seems so lacking today.

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Sack Barrow and Two Years at Sea (both 2011) offer a sustained concentration on a particular locale and the individual(s) that inhabit it. Sack Barrow joins a host of other recent artworks fascinated by the fate of things that have lost their usefulness in its careful capture of Servex Limited, a factory opened in 1931 and shuttered in 2010. In a palette that mixes the tired milkiness of age with the vibrant intensity of marigold and ultramarine, Rivers explores the living labour at the heart of a form of industrial production soon to cease. As in Slow Action, drowning becomes a trope for expiration and rebirth: a female voiceover speaks of the rising water in Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1935), a novel in which fantasy and reality mingle together and in which death is not final but simply signals the passage to a new form of existence. Two Years at Sea, Rivers’ first feature-length worth, returns to Jake Williams, the subject of his 2006 short This is My Land and one of the “last men” of I Know Where I’m Going. The film is something of a Rouchian ethnofiction, assiduously avoiding both the pretense of observational neutrality and a fact-based account of Williams’ life. Rather, in mesmerizing hand-processed black-and-white film – a stock since discontinued – Rivers stages a quietly magical encounter with Williams and the world he has made in the woods of Scotland, one in which it is not out of range to see a caravan levitate. Through this curious mingling of fact and fiction, Two Years at Sea telescopes the particularities of one man’s life with a more general meditation on what might be at stake in eclipsing our here and now in favor of other places, other times, other visions. Erika Balsom: I saw Sack Barrow at the Hayward Gallery when I was in London last year. A big part of that film is a fondness of the outmoded and for the social relationships that lie within outmoded technology. What do you think your attraction is to things that have outgrown their usefulness? Why do you think that these things exert such a fascination today? Your interest in these issues is, of course, part of a larger tendency. Ben Rivers: With that film in particular I was interested in an industry that was small and made with kind of love. It had a family focus. That is becoming more and more impossible 119

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BEN RIVERS BY ERIKA BALSOM

Sack B ar row (2011)

in the world in which we live. Everything is done on a huge industrial scale. It’s very impersonal and that’s why you have suicides in Apple factories and what have you.

Balsom: It’s almost about finding a touch of artisanal modes of production, even within a factory. Was it a chemical factory? Rivers: They’re doing electroplating. They’re plating bits of metal with other kinds of metal. To me it didn’t really matter so much what they were doing. I was really interested in it because it looked very alchemical. It was something that I didn’t understand and I didn’t really want to understand it. It looked like they were cooking up potions [laughs]. They’re doing something that is very skilled and something that they’d done for years and years. Everywhere I go I spend a lot of time; I stay in these places and find out the histories of a place and the lives of people there – but these facts often don’t end up directly in the films, they are there only as underlying ingredients to help me understand where and who I am working with. Barbara, who ran the factory, is a friend, so I knew that her grandfather had opened the factory in between the world wars, with an emphasis on giving work to ex-servicemen who had been disabled. 120

It was a family business and for the last ten years Barbara was running without really making a profit. She was literally just making enough money to pay the workers and the workers become her family in a way. I thought that was really interesting, so on that side of things there’s a melancholic aspect to it.

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But then there’s also the artisanal thing which I’ve always been interested in. I think I relate to in terms of filmmaking. The kind of filmmaking that I do is pretty self-sustaining, nonindustrial. . I try to do as much of it myself as I can. So it’s usually just me making these things, or a very small team like me and a sound recordist. There’s always that kind of mirror with the places I’m interested in, and the fact that it’s a very enclosed world. We’ll probably talk about this, but it’s another kind of island. That’s something that fascinates me, the way that people build these spaces. With that factory, one of the things I really liked was the fact that whenever I turned up there, all the workers were there, and I always left before they left. And so there was the sense that they were always there, you know? [Laughs] This was really their world and I like to keep that fantasy, which is why I never showed the outside. You stay inside those walls.

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Balsom: That’s interesting, because I feel like a lot of the fascination with the outmoded that you see in film and contemporary art tends to deal with outmoded objects. Whereas what you’re talking about seems something slightly different. It has to do with the form of social relationships that congeal around practices that are becoming outmoded. Their interest is more in these relationships than in looking at a certain kind of technology or a found object that has some sort of charm or that is fetishized for its rarity.

Rivers: Right, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. I’m less interested in technology even though I think people might be because I use film, which is supposedly outmoded technology. But who says it’s outmoded? It’s really not that old, but fortunately or unfortunately cinema is this thing that’s been dictated by technological progress. And then we are deprived of choice, which I think is really important. We should be able to run businesses on a small scale and we should be able to have a choice between different mediums, as we’re the artists. We’re the ones who should choose, but actually that’s not the case – it’s chosen by large companies. So it’s all somehow intertwined with the same kind of melancholia. But I try and also see the joy in it. With Sack Barrow I deliberately didn’t want to make something that was really morbid. I think it’s a celebration as well. It’s a film about the transformation of space and about transformation in general. That’s why I brought in that piece of text, which is a move into this other world. It’s the cave-like world that is described in The Green Child (1935) by Herbert Reed. Balsom: Can you say a little about this book? Rivers: It’s an amazing book. It’s a book that’s in three sections. It’s about a character who almost reaches a point of death and then experiences a rebirth into the next section of the 121

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Chris Kennedy and Tomonari Nishikawa

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“I wanted to understand apparent motion, or the cinema apparatus and human visual perception.” “I wanted a portrait of this idea of politics and gravity.”

Editor’s note: In 2011, at Emerson College in Boston, the filmmakers Tomonari Nishikawa and Chris Kennedy presented their films together in a program that brought out a number of aesthetic and conceptual affinities in their work. They later agreed to explore those points of connection within the format of a co-interview. Chris Kennedy: Probably the best way to do this is to talk a bit about our backgrounds and then go through our films, using the show at Emerson, where we showed our films together as a bit of a model. So tell me about yourself. Tomonari Nishikawa: Okay. I am Japanese and I studied filmmaking at Binghamton University in New York, where I encountered experimental cinema. After spending two years at Binghamton, I went to San Francisco Art Institute, spending another two years and making more films and I started making film installations. In 2007, I went back to Japan, having a teaching job at a nursing home for the elderly, and in the following year, I received a fellowship to spend a year in Malaysia and Thailand to do some research about personal filmmaking scenes in the region. After coming back to Japan, I went to screenings of experimental cinema in Tokyo, and I felt that the experimental films shown at the screenings looked very different from what I had seen in the United States. I thought it was because

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of the cultural differences, Western and Asian cultures, and that’s why I applied for the fellowship to know more about the Asian personal cinema. After finishing the fellowship, I got a teaching job at Binghamton University, so I came back to where I started. Kennedy: Did you know of experimental film before you went to Binghamton? Nishikawa: Maybe not experimental films, but I had seen some – more like avant-garde, including feature movies by Shuji Terayama and Toshio Matsumoto.

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They appeared very strange to me but I liked them. Then, later when I was at Binghamton, I found out that they were well-known Japanese experimental filmmakers. I did not know about experimental cinema. Kennedy: Right. But your introduction was at Binghamton basically. Nishikawa: Yeah.

Kennedy: And how were you introduced?

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Nishikawa: Well, I took a course required for the major, Expression & Innovation in Cinema, which was a lecture course, I would say, an introduction to experimental cinema, and that’s how I’d seen experimental cinema works like Fog Line (1970) by Larry Gottheim. Kennedy: Oh, yes, Fog Line.

Nishikawa: And films by Peter Kubelka, Ernie Gehr, and of course Ken Jacobs and many others. I had never seen any of these works before coming to Binghamton, and I didn’t know anything about these films. Kennedy: Were any of those guys still teaching when you were there? Nishikawa: Ken Jacobs, yes, but not Larry Gottheim. Ernie Gehr was teaching at San Francisco Art Institute when I was there. Kennedy: Why did you go to Binghamton? You also went to university a bit late, right? Nishikawa: Right. I went to a university in Japan, majoring in business, and during my senior year I decided to drop out of school because I wanted to become a film director. Then I worked and saved money to study abroad, and after quitting the job, I decided to spend a few years in Australia and Canada, just to get familiar with the English-speaking environment. When I was finally ready to go study abroad, I decided to go to the United States because the country produced many movies. I had a limited budget, so a community college was my choice. I checked the tuition for one in California and another in New York, 131

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K enned y, Simu ltane ou s Co nt r a s t ( 2 0 0 8 )

Kennedy: Yeah, The Zone of the Total Eclipse (2006). With Into the Mass I hadn’t thought about the circles so much in terms of the form. It’s interesting.

Nishikawa: Maybe could you talk about Simultaneous Contrast (2008) because this is a film I believe you made around the time you were leaving San Francisco or finishing your MFA. Kennedy: It was also one of my transit films. Finishing it actually ended up corresponding to around the time I was leaving.I was struck by the fact that all the bus shelters in San Francisco have these fixed stripes, they all had the same stripe design, the stripe pattern. And so it’s kind of a fixed form where the background changes. I think around that time I had seen one of Nathaniel Dorsky’s films, maybe Song and Solitude (2005/2006). There’s a moment with a very high contrast shot of a bus shelter and it’s in a shadow and you’ve got the stripes as black stripes basically, as masks. So what I had originally thought when I started to make Simultaneous Contrast is that I would use those stripes as masks. The idea would be that you would have two different scenes along the same parallel lines so the stripes would work as masks to mask out one part of the scene and I would fill in the masked part with a second scene. But as I began working on it I realized that stripes themselves were a bit more translucent and I wasn’t going to get a firm mask. At first I wasn’t quite sure about that, but then I 149

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Four from the Archive,

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Owen Land, George Kuchar, Warren Sonbert & Peter Hutton Compiled by Federico Windhausen

Editor’s note: The following excerpts are taken from question-and-answer sessions conducted at San Francisco Cinematheque screenings at the San Francisco Art Institute. They have been transcribed from analogue tapes which are stored in the San Francisco Cinematheque’s office. Because the recordings were made casually, using inexpensive equipment, the sound quality varies greatly. In the transcripts, portions that are difficult to make out are labeled “indiscernible.”

Owen Land (a.k.a George Landow), September 9, 1976 Land [reading aloud, after reciting “the marriage broker joke” from On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1977-79)]: I am often asked questions like: “Why did you choose the color red in the paintboard sequence in Wide Angle Saxon (1975)?” Sometimes, being so frustrated by my seeming inability to answer such questions, I’ve gone so far as demanding the audience refrain from asking questions beginning with the word “why.” Recently, I’ve come to understand that this reticence to discuss my motivations behind specific choices is a result of an unconscious desire to avoid tampering with one of my primary sources – that is, my own unconscious. In Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud points out the similarities between techniques of wit, as used consciously and as used unconsciously, by mental patients, children, and, most interestingly, by all of us when dreaming. I found that I had been using some of the most common techniques, including...condensation. Here are some examples of condensation: the title Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970) is a combination of remedial reading and reading comprehension, in itself a nonsense phrase; the multiple 159

FOUR FROM THE ARCHIVE, 1976-1979:

choice test in Institutional Quality [1969] which asks you to choose a camera to make a 16mm film; the red paint covering the woman’s face in Wide Angle Saxon [1975] which combines the film which the protagonist has seen with the memory of the woman passed on the street on his way to see the film. Freud analyzes many techniques of wit, including changes of order or sequence, metaphorical meanings, puns, ambiguity, allusions, etc. Suffice it to say, I find a large number of these cropping up in my films. For me the significance of this is that it indicates an attempt to set up a situation which the unconscious is encouraged to apply material to and interact with more conscious agents of the art-making process.

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Land [discussing Wide Angle Saxon]: I should just make a few comments about this film. It sort of sums up for me my experience with certain – probably about a year in my life.... Part of it is a way of dealing with the American Midwest. It’s very much a Midwestern film. All the people in it are Midwestern people, and so it’s Americana, actually.... It just really tries to put together a lot of concerns that I had at the time. All of the people in it are real people that I met, and I tried to incorporate their stories, their real life stories, into a fictional account, but that was true in a sense too, questioning what is fiction and what is truth, as they do tend to overlap and influence each other, and sometimes it’s hard to separate them. So the man, Earl Greaves, really did experience those things with a few changes. He didn’t really have a Cadillac, he had a Mercedes-Benz. A few details were changed. [An audience member asks a question about what was shot by Landow and what was appropriated footage.]

Land: The only thing in it that is actually found footage that I didn’t film myself is the reporter who is talking about Panama, which I found an outtake, and [indiscernible] I really liked it. And I don’t think I could have ever gotten an actor to fail like that. I mean, it’s easy to get an actor to fail, but to get them to fail so it looks like they’re not acting is difficult. So in a way, I’m glad that there’s just confusion between what may be real or documentary, socalled and what is purely fictionalized and fantasy or what [indiscernible] images.... I like putting things together that have apparently no relation to each other, because everything obviously must. So, it’s kind of, “Okay, you have to find the common denominator between all these images.” Oh, yeah, I should have mentioned that another concern was that I was interested in making a narrative film, but not doing it in conventional way. So that there is a story that occurs, but I find most people can’t figure it out at least from one or two viewings. (We’ll get a chance to see the film again, later.) But every image does have some logical relationship to ever other image, they all gravitate around that central story of Earl Greaves and his conversion experience.... So the next film is called No Sir, Orison! (1975) and the Bible says that the Devil is the father of lies, and so you’re probably wondering what that has to do with supermarkets. Well, I think the supermarket is the prime example of a sort of institutionalized lie. I mean, there 160

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Notes on contributors Erika Balsom is a lecturer in the department of Film Studies at King’s College, London. Her book Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2013. Kathy Geritz is a film curator at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA. She is co-editor of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945-2000.

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Collaborators for over a decade, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder unite the rich traditions of the experimental film, particularly its structuralist and materialist strands, and the multimodal sensibility of expanded cinema that emerged in the 1960s, in which the moving image was woven into the labile space of performance, sound, and audience interaction. Their larger body of work explores this interstice between avant-garde film practice and the incorporation of moving images and time-based media into the museum and art gallery. In 2012, Gibson and Recoder were “Artists in Focus” at Courtisan Festival in Ghent, Belgium. From March 1 to April 7, 2013, Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York exhibited their first public art commission, Topsy-Turvy: A Camera Obscura Installation. In Fall 2013, the Viennale will be featuring their latest 35mm projection performance, Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure. Gibson and Recoder live and work in New York. Aily Nash is a curator and writer. Her curated programs have screened in venues such as MoMA PS1 (NYC), BAM/Brooklyn Academy of Music (NYC), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), in Light Cone’s Scratch Expanded (Paris), Northwest Film Center (Portland), Image Forum (Tokyo), Echo Park Film Center (L.A.), Art Cinema OFFoff (Ghent), and others. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, artforum.com, Film Comment, Kaleidoscope, de Filmkrant and elsewhere. She curates films and moving images for Basilica Hudson, and is an editor of a film criticism program at the Berlinale Film Festival. She is based in Hudson and Brooklyn, NY. Lucy Reynolds is a writer, artist and curator. Her work moves between these different forms, bringing them together through the questions of feminism, political space, collective practice and film. Her articles on artists’ moving image have appeared in journals such as Afterall, 167

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Millenium Film Journal and Vertigo, and she has curated film programmes for museums and galleries such as Tate Modern and Mukha, Antwerp. Her own films, performances and installations have shown at the National Film Theatre and galleries in London and Europe, most recently in Film in Space at Camden Arts Centre. She runs the MRES: Art: Moving Image, a research based MA devoted to the study of artists moving image at Central St Martins, in association with LUX. She is features editor for MIRAJ, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal.

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Jonathan Walley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema at Denison University. His writings have appeared in October, The Journal Of Aesthetics And Art Criticism, The Velvet Light Trap, and in several collections of scholarship on experimental film. He is currently writing a book about expanded cinema.

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Mark Webber is an independent curator of artists’ film & video whose special projects include “Shoot Shoot Shoot: The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative & British AvantGarde Film 1966-76,” “Reverence: The Films of Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow),” and “Expanded Cinema: Film as Event, Spectacle and Performance.” From 20002013 he was a programmer for the BFI London Film Festival. As co-founder of The Visible Press, he is currently preparing the new imprint’s first publication Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos. His website is www.markwebber.org.uk

Federico Windhausen is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. His essays on experimental film and video have been published in journals such as October, Hitchcock Annual, Grey Room, MIRAJ, Senses of Cinema, and Millennium Film Journal. In 2013, he programmed a series of retrospective screenings of the work of Narcisa Hirsch for the Toronto International Film Festival’s Free Screen series. He received a 2014 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a forthcoming article on Hirsch. In May 2014, Windhausen will curate the first Oberhausen Seminar, a project by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, LUX (London), and The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (New York).

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About San Francisco Cinematheque

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San Francisco Cinematheque was founded in 1961 in the rural community of Canyon, California by Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand and a handful of other idealistic filmmakers. As an informal showcase for artist-made works, Cinematheque became a pioneer in the presentation of independent film as a unique art form and has persisted and thrived for over fifty years. Retaining the early founders’ spirit of independence to this day, Cinematheque is now—over half a century later—one of the leading exponents of experimental and avant-garde media in the world.

As an internationally recognized arts institution, Cinematheque is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of film and video works that challenge the boundaries of moving-image art. Cinematheque strives to make film/video artists and their works a part of the larger cultural landscape through the regular exhibition of works, through the creation of publications and online resources and by maintaining a publicly accessible research archive. Each year, Cinematheque presents approximately fifty public screenings of artist-made film and video across the San Francisco Bay Area at a diversity of venues including Artists’ Television Access, The Exploratorium, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Cinematheque’s programs include premieres of recently completed national and international works, newly restored films, retrospective screenings, multi-media performances and in-person artist discussions and lectures. These events offer audiences the opportunity to experience otherwise unavailable contemporary and classic moving image art and to engage in discussions with numerous local, national and international artists. In 2010, Cinematheque inaugurated CROSSROADS, an annual film festival devoted to the exhibition of cutting edge contemporary artists’ cinema from around the world. For comprehensive program history, publications and other resources and information please visit www.sfcinematheque.org.

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