QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WITH THE FILMMAKER

 

Q: How did you cut the frenetic first section of The House is Empty?

A: That first section isn't actually cut, it's "scratched." That is, I shot a long pan around the room, a circle, which was quite dull—maybe the way I'd look around a room, but, I thought, not at all how a cockroach would look around a room. Once I had it in the editor, on the timeline in Premiere, I did a screen recording while I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline to the beat of a waltz, just like a DJ.

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Q: Who is Clarice Lispector and why did you use this novel for The House is Empty??

A: Lispector was a Brazilian novelist of the 60's, a favorite of the theorist Hélène Cixous, who was influential to me as a young artist. Lispector's novel, The Passion According to G.H., describes at its climax a moment of fellow-theorist and feminist Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, where the inside crosses the boundary to the outside—the guts of the smashed roach ooze out—and cross another boundary when the woman puts the mess into her mouth.

I'd never used narrative fiction before, but I needed a structure for the empty house shoot. I remembered that the novel took place entirely in an empty maid's room, which worked with the empty house idea. I wasn't intending to illustrate the novel and that is evident, it's pretty loose in relationship to the story.

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Q: How did you arrive at the editing structure for Catalogue?

A:  I've always been interested in how long it takes to look at something. When I was coming up as an artist and studying post-structuralism and structuralist film, subjectivity was a negative word and choices were derived from chance or predetermined systems, never from feeling—which would be sentimental. I shot the catalog as it was already organized by the retailer Restoration Hardware but the duration of each shot is derived from my own subjectivity, my desire for the image or the object in the image. Now, this choice is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it’s meant to be funny, for according to Gene Youngblood, there’s no such thing truly subjective desire: desire is a matter of capitalist conditioning. Hence, the catalogue at which the camera gazes is producing in me the feelings from which the structure of cutting is derived, feelings, it turns out, which are not really mine. It’s a tautology, a loop, a hamster wheel.

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Q: What was your aim in using extreme closeups on printed type in A POTENTIALITY?

A: I'm mulling over something the Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom said not long ago in an interview:

"The perhaps ridiculous assumption was that if one could look closely enough at the materials of cinema, one could find within them encoded the mechanisms of capitalism itself. We would disarm capitalism by exposing the operations, and we would do that by creating different models of attention, which was what fringe cinema was busy producing. Each small movie created a different model of attention. Through sometimes heroic acts of duration, we would practice different modes of consciousness together in the cinema, and these would be sites of resistance, they became models for how we might live collectively outside of capitalism."

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Q: Anything to add?

A: Yes, a couple of "Easter eggs": The third sequence in "The House is Empty has a nod to two favorite filmmakers. the swishing clothes is a direct lift from Chick Strand's Artificial Paradise" and the fire alarm sound in that sequence is borrowed from John Smith's Girl Chewing Gum. Oh, and there's a photo of the sea in Catalogue Vol.6  that resembles the image in the culminating shot of Micheal Snow's Wavelength.

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