A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

. Well, that was anxiety-provoking. I did get an unusual sense of the shape of the film. Often, at

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experimental film screenings, when people realize what they're going to see, they walk out at once. With

Riddles

that didn't happen: people just sat, kind of bewildered and mesmerized,

until

synch sound came on. They would sit right through the rephotography of the sphinx, which is in many ways the most difficult part of the film. They would sit right through the opening three pans of Louise's story. And then they would leave during the telephone exchange shot. There would be a first walkout exactly at that point which, strangely enough, is exactly one third through the film. There's a reel change just before that shot. There was something in the rhythm of the film that captured people at the start. And then, one third of the way into the film, people would leave.

[

Wollen:

That sequence is too demanding. I hate it myself. We should have done a mix of telephone conversations as a voice-over. Then it might have worked.]

MacDonald:

My students are usually overwhelmed at first. They tend to be frightened until they can get a handle on the form and realize they can begin to make sense of the film.

Mulvey:

They should be able to figure out that the film has a pattern, that it's symmetrical. That should be engaging and is, indeed, intended to be a "handle." That is one of the things that I always thought, and still think, is most important about its structure: that it has a symmetry that can help viewers orient themselveseven if that structure was originally chosen for formal reasons. Even if you can't figure out

Riddles

during the first viewing, afterward you can see that

this

matches

that,

that the two bits with me go together and that acrobats go with the sphinx, and so on.

The experience of

Riddles

relates to the work I've been doing on Pandora, where I develop a parallel between Pandora and the box. Pandora herself is like a film noir figure: inside, she's deception, but outside she's beautifullike Rita Hayworth in

The Lady from Shanghai

[1947]. I argue that there is a "topographical" repetition between her structure and the box's structure. So, her opening the box is a figuration of woman trying to look at the secret of femininity, or the enigma of femininity, as Freud said. I've been arguing for an "aesthetics of the enigma," an aesthetics of the riddle, in order to get away from literalism about the body and the literalism of the look and into the look as curiosity, directed toward the deciphering of a sign. To go back to

Riddles:

organizing the film around a formal pattern gave it the structure of an enigma; the audience is then allowed to enjoy deciphering the shape or pattern of it, so that aspect of the riddle wouldn't be a frustrating obscurity but a form of play.

MacDonald:

A form of play that models solving the social and psychological riddles that surround us.

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Mulvey:

Exactly. You see, Freud in

The Interpretation of Dreams

describes the dream as a rebusa rebus being a riddle that has its solution actually inscribed into its form. It's not as if the solution were concealed inside by a mysterious space; it's actually concealed in the text itself, and the ''reader" of the dream has to decipher the clues through intelligence and imagination, through curiosity engaged by a text. Thinking back to

Riddles

from the point of view of my work on Pandora, I've realized how important the formal pattern of the film was, in making this kind of engagement possible.

I started being theoretically interested in this means of engaging the spectator through thinking about

Wavelength

and through reading Sitney on structural film," particularly on that aspect of structural film he called "participatory film" [See P. Adams Sitney,

Visionary Film

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 430435].

Wavelength,

Frampton's

nostalgia,

and of course, Frampton's

Zorns Lemma

set up a pattern or a system the audience has to engage with. It seemed to me then that this was an important approach, if you're thinking about the pleasure of the text and the pleasure of the look: it provides a way in which the pleasure of the look can become implicated with the pleasure of the rebus. It allows curiosity to be associated not only with narrativity, with wanting to know what happens next, but also with formal engagement where narrativity is transposed onto a kind of grid or pattern.

MacDonald: