A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I deliberately put Yvonne Washington on the edge of the frame until that key Marxist speech when the camera comes around the couch and finally frames her in close-up. That has a very specific metaphorical meaning about marginalization, as does the shot of the black signer, center screen, signing for the white speaker in the oval on the side.

MacDonald:

It had never occurred to me how ludicrous the normal way of including a signer on the TV screen is: the person

signing

is in the small hard-to-see space at the corner of the image and the person

talking,

who we can hear without any image at all, in the big space.

Rainer:

When it's important to

see

the signer!

MacDonald:

It's like the moment in

The Man Who Envied Women

where you reposition the slicing of the eyeball from

Un Chien Andalou

so that we realize its violence against

women

. After decades of teaching that film, the gender implications of that shot had never occurred to me!

Rainer:

Really! Wow. It's always been thought of as the "eye" of the camera, hasn't it?

MacDonald:

I'm a little puzzled about the dream where there are two black men looking at the

New York Times

want ads and two black women in the bed underneath them.

Rainer:

Well, Jenny and Yvonne Washington have just been talking about REM sleep. Jenny mentions that she's heard that older people don't have REM sleep anymore, and Yvonne Washington protests: "I don't believe that, I still dream. Just the other night I had the weirdest dream . . . " and we're into the dreamor actually it's preceded by another dream image, of Jenny running in terror from something

off

screen. Then we see the two black men looking at the

Times

help-wanted ads. The camera pulls away and there's a sign beneath the

Times

that you really can't read: it says, "Lost: memories, muscles, husbands, friends"all the things that are lost in the aging process or

look

like possible losses. And then you see these two women entwined in bed. It happens too fast (and there's also a voice-over that doesn't quite jibe with what you see), but the two

women

in bed are a reference to lesbians not

needing

men: the men are looking for work!

MacDonald:

[Laughter] Hmmm. I missed it.

Page 352

Rainer:

I don't think it's that obvious. But

then,

there's a reverse shot of Jenny looking down, suggesting a racial thing, the threat of the white woman coming between the black women. It's a dream within a dream.

MacDonald:

The title "Privilege" was used by Peter Watkins in a 1967 film about rock musicians receiving privilege as a means of siphoning off the political energy of young people into the rock concert phenomenon.

Rainer:

I don't remember that film.

MacDonald:

How did you decide to use, that title?

Rainer:

It had to do with Jenny's status in the flashback event. She had privilege and didn't know it, and was also lacking privilege and didn't know it. To her neighbors the Jenny character represents a white norm and a privileged life-style. The aging process has put her in a different relationship to privilege.

Every character in the film can be seen as either having or not having privilege, depending on race, sex, class, age. If they didn't have it, I gave it

to

them. I privileged Digna to be the commentator, to be more omniscient than Jenny, and to be able to follow Jenny around without being seen. "Privilege" is a crucial term in the film, a kind of prism through which all these issuesand techniquescan be observed.

MacDonald:

At the end, you do an interesting thing with the credits, particularly given the line we see during the credits: "UTOPIA: the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes." You intercut between the textual credits and what I assume is the wrap party for the film (you also include additional interview information). Do you see the party as a kind of momentary Utopia?

Rainer:

Yeah.

MacDonald:

Is the process of making a film your attempt to model Utopian interaction?

Rainer:

Originally, the ending was going to be a dozen postmenopausal women in bright red lipstick and black leather jackets, pouring out of a bar, trying to zip up their jackets [laughter]. It was going to be some climactic moment attacking stereotypes: these raunchy, spunky women. And then I kind of abandoned that and thought, "Oh, well maybe there'll be a dance." I thought I'd show all these women dancing to "Sounds of Soweto" or something, and then that seemed too corny. And finally, I decided, why not document what was already going to happen. I invited all the interviewees to the party. Only a few could come. Actually, Shirley Triest, the tall thin woman, flew from California: it was the first time in her life she's been out of California. I was very touched by that.

MacDonald: