A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

] and realized, once again, that I didn't like to use my camera as a substitute witness for myself. And I'm not a good live cameraperson anyway. But I went to all the happenings. In the spring when he'd finished them, we talked about making a real film together. I suggested doing it out in my neighborhood in Palisades, in Piermont, where

The Great Train Robbery

[1903] was shot and where Woody Allen shot

The Purple Rose of Cairo

[1985]. Allen turned that little town into a Depression town. The local joke is that he had to upgrade it about ten years to make it look right.

So Oldenburg and I hung out there and talked, and then on our appointed day a week or so later he arrived with Lucas Samaras, and Pat [Oldenburg], and one or two other people. He had a big duffel bag full

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of props, which he dumped on the floor, and we started from there. We shot for a week or ten days, about three thousand feet. I just followed him around with my camera. The golf scene was my one contribution to the action.

As we were shooting, I'd get the rushes every morning and everybody would show up to see them, which was a big mistake. I didn't know enough to realize that you don't show actors their rushes because when you cut out their best scenesand I was pretty ruthless about thatthey hate you.

I took about six months to edit the film. I agonized over it, though it was also thrilling. I developed an elaborate theory, which I won't bore you with, called "discontinuity," having to do with cutting on the basis of the interior feel of the shot rather than on either the plastic or the rational explanation of the sequence. It was no giant breakthrough, except for me. Also, I cut so as to obfuscate narrative. I did realize that if you're going to cut against narrative, it's got to be a positive thing. When you're disrupting the narrative expectations of the audience, you've got to do it in a way that makes interior sense of some kind. It was a matter of making a structure that had consecutive form, where one thing certainly led to the next, but where the specifics were chosen in ways other than story. You might go from a light frame with a lot of angular action to a lush dark one with rather static images as a matter of counterpoint. In a sense you do build up expectations and you've got to make good on them in the terms you finally set up.

I wrote something about those ideas, saying that time doesn't move forward, that things

are

going, but sideways, obliquely, down, and backward, not necessarily ahead. The sense of motion is the issue. That idea seems hard to defend, because our locomotion drives us forward with our face looking toward new things. But since that movement is toward oblivion, in my philosophy anyhow, it might as well be backward. It's a delusion to think that you're getting anywhere. Of course, there is an accumulation of experience.

When I finished editing

Pat's Birthday,

we opened it at the Charles Theater at midnight, and I took Claes with me. I'd shown

Horse Over Teakettle

[1962] there at midnight a few months before and got a big ovation for it, partly because it was about the atomic bomb and everybody had atomic bombs on the mind. But for some reason the audience for

Pat's Birthday

was antipathetic. In fact, there was some hissing, which I told Claes was the radiators, but he didn't believe me. Since then, it's slowly gathered a little momentum.

MacDonald:

The cool, deadpan, arty mood of the action seems very much of that period. The animations seem less dated.

Breer:

At the time, there was a sincere feeling that the only valid

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approach to life's absurdities was to have a certain Zen distance on everything, to be above it. To make it obvious that you

were

above it all, you would set up outrageous situations that you'd go through without batting an eye.

Anyhow, I didn't see much difference between shooting live action and animating, because in both the emphasis was on cutting. For me editing isn't just the perfunctory business of filling out the plan; editing is where I make the crucial decisions that make or break the film. It doesn't matter how good the shooting is if the editing isn't good.

MacDonald:

I've always assumed that when you animate, you prepare your cards more or less chronologically and then simply record them.

Breer: