A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

[1970] in class, many people react stronglyat least at firstalmost entirely because of rhythm. I mean they're not anti-blueberries or anti-fog (though some people don't feel that such things are fit topics for movies); it's primarily the fact that they're being expected to watch an eight-and-a-half-minute continuous shot from a single camera position. It's like I'm asking them to be involved in a system of belief that they know to be false because it doesn't obey the rhythms of a system of belief they're accustomed to.

Watkins:

Well, in having said that, you've partly answered your question about the public response to

Roots. Roots

is challenging but reassuring at the same time, which is one of the really worrying things. If I made a film about the slave experience, you'd have a totally different reaction simply because the experience would be so difficult and complex to observe. In

Roots,

you're given a seemingly bleak or radical look at history, which in fact isn't at all because you're swimming along in this warm reassuring Jell-O: the narrative form in which it's given to you.

MacDonald:

And the context . . .

Watkins:

And the context in which it's given to you. Absolutely. Double layers of Jell-O. It's a very clear form of pollution"pollution" actually is not a strong enough word. When I talk to people now, I ask them to think about the way these rhythms cut up the time continuum, like a chip fryer slicing french fries. I try and have people think about that as breaking up, slicing through, our psychic continuity. I mean if we normally relate to things, or should relate to things, in gentle curving flows as we progress and grow, this is the opposite. It fragments our learning process, and our psyches. But there's a dilemma: it's hard to keep this whole topic from being just a kind of abstract aesthetic to discuss with students; we have to really start dealing with it in the body politic, in the social process.

MacDonald:

Is the Strindberg film to a stage where you know how you're going to deal with these problems?

Watkins:

No, not really. I have theories about it, but I'm quite worried because there's been so much research to do on the subject itself. It's been two years nonstop; I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to feel my way through certain ideas. And I guess anything I say is affected by the fact that I'm really strongly aware of the limitations of film nowfor me. I'm so aware of the manipulatory process, and no matter what I do, I'm only moving to another level of the same process. I might go to an infinitely more complex level, and I might allowI deliberately use that word

allow

people to have more variety in their responses, more complexity of response, more individuality of response, but I'm under no illusions about what's happening: that I am

still

shaping

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the film. What I don't know yet about the Strindberg film is how much I'm going to try and fight against responding to my own rhythms, those I've built into myself as an editor and director: someone stops talking, one, two, cut. I mean it's almost like when you take a sandwich, it goes towards your mouththese things become so instinctual. I started to break away from that in

Edvard Munch

by cutting

against

the beat in the music, which I really enjoyed. Normally when you put music on a film, you get your wax pencil out, and as the film is running through the machine, you're marking the beats, so that all you need to do is cut on the places you've marked on the track. But to the best of my memory, I didn't do that with the Munch film, and what I really liked was putting in a piece of music and then just suddenly stopping it. It created such a tension in me, and I think in the audience, because it breaks the usual rhythmic expectancy. I do want to work with time, and our perception of time. I feel that the basic Hollywood narrative structure is totally antithetical to the way we experience life. We don't experience things in synch; we don't think in synch. Our bodies may go through a basic rhythm during the day, but we certainly don't do so inside, particularly inside our feelings. We can look at someone and be thinking about something else. You can be hearing something, but seeing something else, et cetera, et cetera. Your thoughts can be a mixture of past, present, and future, all in a highly complex individual pattern.

MacDonald:

Of course, to the extent that one is being practicalworking toward an end, concentratingone is imposing synch onto life. Right now, I'm concentrating on listening to you talk. There are a lot of other things going on here, but to the extent I'm being practical, I'm forcing myself to work as though things were in synch. So, one might say thatand TV does this more than filmto make shows that are entirely in synch is like presuming that a go-get-'em practicality is the only way of functioning in life.

Watkins: