A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

That's right. The point that I keep trying to hammer home these days is not only that the ideas on TV are conservative, but that the

form

with which they're presented (even if they

were

ideas with which you and I might politically agree) defuses them.

MacDonald:

In other words, if you put radical subject matter into a conventional form, it's as though you're teaching people to have ideas they don't act on, to think about things they would never take action to change.

Watkins:

That's right, yes. If I could wage full-time war, I'd wage it on such words as ''objectivity" and "propaganda." I mean

The War Game

has been shot down for being propaganda, and this by the BBC, which has transmitted pro-government, pro-nuclear-weapon films. I mean this is how fucked up Western society has become in its perception of reality.

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I think so much of what is happening today is stemming from the way we're being affected by film and television. How can we go on ignoring the effects of these forms of media, generation after generation?

It's impossible not to have a message in a film or TV show. The way you cut a film, the way you shape it, is highly subjective. Even if you have someone sitting in a chair facing the camera, the moment you touch the bloody button that starts the celluloid through the gate, you're manipulating, because you've had to decide where to put the camera. These are all dilemmas when you make a film. I think Godard has fallen into traps by believing that he can work out these problems within films. I'm not really sure that you can. Well, the structuralists or minimalists, or whatever one should call the filmmakers you mostly work with, Scott, seem to me to be working in extremely interesting ways with film, in ways that really challenge this basic language. Even so, whether you take that route or you take the other routesthe ones I took with

Munch

and my other films, for exampleyou are participating in a manipulative experience, which you must continually reevaluate.

MacDonald:

Also, avoiding traditional forms can make you seem more manipulative than people whose methods of manipulation are accepted as normal.

Watkins:

That's quite right; I hadn't thought of it like that.

MacDonald:

I think that's why it's important to do the other kind of work; even if it's not seen by everybody, it's seen by some, and whenever it

is

seen, it immediately recontextualizes the more "normal" films. If the normal film manipulation is all that exists, then it does seem to be inevitable. But once students have seen

The War Game

or

Blues,

I have to think that there's a seed in their brains that will sooner or later undermine their ability to accept the normal narrative pattern as the only way of interpreting human experience.

Watkins:

What I'm going to try to do with the Strindberg film so that I won't end up doing some of these things is really complicated: I'm going to have a go at the normal narrative structure: I'm going to shred it. What makes this subject so right for what I want to do (and which is one of the primary reasons why I've stuck through all this nonsense I've been experiencing in Sweden) is this man's complex character. He's completely different from Munch, though Munch was complicated too. Strindberg wrote novels, plays, short stories, political articles; he wrote on all kinds of things, on astronomy, astrology, biology; he studied language systems, the Chinese, the Runic, the Arabic, Japanese, Javanese; he studied plant life; he studied optics; he studied sound. He's a renaissance figure, and, of course, he was the grand amateur in a sense, but sometimes he went a long way. What makes him especially interesting is that at times he became very depressed by writing. He doesn't talk

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about manipulating, and he doesn't go as far in his analysis as I might have liked. But he does talk about writers being parasites.

Strindberg married three times, but the first marriage was the main one. His first wife's name was Siri von Essen. She was Swedish-Finnish, and they were married for about fourteen years, though the marriage was breaking up after about ten. He wrote two autobiographies. One was written in 1886; it's called, in English,

A Madman's Defense

. It's this incredible story about his marriage. Strindberg is attacked by feminists as the greatest sexist, but in fact he isn't, if you really think about it. He does really attack his wife, and it's awfulno doubt about it. He's calling her a whore and he's having really paranoid fantasies that she's having affairs with other people, which as far as I've been able to learn, she was not. She put up with murder being with this guy.