A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

There are filmmakers concerned in examining form; quite a lot of them do that. Some do very interesting work. But many of them don't seem anxious to go further with what they do, by taking it into the actual social process. You can't just talk about nuclear weapons blowing people up anymore. You have to talk about the society that is creating them, the society that is seemingly pushing down people's ability to be able to respond to them. The issue is going to be everywhere, and you cannot deal with it, as the peace movement has often tended to, as

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Watkins and crowd preparing scene for

The Journey

 (1987).

Production still by Sylvia de Swaan.

something destructive which one has to simply pluck out, like plucking out the core of a malignancy. Here the core is not a lump. It's got obscene roots going everywhere now. And the moment you understand that, you have to start dealing with why people are not reacting. And

that

leads to why people know so little.

We have to deal with the way we are receiving our information (and our entertainment, because the two are linked together) and with how that process is intricately interwoven into the quality of life. We all know this in theory, but we never move on it. We just go on letting it happen, without any kind of public reflexivity, which is really what I'm talking about: public participation in the processing of information.

I suppose one way of saying it is that I think the process I'm trying to get going in this film is one model, just one, of the kinds of ways in which I think the media should be working with the public. There should be a psychological and intellectual relationship, a working relationship, between the media and the public, not simply a closed masonic secret language coming from one kind of power source to the receiving public who don't quite understand the language of manipulation. This is

totally undemocratic

.

As things are, the media is a fantastic metaphor. The United States fires off nuclear missiles, including the MX missiles they test, from the

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Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. They fire the missiles into an atoll in the Marshall Islands. It's called the Missile Firing Range. The islanders are moved away, so the missiles presumably don't hit them. But the image of firing this stuff off towards a clump of islands thousands of miles away is just parallel to the way the media works. Just launch the stuff towards the public, and say good-bye.

I find the usual process pretty horrifying, and I'm really looking forward to working with families without a centralized script, and I'm looking forward to showing the film publicly. I'm hoping it will send tremors through certain sections of the media. Part of the media's way of not dealing with the public is to make production a secretive, elitist process. The professional does everything. He or she writes it, films it, and there's no relationship at all with the receivers. My god, there are as many possible ways of making film as there are blades of grass. But the media still clings virtually to one form, the theatrical mode, which has become a form of political constraint, of political power.

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Filmography

In the following listing, each film's title is followed by the year in which the film was completed, the film's gauge, the length of the film to the nearest quarter minute, and an indication of whether the film is black and white and/or color, silent or sound. In parentheses I have listed primary rental sources. The following abbreviations are used:

ACGB (Arts Council of Great Britain, 105 Piccadilly, London W1V 0AU)

AFA (American Federation of Arts, 41 East 65th St., New York, NY 10021)

BFI (British Film Institute, 21 Stephen St., London W1P 1PL)

CC (Canyon Cinema, 2325 Third St., Suite 338, San Francisco, CA 94107)

CFDC (Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, 67A Portland St., Toronto, Ontario, M5V 2M9)

Circles (113 Roman Road, London E2)

FACETS (video only: 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614)

FMC (Film-makers' Cooperative, 175 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10016)

FR (First Run, 153 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10014)

LFC (London Film Makers' Co-operative, 42 Gloucester Ave.,London, NW1)

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MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, Circulating Film Program, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, NY 10019)

WMM (Women Make Movies, 225 Lafayette St., Suite 207, New York, NY 10012)

Major distributors of commercial features (New Yorker, Films Incorporated . . .) are indicated by name only. In some cases, films are available from the filmmakers. In those instances, I include the filmmaker's address only once, with the listing of the earliest of such films.

Bruce Baillie

On Sundays

. 1961. 16mm; 26 minutes; black and white; sound (FMC).

David Lynn's Sculpture

. 1961. 16mm; 3 minutes; black and white; sound.

Mr. Hayashi

. 1961. 16mm; 3 minutes; black and white; sound (CC, FMC, MoMA).

The Gymnasts