A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

was. My reply to that was to have the cliff that they had gone over collapse and create an avalanche that covered both of them completely. He came back and had a helicopter with a magnet fly over and pull them out of the debris. I retaliated with the same helicopter flying too close to the sun: the blades dropped (in another version it was hit by lightning), and the two pieces fell into the ocean and disappeared. His retaliation was to have the ocean turn into the contents of a pop bottle, and the two sculptures became bubbles going to the surface in huge numbers. I didn't know how to answer that. I ended up making vast numbers of little sculptures half his and half mine out of Play-doh. I put them in cotton, in a box, and sent them to him. His answer was the rubber stamp, and of course you send a rubber stamp to an animator and it's going to get into his films. All that time I never saw Oldenburg.

MacDonald: TZ, LMNO, Swiss Army Knife,

and

Trial Balloons

seem to be blends of collage and animation with bits of live action. Do you still see each film as a new experience or is the newness now in the particular mixes of techniques you've already explored?

Breer:

You didn't use the word "rehash" but that might be your question. New wine in old bottles, or is it old wine and new bottles? I forget. I'm always hoping for a totally new kind of image, but I've been around long enough to know that repeating myself is something I can't help. I don't think you fall into ruts; I think you're born into them, but that every effort to break out is a healthy one and should be nurtured. When I was a kid, I thought style was going to be forever elusive, and that it was something some people had and others didn't. Now I realize that style is something everybody has in spite of themselves. Anyhow, the way I'd put it is that in those films I was looking for a maximum range of technique.

MacDonald:

Have you ever thought about making a feature-length animation? That's been the fantasy, and in some cases more than a fantasy, for a number of serious animators.

Breer:

To do an animated feature is reminiscent of fakirism, beds of nails, and other activities where you try to extend your normal capacities beyond the ordinary. The idea of filling up twenty-four frames every second for an hour or two hours sounds pretty dreary to me and, unless it was one of these full-blooded collective efforts like the Disney features were (which I'm not interested in anyway because in the long run that sort of collective process usually takes all the corners off the film so that it's no longer very expressive), everything would get stretched thin, and you'd see the stretch marks. At the rate of ten minutes a year, it would take me six years. So, no, I don't have any feature film yearnings, certainly not for films that would look like the shorter films I've made.

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MacDonald:

What else have you been working on?

Breer:

Well, I've been sawing wood and painting window frames for what seems like years. I have six hundred feet of new material I haven't told anybody about; it hasn't congealed into a film and might never. I play with words on the screen and do some rotoscopingusual techniques, but with a different look maybe. I got interrupted so many times last year in the middle of this film that it might be lost forever. I do have plans to make a new film dealing more with the soundtrack-picture relationship than I have in the past. At least that's my concept now: anything can happen to change my mind. As far as how the future looks: from where I sit it looks compressed. As a little kid, I was told there was a Beyond, but I never got a convincing picture of it. So without a Beyond, I have a kind of trapezoidal vision of eternity. It's like looking at the table I'm sitting at; the table tilts away in perspective, but it's sawed off at the end: it doesn't go to an infinity point. My sense of time compressing does make life a little more savory, though I don't know if it was ever unsavory. Right now I've got a couple of shoe boxes full of index cards and half an urge to go up and fiddle them into a sequence, and I follow my urges pretty much. They don't always take me into doing a film, but I'll return to the euphoria of putting out a work of art because it's a high you can't get any other way that I know of.

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Michael Snow

Very few filmmakers have had as powerful an impact on North American independent cinema as Michael Snow. Indeed, five of this volume's interviewees (Ono, McCall, Noren, Benning, and Mulvey) talk specifically about him, as do several of the interviewees in Volume 1. The impact of Snow's workand of the breakthrough

Wavelength