A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

has in common with it the idea that the process of recording something inevitably creates interference, which everybody normally labors to avoid, or at pretending it can be avoided. In

Side Seat Paintings

the many levels of interference, of distortion, become the primary subject of the work.

Snow:

That's certainly true. I think you could say that representations are all abstractions from some original given, whether they're photographic or verbal or whatever.

Side Seat Paintings

is a Chinese box, one abstraction within another, within another . . . until you get a new form. I've always tried to make the recognition of exactly what's happening part of the experience of seeing a film. In this case, the projection of the slides of the paintings becomes the film, and I think it really

is

transformed into a film.

MacDonald:

Of the films,

Back and Forth

seems the furthest from the other arts that have fascinated you.

Eye and Ear Control

combines music, painting, sculpture, photography

in

film.

Wavelength

has a musical element and, at the end, references to photography and

The Walking Woman

. By

Back and Forth,

you're really into film at a very intense level with, at most, vestiges of music on the soundtrack. Then with

One

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Second in Montreal,

you move back toward photography and with

Side Seat Paintings

you combine photography (in the slides) and painting and sound in a kind of artist's autobiography.

Snow:

Yes. It's not exactly autobiographical, since you can't really see the paintings. It's really a redigesting or a recycling of earlier work. But it is true that other kinds of work come and go during various periods.

MacDonald:

I think of

Side Seat Paintings

as autobiographical in the sense that, as a

visual

artist, you were first a painter, then a photographer, then a filmmaker. In the film, the paintings are recorded in the slides, which are recorded in the film. Did you and Hollis ever talk about the similarities between that film and

nostalgia

[1971]?

Snow:

Well, actually

nostalgia

is more similar to

A Casing Shelved

[1970], a slide and tape piece, my only 35mm "film." It's a slide of bookshelves I had in my studio, loaded with all kinds of stuff. And the sound is a voice, my voice, discussing what's on the shelves from various points of view: what it is or what it was and where it came from. The bookshelf has many small things on it and the text is written to move your eyes around on this big image. There's a plan in the text that moves you over the whole space of the image, and through time, because some of the things and events referred to are recent and some are older. Some are art related and some are related to my so-called private life. But it is very autobiographical. And it's similar to what Hollis did in

nostalgia,

although there's no destruction involved.

MacDonald:

What strikes me as similar in

nostalgia

and

Side Seat Paintings

is that both are look-backs at the past, and in both the earlier work is "destroyed." In yours the destruction isn't literal [actually, it isn't in

nostalgia

either, since only

prints

are being burned and since they're exhibited in the film before the burning "destroys" them], but because of the processes of recording those paintings have gone through, there's no way to know what they actually looked like: what we know is that we

can't

see exactly what they were.

Snow:

That's interesting. And in both films, the works discussed are two-dimensional surfaces.

MacDonald:

There's been a tendency, at least among some people I talk to, to think of you as an old-fashioned guy who has a problem accepting women and women's independence and that this problem is embedded in

Presents

.

Snow:

Well, I am an old guy, but I've never had any problem accepting women's independence. In fact, I was very much interested in women's independence before this current wave of feminism. I was always very supportive of Joyce in her work. Everybody should have the possibility of going as far as they can with whatever they do. It's not an

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Nude in opening section of Snow's

Presents

 (1980).

issue for me. However, exactly how ''independent" anyone can be is a question we'd better not try to get into now.

MacDonald:

I suppose it surfaced in the case of

Presents

because the film came out at a time when everyone was talking about the eroticized female body as the subject of the male gaze. This film seemed to rebel against that concern: it focuses in on a naked woman's body at the beginning, and then in the third long section where you jump from one shot to the next, naked women's bodies are used often. Were you addressing that issue or . . .

Snow: