A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Yes, I guess I was. It was probably the first time I'd done something specifically as a means of entering a current dialogue. The way you said "rebel against that concern" is interesting. It reminds me of that horrifying phrase "politically correct." Is having

some

differences of opinion with

some

feminist/social theory "rebelling"? Is the "concern" so defined that it can't be discussed, only approved?

Looking for "what does this mean?" first and not experiencing what is happening in its sensual complexity is a terribly wasteful, ass-backwards way of experiencing my films or any other work of art. I have never made a work to convey

a

meaning. I work with areas of meaning and know that there are as many meanings as there are viewers. What is

there

in the concrete, phenomenological sense is of first importance. You seem to see all my other films, except this one, that way and I appreciate your observations. The problems here seem to be as much yours as the film's.

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On one level I was asking the spectator to consider the relationship between separate, or seemingly separate, parts of this one film to each other, and in that light to consider the relation between the two parts of the human species. After the opening where the image, which is electronically shaped, focuses on the nude woman, there's a section that's totally staged: there's a fixed camera and the set moves. The longer, third section is the opposite of the first two in terms of what is done to make the image.

The first image sequence is made by shaping, molding, manipulating the entire frame. In the second, what was photographed was staged, constructed, the way a play or most narrative fiction films are made. The camera is fixed on a tripod and what one first reads as a series of side-to-side trucking shots is soon revealed as the opposite: the entire set is being moved. This sequence is audibly directed by the director. Then the camera dollies into the set, destroying it and knocking down a wall, which starts the third and longest section: a montage of images taken from life that's quasi-documentary and diaristic. It's important that I shot all these images: the surgery, May Day in Poland, the Arctic hunt, et cetera. All the shots are hand-held panning shots, the movement of the camera always being derived from an aspect of the scene: following a line, moving with, or against a motion . . .

I wanted to make a dialogue between these systems. Aspects of the film are male: it's made by a heterosexual man. Some of this is conscious, for

this

film, and some of it's inevitable. Aspects of the film have to do with experiencing the inherent nature of the camera, and then, seeing with the camera within the different systems used in the film, which includes man seeing women with the camera. It so happens that I do occasionally lust and while I didn't try to shoot only that way, I do

see

women. I noticed in working on the film that women's magazines always have women on the cover, which is very. interesting. There are a lot of photographs of women's magazines in the film. There's some so-called pornography. And there's some intimately personal stuff.

These images involve my sexual life as an artist in some respects, but they're interwoven with many, many other things that are all thematically announced in the first section. For example, the room is pink and the film gradually develops into a discourse on red: the symbolism of red, which, at least in the West, has to do with "stop" and red-light district, blood, sugar, passionall those things and, of course, communism too. That's all in there. It demonstrates the multiplicity of readings there can be for any word or image.

The word "presents" has incredibly varied meanings and uses, including the use in zoological literature that females

present

to males. Biology is as important to the film as psychoanalysis. Entertainment advertising

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says So and So Presents Such and Such. I like that my title is an abstraction of this. It doesn't say who presents what, it says that "Presents" will be the subject of this film, so "presentation," then ''representation," is invoked. A mostly feminine use is: "is so and so presentable?" But of course the film is also "presents" or "nows," and also "gifts."

Interwoven with all

that

is this business about how things are made. There are three different ways of making things. You can shape something, squeeze material into a certain form. Or you can add this to that. Or you can subtract this from that. And those are the

only