A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

ways you can make anything. The film is involved with those options, and with a latent aspect of them, which is the unfortunate truth that in order to make something, you have to destroy something else, or at least change its form. And that crisscrosses with the sexual themes in some ways, but again, it doesn't attribute any one way of making to one gender or the other. So much is interwoven in the film in so many ways that it's almost the opposite of

Wavelength

.

Presents

' references get wider and wider. It closes with the fading out of the red and a drum roll, which is either military or funereal, the death of the film.

MacDonald:

I understand that

Presents

had some hostile audiences, at least at first.

Snow:

One of the worst was at the Collective in New York, where some women were furious in a way I found really obtuse. One question was, "How come there's so much tits and ass in this film?" I was tempted to say, "I can tell from your voice that you are the possessor of tits and ass." The assumption seemed to be that tits and ass

can't be seen

. It was brought up that you

can't

photograph so-called pornographyfor

any

purpose. That's amazing. I don't necessarily have anything against so-called pornography. I'm aware that there are aspects of it that are extremely questionableinvolving children and cruelty for examplebut I like, sometimes, some of what's called "pornography." I say "so-called pornography" because that's always a question, too. What do you mean by "pornography"? You mean it's what doesn't turn you on? Or what does? Another amazing question that night was, belligerently, from a male voice, "How come there's no men's asses in this film?" I thought the discussion at the Collective didn't have much to do with the film.

It's true that

Presents

was prompted by the debate about eroticism and the depiction of women that was going on. I had been thinking about those issues for quite a while.

I think it was at that Milwaukee conference [Cinema Histories/ Cinema Practices II, held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, November 1982] that, after the screening of

Presents,

Christian Metz asked, with a certain amount of puzzlement, "What is the relationship between the two parts?" What

I

want that film to do is to force the

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spectator to

think

about the relationship between the two parts. All I could say to him was, "The relationship between the two parts is a splice." How

do

they relate? How are they part of the same organism? The point is that there are

a lot

of answers.

MacDonald: So Is This

has been very useful for meespecially in thinking about the relationship of film experience and film criticism. Film criticism is almost always considered to be a

written

text about a

visual

experience. But there's an inevitable gap between what writing can communicate and the multi-dimensional experience of film. It strikes me that a lot of what passes for complexity in writing about film is interference that results from the inability of the word to really come to grips with the visual/auditory experience of film.

So Is This

is about these issues; it turns film onto language in the way that language is normally turned loose on film.

Early in the film you pay homage to independent filmmakers who have used text in inventive ways: Marcel Duchamp, Hollis Frampton, Su Friedrich. . . . Had you been thinking about working with text for a long time or did the recent spate of this kind of work inspire you?

Snow:

I wrote the original part of that text around 1975 and made the film almost ten years later. It came out of the text for the Chatham Square album [

Michael Snow: Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder,

Chatham Square, 1975] and out of

One Second in Montreal,

as another way of controlling duration. Since then, I've been asked whether I knew Jenny Holzer's work, but I didn't at that time. The things she's done have some relationship, although there's no timing involved in her work, as far as I can tell.

MacDonald: So Is This

is poetic justice for people who make a fetish of the ability to write and read sentences. Is that what you had in mind?

Snow:

That's part of it, yes. Another thing is the business of using the art object, in this case film, as a pretext for arguments that the writer considers of more interest. That's valid in some senses, but sometimes it seems like a misuse of the stimuli, the film. It's as if you're producing these things for other people to advance their own interests and arguments.

MacDonald:

The way in which text is used in

So Is This