(00:00:00) I want to start with at least the concept of autobiography in films films in general and film specifically yours. (00:00:09) Well, that's a nice place to start. Thank you. I feel somewhat validated in the st. Paul because I feel that there's no question that the first conscious lie autobiographical film that was ever made was made by Jerome Hill and that's not very well known because his work isn't yet? Very well known. (00:00:35) How are you defining (00:00:36) autobiography than well in the first place you just to give the whole Spectrum every film that's made by any filmmaker that has maximum control over the making of the film that is where a single person is essentially making the film is essentially autobiographical like any other human the expression I mean Citizen Kane by Orson Welles is if you think about it, very obviously autobiographical. And whereas the average Hollywood movie is not because it's not under the control of one person but wherever that occurs if it's DW Griffith in making Birth of a Nation is making it out of his experiences as a child at the knees of his father who was a colonel colonel roaring Jake Griffith was his name in the in the Civil War and all of the tensions of his father and all the stories that he heard about war are finding their way through DW Griffith into the making of Birth of a Nation and makes it very much the kind of film that it is. And intolerance even more in fact intolerance is taking up not only all the themes of Birth of a Nation but it's taking up the themes of intolerance that he had endured against his own film Birth of a Nation which opened him up to the intolerance that he as every other human had endured all his life long past that point he had decreasing power or as control over the making of his films until finally they didn't let him make films at all. But as long as he had power to control what happened in the film, it was autobiographical as it will naturally be it's a be as autobiographical as the at the least as the slimy trail of a snail that is the market leaves on the (00:02:49) world. Go back to Jerome Hill for a minute since it does have a direct bearing on people in this city. What did you find particularly striking about? The first film you saw of Hills that seemed to sense an autobiographical. (00:03:03) Oh, I didn't eat don't even remember the first film I saw Jerome's but let me speak to the point of film portrayed what distinguishes it from all previous films where a person could express him or herself. Therefore autobiographically is that he consciously intended to make an autobiography and to my knowledge and all my after all my searchings. I found no previous example of that in the brief history of film and I believe that Jerome knew he was going to die. That is that he knew his death illness a long time before he ever acknowledged it to anyone whether he actually knew it when he began making that film. I don't have any proof of he never said anything to me about it, but I always thought that he did that at least somewhere in himself. He knew that he didn't have much longer to live and so he as his last gesture he worked for The last seven or eight years of his life very consciously on this autobiography and he knew that it was a new form that he was evolving. And and therefore was very concerned to draw others into the process all along the making of it for advice. That is he knew it was all his previous films had been either films answering the needs of the commercial mode such as his Schweitzer which won the Academy Award or they were the most brief intensely little poems of but very lyric and very brief statements and and hand-painted films most of them and his then he had made a couple of dramatic features. Such as is it open the door and see all the people. Yes where he tried to create put something of his very loving Spirit of humanity and his sort of light Shakespearean belief in the in the the possibility of seeing all the different people and evolve a new dramatic form so to speak. But that wasn't entirely new form actually what he was being I think with those films inspired by would be things like, mr. Julio's holiday and and and James broughton's pleasure garden and there had always been a tradition particularly in the British and the French of a kind of light-hearted. Let's enjoy all the varieties of people including the villain. I call that Shakespearean because I think it begins with Shakespeare in the west at least that that desire to not have good and evil, but to try to see even in Richard The Hunchback King the to try to empathize even with Richard or even with Brutus or even with Julius Caesar, (00:06:34) you know, you talk about the new form in doing an autobiography and you have done autobiography direct autobiographical works and I'm wondering as an artist what it takes to even begin such a (00:06:48) project. Well for me it took Jerome Hill and as part of his. Timidity realizing that after a lifetime of making these films related to past filmmaking or what that you could call even sometimes from just outright commercial filming and after making then these few intensely little lyric films of his suddenly. He had this impulse to make a film of his life and he was frightened at the possibility. I mean and so he kept calling on Jonas mekas and myself whenever I was in New York or when he would come to my cabin in Colorado. He would actually lay out the footage the little sections that he'd been doing the hand painting and he demand a criticism and I was an end computer kabocha was another every time he'd come over from from Vienna. Jerome would call her him immediately. You have to come See the new sections this all made me very very nervous actually because I don't like to comment. I almost have a rule not to comment on anybody's work until they're entirely finished with it. And until I've seen it 15 times or so, but Jerome's need overrode my own hesitancies and Jonas's and Peters and I don't know who all else and so he was frankly appealing for help and as a result of that he engaged all of us and many others finally in the autobiographical process. And that was so typical of Jerome's special beauty that without giving up an inch of his unique individuality and he would reach out to a variety of people. You couldn't find just just to name myself Jonas and Peter could belka. You couldn't find a wider variety of aesthetic attitude than that and and then gradually over the years. I lost my worry about criticizing bits and pieces of this film because I saw that he would often ignore whatever one or the other of us had said to change and and as often he changed something so that it he demonstrated that he was not, you know under our sway any more than was useful to him. And of course is he, you know, then certainly some were midpoint of making this film he became aware. I mean, in fact the rest of us became aware that he was ill And he certainly must have been aware. He was going to die soon and this intensified the whole struggle to make a film portrait, which to me is the first conscious autobiographical film and it's a beautiful one to have in that first place because he parallels his life. with the the coming into being of film and it does parallel it very beautifully he for instance per the his fate actually settled finally in nearer La co-taught where the very first publicly screen film was made the lumiere's train entering the station at La co-taught as a Young Man a young painter in France in the 20s. He had actually seen the old lumiere's sitting in a cafe near that station. And he didn't realize at the time how important they would be to his considerations later. He made some of his first filming near that station and in that territory where they done their first filming (00:11:04) if that is the parallel that he used. Do you see a need in autobiographical Works to strike similar kinds of Parallels for yourself in your own? (00:11:16) Old and need is always absolutely personal. I don't like at all the assumption that the colleges have and that critics have and that most people therefore have that we're evolving as a group effort forms of film. That can be done with film but it always Delta phi's and so you end up with what people later call academic poetry or academic music or academic film, which is now becoming very prevalent in the world a person like Jerome Hill has as give the most the great thing they've given us is the example of uniqueness of person and that's absolutely lost in in the academic sizing of any (00:12:14) form I'd and I didn't mean to stress that there was a specific autobiographical process used by every filmmaker. Perhaps I should just ask you what is the basis of stand breakages process in in the audit the conscious (00:12:31) autobiographical work when you see unfortunately, there will be a standard autobiographical process. And it is being largely based now on Jerome's work and on mine and Jimmy broughton's Testament and each of these are different and and it's going to be very hard for me to speak of mine the first place. It's in process. I've been working now. Since about 1971 rather continually on this form. I suppose the words that are most useful to describe it to you to begin with is the title sincerity. And then to try to say what that means to me the very most important and the one that academicians will tend to overlook because it'll be so embarrassing to them is a mistranslation out of the Chinese. Of Ezra pound's definition for the hieroglyph sincerity. He working along a line of frobenius. But but not with any great degree of Chinese scholarship translated this ideogram which stands for sincerity or the nearest equivalent of our English word sincerity as the sun's Lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally. Well, it turns out what he thought was the sun's Lance is really something else and so on and so forth that he didn't he couldn't really derive from that picture by itself and accuracy of observation. But his definition in the English is one of the most extraordinary definitions of sincerity the precise word coming to rest. I mean the sun's Lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally. Such a beautiful meditation piece that it's it's parked me and one of the most exciting parts of it is that it's a mistranslation out of the Chinese that it's a academically faulted. Comes to you broken and therefore usable at scratch. And so I almost like some people might Shuffle beads. I mean, I shuffled that definition and still do through my mind whenever I'm working (00:15:05) trying to find Visual images that (00:15:07) well for years. I said, I made the paraphrase of it the the sun's Lance coming to rest on the precise spot visually, but very quickly the making of the film showed me it couldn't be coming to rest could it? And that is one of the faults of sincerity one that I hadn't straightened out my thinking in that respect. It's not well it's a it's a it's a fault but also it's rather necessary to the film because with sincerity one, I'm relying almost entirely on still photographs and the animation of them by the Lots By the Light. So there is a precise visual spot one after another which are really scrapbook pictures that I'm translating into film into the film experience and their inner woven with motion picture images including going back to some places of childhood and photographing them now and interweaving that with or finding certain objects that were important in childhood and and weaving those into these still photographs, but there is a precise visual spot, which is to say scrapbook picture. shifting one to another throughout the film but by sincerity to were I'm now relying at that time on film that I had taken all along from the age of 18 on I had a lot of film that I had taken over the years that had not gone into had never made another film pictures. I'd taken that had never made a film and and some of them were frankly home movies where I had not not in the idea of making a film had just taken pictures of things like anyone might of children growing up or whatever. And so all this material had got saved and began to give me the way to do what Jerome couldn't Jerome had when he made his the good luck that his father had hired Hollywood photographers to come here to st. Paul and to go on the train with them two visits to the Indians and so on to to make pristine 35 millimeter Motion Pictures of him and his During brother and so on family dog and so on in various antics. But these presented him with a problem too. For example is give you one example he painted but he was as a child he painted then to and but he was given lessons in painting but he got so involved in it that it became already very early in his life and important thing which was not quite what the family had expected. But when the the Hollywood photographer came to take pictures of children's activities his father put another painting on the easel and with a dry brush, he was to pretend he was painting this painting you can imagine what a that was such an embarrassment to him that I don't believe he made reference to it in the film. He didn't he just let it pass but but that certainly was a loaded. Autobiographical image so I don't want to suggest it because you have moving pictures along the way of various events that it necessarily means that you have a autobiographically useful image I did and and so that out of that evolved sincerity to and by that time I had come to be clear that it was not a precise spot that my paraphrase of pound would have to be more complicated than that that it's not coming to rest but keeping moving other senses of sincerity that have been meaningful to me Robert creeley once on a napkin in Buffalo laid out for me a derivation of of the word sincerity. That's a very meaningful to me which is that it comes from since are a that it involves the goddess of the field series. And sin, which has a also an interesting pun in English that could have alerted me to dangers that were coming but it really means essentially a true pot sincere would be a glazed pot that as something that had been baked with his glaze and would hold water and series gets into there because she's the Earth goddess. So the clay itself is the series and and so as distinct from the kind of pots that that often people would foist on people in the marketplace in Ancient Greece which were clay baked in the sun pots that were covered with some kind of varnish and they looked to the Casual Observer very much the same as the others, but they wouldn't hold water. So sincere means something that will hold water. That's a true pot that will hold water or true form. And oh there been others over the years that have been wonderful little verbal things that have I've tried to guide myself with because they have essentially you'll note these two that I've given you throw the emphasis of the thought upon the work itself not upon its being an attempt to reinstate a past reality. But rather on the thought process of memory itself and and and how and so the each different section of sincerity shows an aspect of memory the the memory process of how if you're going to rethink your past the various ways that you might and then given the film that I actually have how I taking those strips of films as strips of thought. With that material how I might demonstrate a process of thinking about these past events (00:21:46) the third sincerity which deals with really the core art of filmmaking as I understand it among other things did that did that provide special problems for you in tackling? So obviously the filmmaking process you as the artistic film Creator. (00:22:08) Well the diff I think the essential difference is that with the it? I know no more problems than either of the other two, but the special problem of sincerity three, I think is that problem, you know, there used to be a rhyme or something from childhood that's coming back to me under this pressure of talking about memory the centipede that doesn't that is asked. How do you walk? And then suddenly can't put one foot in front of the other. You know, it's been going along with all these many many legs moving fine. Then someone says to centipede how do you do that? And and suddenly the centipede can't walk. So so while making a film to be looking into the way of film is being is made is presents that particular problem. I've often thought by the way, I'm rather burned up with the academic definitions of structural filmmaking as has come to be known over the last several years and I think it's very destructive ideology particularly in the academies and among the critics and I've always thought that if anyone had had the sense to understand that sincerity three was also a structural film that it would blow the whole field wide open and permit a great deal more growth and is now possible as it Narrows down and down and down. (00:23:40) May I ask you to elaborate on that for people who may not understand (00:23:44) well structural filmmaking. I don't understand what structural filmmaking supposed to mean either. But essentially I've defined it in a way that seems to satisfy some of the exponents of it that it is a film Who which is about that films coming into being and being existing? And that definition if indeed that's what structural filmmaking is that it is as I find it as boring as those people that are always just talking to you about coming into being in there being existing, you know telling you about their latest operation and everything and I'm maybe as I am one of those kind of people I have to watch myself and not do too much of that. I'm not kind of person so I'm a real litmus for recognizing the boringness of structural filmmaking as it's not defined but you found (00:24:31) ways that's by the way structuralism in films that is not quite as obvious as inserting whole segments. For example, I I know that in certain films we will see you reflected in Windows. We're in other (00:24:47) things see one of the simplest ploys of structural filmmaking as many many students Discover right away when I go into it and there's many many of these kinds of films is to just leave the camera running on a particular scene and if you leave it running long enough on a particular scene everyone in the audience is so bored. With this flattened, you know limitedly colored Vision or black and white vision of this scene that they're forced to recognize that it is a film they're watching. And there's anything else to do with it, but that would say well God this is a strip of film and it's going on and on so Presto a wonderful recognition has occurred at to me a very laborious price, but all the same that is the value of that kind of phenomenon and and that was stated. I thought definitively and could be and finally by Andy Warhol, when he photographed a number of films, but the most outlandish in this respect or the extreme edge of it would be Empire where the camera sits on the Empire State Building for 12 hours or something. The reason writers are attracted to this kind of film into his work is because it's very much more interesting to write about than to sit through. Andy Warhol himself never sat through any of those films. I was part of his black humor. I mean, they weren't made to be sat through. They were made to be written about a very much I think as the painting white on white. Which is is good to have that along with all our other outreaches in the 20th century this wonderful Russian whose Name Escapes me at the moment. Made a painting white on white. So that shows that's the outside limit of that possibility in painting now can't we put it down and go on? Well, no because it's so interesting to write about and so everybody hears about it. And so they have to try it and in addition to which it's easy to make so that once someone's made it and perform the brave outlandish act then it's easy to very easy to make a structural fill more or painting white on white is snaps inch and and and so and to make others like it because that following in a train of making likenesses of that kind of periphery of an art only requires the maker to have one idea. Just one like Blue on Blue. And then they can go then they can make a work of the work makes itself. Essentially from that point on (00:27:28) isn't that just a demonstration though that artists are artists the difference between an artist and someone who is doing derivative filmmaking is just because there will always be a limited number of people breaking new (00:27:41) ground. Well someone I was in Holland recently and someone said to me as I as is a very fair question most pertinent question probably ever some stoic Dutchman got up and said why I said what is an art, how can you say that your work is an art or not a how can I say it is not or how do you say that? Something's in art and I mean my older answer to that is well, it takes time. You know, first of all, it's absolutely personal matter and this I insist on In the teeth of the great books list and everything. What an art is is your personal determination. Whoever you are. But then for that to have any meaning even for you, you have to live with it. Can you live with it? Is it a true marriage? Can you go back to that work that poem that piece of music or that knick-knack over and over again, or does it just sit on a shelf and gather dust? And and do you have you not thought of it in 10 years, so it isn't fair to say well I once thought that was an art and so it is if you haven't lived with it and loved it. So if you lived with it and loved it and it's sustained you and you it then then yes for you personally. That's an art even if no one else in the world recognizes it as such but what I said to this Dutchman under the circumstances was I said, well that takes time. I told him that but I was interested in pursuing another aspect. I said also it's a cultural matter. And finally, it's an absolutely personal matter for the maker also, and and I said just to give an example of the cultural matter in America. The little dogs go out into the backyard at night and they stare at the moon and they go art art art and American dogs when encountered can be various and they might rush up and jump on you and enthusiasm. They might bite you they might roll on their backs to have their bellies rubbed anything might happen on the street in Holland on the other hand Jane and I had noticed that the dogs are almost universally sweet and indifferent to strangers and very well behaved. And I said perhaps the reason they are is that when they Bark at the Moon they go kunst kunst. Const means art in (00:30:11) touch (00:30:13) now. It's a it's sounds maybe like a superficial joke, but if you let it stick in your mind and work a bit inside you the difference between the word art. and the difference of pronunciation of Americans art and British art and const and think about it a little you realize that even culturally there is a vast drive toward uniqueness and shaping I shaping of attitude even culturally and and even that doesn't excite me at all until you bring that down to (00:30:57) person. We have only a few minutes left and I want to get to the fourth sincerity duplicity film because that's another false matter. The whole title itself is probably Central to what's been going through you and probably those who view the film. I know that you hit upon the duplicity matter because of something that a friend (00:31:22) imparted. Well, you know, I don't even know that anymore because that's what I thought friend had charged me with duplicity in such a strong way that I really had to investigate my guts and and Tara went through a period of self-examination for some time during which process I realized that not only I found a great deal of duplicity in myself, which I hadn't known was there when Marie Nest this wrote was going to write about these films she dug up material and a dream journal that I'd made several years previously, which I had only referred her to actually so that she could write about the the nightmare series films and she found a statement in which A dream had given me the term sincerity duplicity clear back in the mid-70s long before this incident with my friend and would show that already that far back some deep subconscious impulses were knowing and we're trying to let me know that a duplicity series would be necessary in order to make this complete and I don't know if that'll make it complete. It could be that multiplicity is the next thing coming (00:32:45) as a filmmaker and as an artist what exactly is the (00:32:51) duplicity? Well duplicity we have in a flat Street sense as a very bad thing. It is in fact a sin and that's certainly what my friend meant. It means being showing two phases being Janice faced. You pretend to like someone and you talk about them behind their back is I suppose the most common time in our language where the term duplicity Rises but duplicity is, of course a great deal more. In fact without a duplicating process film doesn't exist at all. The basis of every film image is an almost exact duplication of the previous image with a slight change which might that there's a theme and that slight change which almost can't be seen in many shots from frame to frame. Is the that's the very basis or the nature of film in its in its making I mean, I get it best to sense of it. When I think there is one film, you know that has been at Great enormous cost preserve by the filmmaker. Absolutely by having it etched on steel bands. It'll amuse you to know which film it is almost like you to guess. What film do you think is the only one that for sure will pass on into further (00:34:14) centuries. I have no idea. (00:34:16) Well, it's the Ten Commandments of Cecil B Demille, which is expense. He etched on steel on bands of Steel so that at least the raw image can though I like to think when archaeologists dig it up. I mean, they'll say well my God, what is this? I mean it might take years before anyone discovers that in these long strips of identical image particularly in a Cecil B Demille film. There are slight Every single picture from one to the other and what a religion of Adoration of movement they might derive from discovering these long metal strips, or will they think first of all that they were bracelets or and and cut them up into little pieces and people will wear them as archaeological artifacts are antiques. But that is the nature of film is is 24 individual still pictures in the average film or 18 in the other forms of film of individual still pictures every second with a slight change in each one. So that's an in the whole basis of film is based on duplicity Bandits based, even on a street sense of duplicity and that we regard film as movies, right we go to see the movies and actually there's no actual movement that's projected at all. Course what's projected is each frame being pulled down into the gate and the gate opening and flashing a still picture on the screen and then shutting and then another still picture and so it's a simulation of movement. So even in the street sense of the sin of duplicity, the whole process of motion picture shows is Motion Pictures is a now you see it now you don't act (00:36:09) the realization that duplicity is not necessarily a bad thing to deal with is not a negative concept as you said probably leads to the next step. (00:36:20) Well, it also is a negative concept and I can go back to I'm faced in thinking deeply about it and making the duplicity. Now I've made to duplicity films. I'm faced with a dilemma something like the old Sigmund Freud's when he recognized that the very thing he'd been fighting all his life. That is attempting any fighting neuroses. I'm trying to cure people of their of their obsessions and neurotic hidden neurotic neurotic almost means hidden had when you were talking about the kernel of a trying to expose whatever has created a neuroses that if he succeeded he would destroy civilization. And as an artist you in the book civilization and its discontents as a tortured old man, he faces this one wonderful and terrible contradiction or you know, and and he who sat fondling all those years his little vestiges of early civilizations and loving them was in the process of attacking the very roots of character and the Very foundations of what we call civilization, which is absolutely dependent on neuroses (00:37:38) and you face that (00:37:40) yes, there's some similar dilemma for me in taking on duplicity and I won't just certainly not going to or the film won't allow me to whitewash over this at all that I have to face that duplicity Zab solutely essential in Friendship. For example, I'm convinced of that now and the Very Prospect of it terrifies me and and undermines all my senses my were very six senses of friendship and and it just tears open further and further that for instance my dream of the round table, which I've always had in some Arthurian sense comes from reading reading the morte d'arthur too young and age, perhaps my dream of the round table or even of the Emerald City if it came true would destroy the most overwhelming imperative of the rest of my life, which is to push for absolute uniqueness of person. It is uniqueness of person that disrupts and destroys the round (00:38:43) table. So is it the recognition of it that is enough for an artist the recognition that that exists and working with it and constantly exploiting it exploring it putting it out in front of you. (00:38:55) Listen. Nothing is ever enough for any human being. Which is another Terror that the world faces as humans eat up. The Earth. Nothing is ever enough for any human being. In fact, it's put best by the poet Ed Dorn when asked if he had an allegiance to America said you don't expect me to have an allegiance to this small set of rings called the solar system. Do you?