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MacDonald:
You mention the openness of
To Parsifal
. Some years ago, there was a tendency to see that film as having a clear, almost polemical message: people who ran trains were bad and people who looked at nature were good. In the film the issues seem more complicated. You seem simultaneously a person in love with the purity of nature and fascinated with these processes that people engage inpartly because they're
also
drawn to naturein order to exploit nature. I want to go up into the mountains near here, and I'll use an automobile to do it: I have to bring
with
me the opposite of the mountains in order to get to the mountains to enjoy this illusion of purity!
Baillie:
That's right: the combination of ingredients which seems to transcend good and evil
and
at the same time, the clear continuing theme of good versus evil that began with
On Sundays
. There's always the simpleminded theme of what's good and what's bad, but it isn't carried on in a simpleminded way.
MacDonald:
That's certainly true of
Mass
.
Baillie:
Yeah.
MacDonald:
The hero of
Mass
is the guy on the motorcyclehis "noble steed"which on one level is distinct from the tract houses he passes and what they seem to mean; but on another level the motorcycle is part of the same consumer culture. The people coming to take care of the guy lying in the street is a parable of taking action within a society where the tendency is to ignore the suffering of others.
Baillie:
Disposable people, as Tulley says.
Mass
is a requiem, conceived on the occasion of President Kennedy's murder. A sad time for many people. I had just come back from a long lonely trip to where I'd been born in the Dakotas. I don't remember if I shot anything on that tripI think notbut I knew I was into a film. One night after I was back I stayed up all nightone of those rare times when I stay up all nightand listened to the requiem masses being played on the radio, especially Mozart's. It was so beautiful. You know, Celtic people love to weep over the beauty of things. One of the many really nice ways to respond to the world is through sadness. It's very deeply rooted in me, and maybe you too. The requiem mass is a non-Celtic way of celebrating death joyfully. So I knew I was making a mass, but again it was new information for me. I'll run into Catholics who think I'm a Catholic. But I only studied the mass for a short time in order to do my work, and then I forgot it. I have almost no data stored in my brain. My life and my art are entirely "noninformative."
The film has a very strong critical thesis: it's
against
contemporary society, buildings, pollutionall the rest of itand it's
for
the at least implied joy of nature and selfhood and being human!
MacDonald: Mass
is full of layered imagery, superimpositions. That's