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completely grasp it. During structural unit B, for example, we must read a text that moves physically while listening to a second continuous text read by continually changing voices. The irony is that the frustration
Argument
creates is an essential part of its central goal: to use the methods of commercial culture to provide a critique of that culture. Despite the information overload, we have a clear sense of the filmmakers' fundamental message by the conclusion of
Argument,
just as we always get the message of the commercial culture ("You deserve a break today!" "Aren't you hungry?") through the barrage of conflicting and partial information that characterizes the commercial television hour and the newspaper and magazine page.
Argument
uses manipulative tactics, not to entertain and market, but to jar the intelligence into a more thorough recognition that our culture's most pervasive and powerful uses of "communications" technologies have more to do with the maintenance of economic and political power than with the exchange of ideas in a free society.
McCall's second collaborative film,
Sigmund Freud's Dora,
developed out of the discussions that
Argument
generated. In fact, the two women listed along with McCall and Tyndall as directorial collaborators on
Sigmund Freud's Dora
Claire Pajaczkowski and Jane Weinstock (Babette Mangolte did the camera work)had written critiques of
Argument
that were published in the final edition of the workbook McCall and Tyndall designed for the seminarlike presentations of
Argument
. Like
Argument, Sigmund Freud's Dora
uses a complex balance of enacted imagery, still photographs, and printed text, but in this case to suggest that Freudian psychoanalysis functionsor in the particular case of Dora, failed to functionas a means of controlling female psyches in the interests of male ideological and economic goals.
McCall has not completed a film since
Sigmund Freud's Dora,
though he has written scripts for film and television, including a version of the Frankenstein story. My interview with McCall began in 1983, with revisions continuing through 1986. Our conversation covers McCall's films up through
Argument
(Tyndall was present when
Argument
was discussed).
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MacDonald:
Where did your interest in film begin?
McCall:
I went to art school [Ravensbourne College of Art], where I studied art history, graphic design, and photography. I was part of a mixed-media performance group called Jacob's Ladder: we used film and slide projections, live music, and dance within an open structure.