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arranged by Film Forum, which at that time was on the Upper West Side in a small upstairs screening room, and the Collective, which was also on the Upper West Side. The two groups decided to have the event at the Collective's screening room, which was larger: a hundred feet long or so and fifty feet wide, with a high ceiling. There was an audience of 120, and the projector had an extra-bright bulb. The distance from the wall to the projector was about eighty feet, and the height of the circle on the wall was about ten feet. It seemed to me like a hymn; it did have a spiritual qualityand absolutely
nothing
to do with the work I had consciously made. I felt as though I was seeing the film for the first time.
MacDonald:
Is
Line Describing a Cone
shown a lot?
McCall:
It's rented a few times a year, and I do get orders for prints. It's in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and in the Royal Belgian Film Archive's permanent collection, and in the collection for the Arts Council of Great Britain.
MacDonald:
Its value and relevance is so broad that I'm surprised it's not shown a great deal more than it is.
McCall:
My regret is that it didn't get shown much outside the avant-garde film world. It had quite good exposure at international art events, but it didn't really get seen very much by people whose concerns were related to other areas.
MacDonald:
How did you decide to do the other "Cone" films?
McCall:
In 1974 I made
Partial Cone, Conical Solid,
and
Cone of Variable Volume
. They were attempts to find out a bit more about the beam of light. In them I developed a small vocabulary of tremoring and flickering which I was able to use to most effect in the largest of the films after
Line Describing a Cone: Long Film for Four Projectors
. You haven't seen that, have you?
MacDonald:
No.
McCall:
In
Long Film
I extended the single axis I had used in
Line Describing a Cone
into a rectangular field of activity. There was a projector in each corner of the room, pointing inward. Great flat planes of light floated across the room intersecting and passing one another. Wherever you stood in the room, you were
inside
the film, surrounded by it. The best screening of that film, the most perfect scale, was realized at Millennium Film Workshop, in a basement space something like seventy feet by fifty feet.
Long Film
has only been shown three times: once at the 1977 Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, once at Millennium, and once in the Neue Galerie in Aachen, Belgium. It requires four projectors, and they're running for six hours. There's quite a lot of maintenance. The beams sweep at different speeds, and the surfaces of the planes of light vary.