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can independent film has found a home, it's definitely in colleges. That's where it's still alive and viewed regularly. That's where the rentals come from. At this point, art museums have lost interest in avant-garde cinema, and I think there's a much smaller audience for it than there was in the seventies.
MacDonald: Line Describing a Cone
was made with a grant, wasn't it?
McCall: No. Line Describing a Cone
was made independently. It only cost me a hundred dollars. The later "Cone" films were made with a CAPS grant from New York State and an NEA. CAPS and NEA were creations of the seventies. It may be that we've seen the end of subsidized filmmaking. I know there were no grants when Carolee was beginning to make films, and it would appear that there are precious few now. That's something that will be interesting to look at later. Historically, what was created by those grants? What did they make possible? There weren't a huge number of them, but there were a few; and one looked forward to applying for them. The NEA was expanded enormously during the seventies and created all sorts of cultural institutions and funding for new programs in museums, which had film curators for the first time. That had an important effect.
MacDonald:
I suppose
Long Film for Ambient Light
is the ultimate minimal film, or one of them. It's an installation, without a projector or a screen or film, which
refers
to conventional cinemaa single electric light bulb reflects on the white paper covering the installation windows ("screens") during a twenty-four-hour installation periodfrom the greatest possible distance. It's as though filmmaking had led you out of film.
McCall:
Yes.
MacDonald:
How often did you do
Long Film for Ambient Light?
McCall:
I did it three times: once at Galerie Saint Petri in Lund, Sweden, once at the Idea Warehouse in New York, and once at the Neue Galerie in Aachen.
MacDonald:
You're an important part of Carolee's
Kitch's Last Meal
[1978], which was being made during the same period. What was the relationship between you as artists?
McCall:
As far as
Kitch's Last Meal
is concerned, I did pick up the camera sometimes and use italways according to her instructions. She'd say, I want you to shoot this or do thatand I'd do it. But that film was completely her project. I really had very little influence, except as an actor in it and as a very occasional cinematographer.
I met Carolee when she and Joan Lifton came to my big computer exhibit in 1970. We became friends, and I think I derived a lot of inspiration from stories she told me about New York performance. I think you'd agree that the aesthetic of
Line Describing a Cone
is the polar