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Straub/Huillet film, Syberberg's
Ludwig
[1974], Fassbinder's
In the Year of the Thirteen Moons
[1979,], Godard's
Two or Three Things I Know About her
[1966], Apted's television project
28 Up
[1985].
MacDonald:
In "Film as a Connective Catalyst" [a paper delivered at the International Forum of Avant-Garde Film, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1976], you talk about home-moviemaking as a potential model for film practice. Do you make home movies?
McCall:
I had a CAPS grant in 1976 and with it I bought one of the first Super-8 sound cameras. I developed the idea of making Super-8 letters, where I could deal with a specific issue and a specific person very directly.
Also, I did a number of very short films during some of which I developed the formal ideas we began to play with in
Argument,
like the device of printing a word whilst saying something related but contradictory. Also, I was the cinematographer on what I think was one of the first Super-8 sound features:
Carnage
[1976] by the Australian Tim Burns. He was a friend, I had the camera, and he wanted somebody to shoot it.
Carnage
was made over a year and was immensely enjoyable to me. I started to experience lots of pleasures that I hadn't experienced for a while, such as constructing a fiction out of photography: I suppose that's when I began to be interested in fiction again, and in acting.
Andrew and I met a year or so after this. Andrew had a strong background in commercial film. He had studied it formally and was beginning to get interested in avant-garde film just at the time when I was getting interested in narrative. Also, he followed political events quite carefully. We had quite a lot to talk about. We were just friends for a while, and then as we talked more and more, our talking turned into working together. One day we were looking through a color supplement about men's fashion in the
New York Times,
and we got caught up with how many things were conveyed in the supplement.
Tyndall:
I was a journalist when I left school. I'd been very interested in film. I'd worked on a local paper, doing film reviews. I'm of the same generation that found
Screen
important when they were coming out of school. I had friends who were very interested in structuralism and in semiotic theory. In England I was aware of what was called "independent cinema." When I came to New York, I discovered what in those days was called the "avant-garde" film scene, which was much closer to the art world than the British independent cinema was. Anthony and I started meeting during the summer of 1977, when all sorts of things in the art world and in avant-garde cinema and independent cinema and in the theory of cinema were being moved around and readjusted. We were in the middle of that readjustmentof people stepping back and starting to think about different strategies for making independent films.