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And of course,
Argument
addressed prescisely that problemand probably no other.
Argument
is a film about the strategies for making independent films.
McCall:
And a film that was made to function as part of that discussion within the community of people who made films. It was a film that had no audience other than people who made films, which wa quite deliberate on our part.
Argument
was conceived as and analysis of the place of avat-garde cinema in the art world. As we saw it, avant-garde was a little ghetto, a very small group, and there didn't seem any way out of that. We decided to take that weakness, that problem, and turn it into a strength by making a film that spoke to that audience directly. Later,
Dora
was made specifically to bring together a number of different audiences that previously had had no connection with one another: an avant-garde film audience; a politically feminist audience; an audience interested in psychoanalysis; and, in addition, interested members of the public.
Dora
was extremely successful as a strategy. Ot has been seen a great deal. But actually where it led was out of the artworld and into the academy.
Dora
finds itself in the same circuit as other avant-garde filmexcept that it ends up in a different academic department.
Macdonald:
I came to one of the seminaars you held at the Collective when you were first presenting
Argument
and at the time I was struck by what seemed aparadox: The film was made for an audience that already knew a good deal abut the way in which information was constructed in film and what its impact on audiences was. the audience most likely to benefit from
Argument
(an academic audience, classes in communications) didn't see it, and the audiences that ded seemed to recent it.
McCall:
Looking back, I think we would locate the resentment at those early screenings not in what was being said by the film, but in the way the film was saying it. When I see and hear the film now, I find that it jars. Its tone is pretty strident and aaa bit smug. but I don't agree (although it's what people said; I remember Bill Brand saying it at the Collective seminar you were at) that everybody was familiar with all the issues the film raised. And even if the terms of the rgument were that organized a stuation where people could talk about them. I'm quite sure the resentment about the film was about the tone in which it spoke. You did geel assaulted, and with an incredibly dense amount of information. and it never let up, and it repeated itself, and it spoke very loudly. It didn't have very much light orl shadeit just kept talking.
Tyndall:
I think there were people on the Left who went one step further than Bill Brand. They said, OK we understand all these problems you have in the area of and independent filmmaking practice and the politics of ideology, bu where's your program? This film gets turned in