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The film seemed strident, overbearing. Now it seems much less a polemic than a labyrinth. I find it poignant and personal.
In the credit sequence you mention that it's an autobiographical account of your years as avant-garde filmmakers.
McCall:
That was one of a number of contradictory descriptions. They were all true.
Tyndall:
I think it is personal myself, but we wouldn't have dared recognize that at the time we were making it. At the time, we wanted a film that would be
against
personal cinema. We wanted to look at cinema as a collective experience, not one where the individual artist donates his work to an audience.
MacDonald:
I don't know any film that dramatizes more clearly how difficult it is to make a serious, meaningful, politically active film. Those conversations where the one person will go through this whole explanation/justification and then review how the person he was talking to responded with an equally convincing but opposite explanation/justification are tremendously revealing.
McCall:
We were quite fond of those monologues. They're probably pretty close to everyone's experience, including our own.
Tyndall:
The film that we quote the most from is Godard's
Letter to Jane
[1972], which has that same sort of tormented concern with how to make a politically correct film.
MacDonald:
It may be that one of the problems people had with
Argument
is that it understood so completely, and rejected, the lines of defense for bodies of work that were popular in the mid seventies. In some ways, it's a remarkable chronicle of that moment in downtown Manhattan filmmaking. It's also gorgeous to look at. At the original screening all I saw was the information coming at me. Now the color and design elements are more obvious.
McCall:
It is good-looking. It's got very rich color. We only have one print, which is too bad, because we can never make a print that looked like the one you saw. There's no Kodachrome printing left, so those reds are gone forever.
MacDonald:
The whole minimal background that you brought to it works quite powerfully in the film. In the credit passage, the guy changes his clothing in a single, long continuous shot; there are long passages of clear leader, and so on.
McCall:
Yes. In a way, nothing got left behind.
MacDonald:
Even the text has a certain graphic elegance though the three texts we see superimposed on the advertisements are not exactly precise. There are slight inconsistencies, which give the film a handcrafted feel. It seems like a subtle vestige of the New American Cinema's concern with the personal.