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is Saul Levine's birthday. Sort of a psychic tribute there. He was one of the people who encouraged me to continue making films. I started the diary about a month after I began sitting in on classes at the Massachusetts College of Art. I'd made eleven short films before that, the first in 1976.
When I began the diary, I bought five rolls of film. I thought I'd film myself, one scene every day, moving around my apartment. And I would go on a strict diet: I knew of a photographer in New York [Eleanor Antin] who had simply taken a still of herself nude every day while she was on a diet. I wanted to do that, but at first, I wanted to be clothed, I wore a leotard. Every day I'd do one more scene.
Five rolls of filmit wasn't enough. Sometime in late November, 1981, my father told me to tell a story. I didn't really have a story to tell, except to expand more on my day-to-day life inside my apartment. The whole film starts out with me carrying some grocery bags into the apartment and then emptying out a huge bag full of produce from my garden and from the co-op. Then I take off a black coat, hang it up, go into the living room, and get myself a dictionarya 1936 dictionary, which has fantastic definitions for the word "fat." In the thirties, "fat" meant something good. It meant plump, pleasingthe best part of your work is a "fat'' joband "thin" had a lot of opprobrium attached: meager, of slender means.
Anyway, I started filming myself in this black coat over yellow leotardsI wore yellow because the
I Ching
says that to wear a yellow undergarment brings good fortune. And yellow was the closest to flesh color I could get (yellow is also the color of fat). But instead of losing weight, I was gaining weight. I kept bingeing so I started taking more frames of that. Later, I filmed the actual makings of a binge, and street signs of food. It was all going to be about food. I didn't really have any goaljust to lose the weight.
I would do things like lay out the black clothing on the bed, a full suit, black pocketbook, black gloves, black coat, black dress, black stockings (this is after I had mended the black coat and put it awaybecause I was against wool: I was getting rid of animal products in my life, to become a vegannot just a vegetarian, but a vegan).
Well, my father died January 10, about two months after the film had begun, and well, that laying out of the black clothing went, "Bong!" And, as if that wasn't enough, I'd just finished weaving a big yellow banner on a loom I had built myself. I had had it on the loom for ten years.
The next day,
my father died. I felt like I'd predicted my father's death. And the reason he died was because he was a hundred pounds overweight when I was a kidat least a hundred pounds. He had a heart attack and strokes.