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Looking back, the only regret I have about
Chakra
is that the titles are so sloppy. I was teaching at the Art Institute when I made most of my movies. It was a macho kind of place. In general, it wasn't considered appropriate to be too concerned about the niceties of your production or your performance. Things being a little rough around the edges was not only acceptable, it was admired. Now I look back at those films and I like the ones where I did a really clean job on the titles. I should redo the titles on
Chakra
and make them clean and very cool, almost clinical.
MacDonald:
Have you continued to make films? Nothing is listed in the Canyon Catalogue after 1974.
Severson:
No. I made one or two more films in England;
Animals Running
[1974] and
The Struggle of the Meat
[1974] are still distributed. I stayed in England instead of returning to the Art Institute because I was driven (that's definitely the word!) to seek teachers to help me develop some psychic capacities that had been surfacing. It was clear to me that something was happening to me, and I had to find out what to do with it, how to direct it more effectively.
In England I started working on a videotape series on unorthodox healing methods. I believed this would provide me with a kind of cover while I observed different teachers and their work. The third healer I interviewed was Dr. Thomas Maughan, a homeopathic doctor and Chief of the Ancient Order of Druids. He effortlessly lured me into the Order with some very tasty information about dreams and dreamwork.
Now I'm working a lot with dreams again. Personal movies. I have a call-in radio show on dreams in Honolulu, and I write a dream column. I'm still interested in basically the same thingfinding a convenient vehicle that makes it easy and exciting for people to explore and expand their own awareness. I think that has been my own lifetime script. Originally I thought my movies, and particularly
Chakra,
had that value. Now I guess you could say I'm working with other people to improve the scripts of their own inner dramas. You should hear some of the wild and hairy dreams that are called in to the radio show. By comparison
Chakra
is pretty tame!
Laura Mulvey
MacDonald:
What was the nature of the collaboration between you and Peter Wollen as you were developing
Riddles of the Sphinx
? I assume that both of you had been seeing conventional narrative film, as well as the reactions to it: the movement out of narrative convention by Godard and others who were questioning the politics of the commercial cinema, and the various approaches of avant-garde filmthe two "schools" described in Peter's "Two Avant-Gardes" [originally pub-