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me. In the back of my mind, I always knew that I'd have to deal with it at some point. The so-called postcolonialist cultural writing of the last five years or so moved me toward thinking about a film around that incident.
MacDonald:
So Jenny's story is pretty close to yours?
Rainer:
Jenny's
flashback,
yes.
MacDonald:
What in particular was it about the incident that made it stay with you so long?
Rainer:
It had to do with a sense that in coming to New York I had been very oblivious to many things around me. Even though I had come from an anarchist background, when it came to self-development and realizing my own potential in the world, certain things got excluded: social inequities took a back seat, in terms of consciousness. Some of that had to do with my being in psychotherapy and coming out from under an oppressive marriage and having the chance to produce a lot of work. This incident occurred at the very beginning of this psychic and social advancement, and at first it had no effect on me. It was just something that happened and was very quickly forgotten. But twenty years later, it came back to haunt me with a lot of questions about the kind of life I led then.
MacDonald:
One standard thing to say about you, and maybe it's something that you've said about yourself, is that you relentlessly avoid the personal, the autobiographical, and yet looking back now, it strikes me that your films reveal more about you than many of the films of the sixties that are
called
personal actually reveal about their makers. It's because you deal with what you're
thinking about
at any given time, which is always a large part of "who we are."
Rainer:
Yes.
MacDonald:
But I wonder, did you set out at the beginning with the idea of
not
making personal film?
Rainer:
No. I certainly wasn't making "personal film" in the sense Brakhage does, in the way the New American Cinemists didin terms of personal vision. I had no particular vision. And filmmakers complained about my films at the beginning because they weren't "visual"; they didn't play on the retina. My films weren't about making poetic or beautiful images. I got images where I could. And I didn't even do my own shooting! I didn't have a personal touch, in the sense of the painter's hand or a filmmaker's eyealthough an eye was certainly there, in the way shots were framed. But my imagery was always at the service of a theatrical, emotional realm;
melodrama
was the perfect form for what I was after: the emotional life lived at an extreme of desperation and conflict. I wanted to explore the emotion of personal life, but it was equally important to me that the films be fictionalized in