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the film. What I don't know yet about the Strindberg film is how much I'm going to try and fight against responding to my own rhythms, those I've built into myself as an editor and director: someone stops talking, one, two, cut. I mean it's almost like when you take a sandwich, it goes towards your mouththese things become so instinctual. I started to break away from that in
Edvard Munch
by cutting
against
the beat in the music, which I really enjoyed. Normally when you put music on a film, you get your wax pencil out, and as the film is running through the machine, you're marking the beats, so that all you need to do is cut on the places you've marked on the track. But to the best of my memory, I didn't do that with the Munch film, and what I really liked was putting in a piece of music and then just suddenly stopping it. It created such a tension in me, and I think in the audience, because it breaks the usual rhythmic expectancy. I do want to work with time, and our perception of time. I feel that the basic Hollywood narrative structure is totally antithetical to the way we experience life. We don't experience things in synch; we don't think in synch. Our bodies may go through a basic rhythm during the day, but we certainly don't do so inside, particularly inside our feelings. We can look at someone and be thinking about something else. You can be hearing something, but seeing something else, et cetera, et cetera. Your thoughts can be a mixture of past, present, and future, all in a highly complex individual pattern.
MacDonald:
Of course, to the extent that one is being practicalworking toward an end, concentratingone is imposing synch onto life. Right now, I'm concentrating on listening to you talk. There are a lot of other things going on here, but to the extent I'm being practical, I'm forcing myself to work as though things were in synch. So, one might say thatand TV does this more than filmto make shows that are entirely in synch is like presuming that a go-get-'em practicality is the only way of functioning in life.
Watkins:
That's right. The point that I keep trying to hammer home these days is not only that the ideas on TV are conservative, but that the
form
with which they're presented (even if they
were
ideas with which you and I might politically agree) defuses them.
MacDonald:
In other words, if you put radical subject matter into a conventional form, it's as though you're teaching people to have ideas they don't act on, to think about things they would never take action to change.
Watkins:
That's right, yes. If I could wage full-time war, I'd wage it on such words as ''objectivity" and "propaganda." I mean
The War Game
has been shot down for being propaganda, and this by the BBC, which has transmitted pro-government, pro-nuclear-weapon films. I mean this is how fucked up Western society has become in its perception of reality.