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I think so much of what is happening today is stemming from the way we're being affected by film and television. How can we go on ignoring the effects of these forms of media, generation after generation?
It's impossible not to have a message in a film or TV show. The way you cut a film, the way you shape it, is highly subjective. Even if you have someone sitting in a chair facing the camera, the moment you touch the bloody button that starts the celluloid through the gate, you're manipulating, because you've had to decide where to put the camera. These are all dilemmas when you make a film. I think Godard has fallen into traps by believing that he can work out these problems within films. I'm not really sure that you can. Well, the structuralists or minimalists, or whatever one should call the filmmakers you mostly work with, Scott, seem to me to be working in extremely interesting ways with film, in ways that really challenge this basic language. Even so, whether you take that route or you take the other routesthe ones I took with
Munch
and my other films, for exampleyou are participating in a manipulative experience, which you must continually reevaluate.
MacDonald:
Also, avoiding traditional forms can make you seem more manipulative than people whose methods of manipulation are accepted as normal.
Watkins:
That's quite right; I hadn't thought of it like that.
MacDonald:
I think that's why it's important to do the other kind of work; even if it's not seen by everybody, it's seen by some, and whenever it
is
seen, it immediately recontextualizes the more "normal" films. If the normal film manipulation is all that exists, then it does seem to be inevitable. But once students have seen
The War Game
or
Blues,
I have to think that there's a seed in their brains that will sooner or later undermine their ability to accept the normal narrative pattern as the only way of interpreting human experience.
Watkins:
What I'm going to try to do with the Strindberg film so that I won't end up doing some of these things is really complicated: I'm going to have a go at the normal narrative structure: I'm going to shred it. What makes this subject so right for what I want to do (and which is one of the primary reasons why I've stuck through all this nonsense I've been experiencing in Sweden) is this man's complex character. He's completely different from Munch, though Munch was complicated too. Strindberg wrote novels, plays, short stories, political articles; he wrote on all kinds of things, on astronomy, astrology, biology; he studied language systems, the Chinese, the Runic, the Arabic, Japanese, Javanese; he studied plant life; he studied optics; he studied sound. He's a renaissance figure, and, of course, he was the grand amateur in a sense, but sometimes he went a long way. What makes him especially interesting is that at times he became very depressed by writing. He doesn't talk