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force. He was so sure of his continuity that he didn't have to see it, though he must have played it back to himself on a viewer or something.
MacDonald: Fist Fight
seems like a personal scrapbook.
Breer:
It started out as an openly souvenir film, using family memorabilia. I had seen some of the personal films people had made, and I decided I could deal with my own personal material unsentimentally, that it would be a challenge to use family snapshots and items from my own life and yet to keep the film cold and publicto have it both ways, in other words. Then I got sidetracked by [Karlheinz] Stockhausen. He wanted me to make a film for his theater piece
Originale
. I'd shot and edited most of
Fist Fight
by then. He had a scenario that required a little preface to the film which would consist of snapshots of the people in the theater piece, so I decided I would turn this film into his film. I asked all the participants to send me snapshots of themselves, and that's how the finished film starts, with Stockhausen himself upside down on the screen, then all the people in the performance: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Alvin Lucier, David Berman, and Mary Lucier, all in bed together with a blanket pulled up to their chins, Letty Lou Eisenhouer, Max Newhaus, Alan Kaprow, and Olga Klüver. I made a composition out of all those stills, moving them and blowing smoke across them, spinning them around and so forth. That preface stopped the film from being a personal film in terms of content, although snapshots of my brothers and myself appear later.
At the Stockhausen performance, my role called for me to open up the scene with closed-circuit television. I had a video camera, and we had two monitors in the audience. As people came in, I shot them so they could see themselves on the screens. That got the audience involved right away, or at least self-conscious. This was at the Judson Hall across from Carnegie Hall, in a kind of arena theater. Later on, in the middle of the piece (all kinds of things were going on: there was even a chimpanzee in it) I turned on a projector that was hidden in the scaffolding on one side of the set and it threw the image onto a screen on the other side of the set, across all the actors, who by that time were directed to lie down on the floor. Around six minutes into the film (which lasts about eleven minutes) I walked over to the screen with another screen, a hoop, and carried the image back to the projectorput it away in a sense. We did this for five evenings, I think.
Fist Fight
is almost twice as long as any film I'd madebecause of John Cage. I'd been going to Cage concerts. Cage didn't cater to the public at all. Whatever his program for the evening was, it went on interminably. He didn't seem to have any theatrical sense of time or timing. I found that very refreshing and thought maybe I could apply it to the film. It was one of the few times I deliberately did something that