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wasn't an aesthetic reaction to the material I was working with. I made an arbitrary, intellectual decision that the film would be twice as long as I thought it should be. I figured that for the first six minutes people would be resisting the onslaught of imagery, but if I kept on going, they'd give in and relax and begin to look at it the way I wanted them to. I think it's a specious bit of theorizing, but that's how the film got to be so long. I thought I could drive it home by dint of overkill.
I'm uneasy when I see the film now, since most people project it at its full length. Kubelka tried to solve the same dilemma by showing his films over and over. Kubelka's obsession is that people have to know everything about his work. It's a little totalitarian to insist that people look at your work over and over, but that's a matter of style. I'd like the same thing, only I wouldn't want to force you into it.
To get the audience to look at films that are proposing different conventions, you first have to disabuse people of their ordinary conventions. Then you have to introduce them to the new conventions. Only then can they see the film the way the artist expressed it. Filmmakers of our ilk have to wait for the public to get educated to the conventions of this kind of filmmaking, but while we wait, our conventions are usurped and absorbed into mainstream cinema. I think most of the pioneer filmmakers of this kind of filmmaking have been fucked. They were pioneers and didn't get to cash in. Some of them are bitter and disappointed.
On the other hand, I think it's fatuous to set yourself up as a pioneer and point at yourself narcissistically and assume everybody's going to congratulate you. It's a self-serving attention-getting process that doesn't guarantee good art. You just look around, see what nobody else has done, and do it. In itself that's not something to be appreciated.
Another Cage idea I picked up on and have used as moral support is that you have to do what you perceive to be the
next
thing. That can get you into the position where you're doing something that nobody's ready for, so that you get dumped on. But it's excusable that way. If it's just an attention-getting process, you deserve oblivion.
MacDonald:
I think the problem with setting oneself up as a pioneer is that so much is always going on in so many places. There are precedents for just about everything.
Breer:
Absolutely. There's always a context for what you do. Ideas float in the air like the flu, and a lot of people get them at the same time. The reason for doing something new is the simple excitement of getting new life out of an old form. And that's enough of a reason.
When I said that I thought that many film artists have gotten fucked, I was referring to the enormous power of consumerism. Take the use of dense groups of different single frames that I came up with in
Recreation
. I've never claimed any firsts for that, and I became aware of