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precedents maybe subconsciously before and consciously afterward, in Leger and [Dimitri] Kirsanov, and occasionally in [Dziga] Vertov. I've never made any case for that device in itself. It's basically a gimmick, but if you carry a gimmick as far as I did, it becomes a style of sorts. In the sixties I was watching the Smothers Brothers on TV. On one of their shows they introduced some guy who then proceeded to show the history of art in thirty seconds with a single-frame kaleidoscope of images of paintings. Well, I had done that in
Jamestown Baloos,
specifically with art history and a series of images of landscape paintings. It was just one ingredient of
Jamestown Baloos
. But here was the device on the Smothers Brothers show, with some kind of crappy music to go with it. The whole thing was one big joke, and it made me very unhappy. It wasn't so much an envy/greed reaction. It was that the newness of that feeling had been simultaneously introduced and disposed of, totally thrown out the window and on a grand scale. I could never imagine myself reaching all those people across the country with more serious work using that device, so it was depressing.
Recently a case has been made on our behalf. Birgit and Wilhelm Hein put together a show of so-called pioneering films and special effects for the Berlin Film Festival, to show how these special effects have been absorbed. I haven't seen any program notes, but they asked for
Recreation
. I don't know what the other films are.
MacDonald:
Of course, it goes the other way too: a lot of things in avant-garde film were done first by totally anonymous commercial people, who did their work without any long-term recognition either.
Breer:
Good point. I went to an advertising agency one time, and they said, ''We like your stuff a lot, but our clients are very conservative." The guy there cited the case of Len Lye and his little Chrysler film: Lye was given an award for the best advertising film of the year, by whatever society or committee does that, but the award was withdrawn because Chrysler hadn't accepted the ad, which wasn't broadcast and so wasn't eligible for the prize. Lye was very bitter about it. He thought he deserved that award, and then he had to be contemptuous of it at the same time. Lye had had big audiences at the beginning; his films ran in first-run theaters, and then later he had to become this "elitist," far removed from all that.
MacDonald:
On the
Fist Fight
sound track there are voices apparently talking about the Stockhausen performance.
Breer:
I took stuff out of the actual performances; you hear the participants. The voice at the end criticizing the film was an English actor.
Stockhausen hadn't been there for the performances, so he hadn't seen the finished film. Later he came out to my house with Mary