Page 47
MacDonald:
Maybe what makes
Fuji
seem more conventional than the other films is the sound of the train, which is more continual than the sound in many other films, and has a clear, direct relationship with the visuals.
Breer:
The sound was put on six months after I finished the film. Actually, I showed
Fuji
in Pittsburgh as a silent film and realized there that maybe it should have some sound. I used all kinds of contraptions in my studio to create the train ride noises. Of course the Tokaido Express doesn't sound anything like my clackity clack, but the soundtrack does evoke "train," and it's the rhythm I thought I needed for that film. One trick that I was real happy with is the interruption of the sound near the end. After using the relentless clackity clack at various paces and pitches, I stopped it right at the climax of the film, or I should say I created the climax of the film with this sudden drop into total silence. Then just at the end the sound creeps back in as a little coda, and we see the person on the train [Frannie Breer] in live action. I withheld the sound in a couple of other places too.
MacDonald: Rubber Cement
uses a lot of collage; it seems a return to the sensibility of
Fist Fight
or
Jamestown Baloos
.
Breer:
I hadn't thought of that. I do have a tendency to pick up on neglected practices. It's possible that I had become collage starved.
MacDonald:
How did your involvement with Xerox in
Rubber Cement
come about?
Breer:
I was invited to be a member of a seven-member NYSCA panel that was formed to give artists access to Xerox machines. Part of the privilege of being a panelist consisted of getting an identity card to go into the Xerox Company. They'd just come out with a color machine. I had to share the time with some of the artists we selected: Bob Whitman was one and Steven Antonakis another. Anyhow, I didn't have a lot of time on the machine, but I generated a bunch of images by playing around with frames from some of my old films (
70,
for one). I was hoping that if Xerox looked at my film, they might think I was worthy of a little more indulgence, but I had a negative reaction from their PR people; they weren't even curious to see the film. So when I realized later that I had misspelled the company name in my title tribute, "Thanks to Zerox," I was happy to leave it that way.
MacDonald: 77
is in the mold of
69
. Like the earlier film, it explores color: the early part centers rigorously on primary colors, then at the end there's a dispersal of that control into a crescendo of color.
Breer:
I intended to make a black-and-white film, to reduce elements and simplify everything. But DuArt informed me that it would cost more to shoot in black and white than in color. I had always secretly admired the effect of black-and-white images in color film, and this