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mal,
One Second in Montreal
really is minimal: you subtract out almost everything except duration itself.
Snow:
I have been influenced by reductive workmaybe that's not the right word. I like Mondrian a lot. And I like Donald Judd's first work. In fact, I had a piece from his first show.
In
One Second in Montreal
I wanted to concentrate again, and I was interested to see what it would be like to live through a film that, as purely as possible, had to do with duration. I didn't want what I put on the screen to be too interesting, which is a funny situation. I wanted each image to be differentotherwise there would be no measurement. But they couldn't be
too
different because I didn't want to have any peaks or checkerboarding of interest: I wanted the viewer to be aware of the time passing, of how long the shot was there. I finally decided on these bad offset-printing images I'd gotten years earlier for a competition to put sculpture in parks in Montreal. I'd put them away because I liked them, though I didn't know
what
I liked about them.
MacDonald:
On a certain level they continue the idea in
Back and Forth
of making the figurative action that happens in front of the camera refer to the process of the film itself. The viewer is looking at spaces that are there because they're empty of what they're trying to draw into them. They're places where sculptures
could be,
just as the photographic imagery in your film is where action or event would be, were there any.
Snow:
I suppose that's true, though you wouldn't know that from the film itself. They're just these bleak photographs of parks and public spaces. It is Montreal, but you don't need to know that either.
I think the film worked very well. And I think that people do recognize after a while what it's about. Yvonne Rainer told me one time that she got very, very fidgety as the shots got longer and longer, and was really mad. And then, when they started to go fast and the film ended, she was really mad that it ended. She wanted more. I'm happy that the film could do that. It's an interesting range of response that's
not
produced by an imitation of real life as in narrative film.
MacDonald:
There was a period during the early seventies when there was some acceptance of the idea that film is a temporal space within which you can meditate. This film has that dimension.
Snow:
Also the silence is interesting. It's a silence that I don't think I've ever felt before in films. Sometimes silence is beautiful, and everybody's concentrating. That happens with some of Stan Brakhage's films. In this film the silence is almost meditational, partly because the snow-blanketed scenes have a mute quality. The imagery affects your feeling about the silence.
MacDonald:
It's a pun, too, in that we're sitting in the audience