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"frozen" within this experience. In that way,
One Second in Montreal
prefigures
Seated Figures
.
Snow:
I just remembered that originally I had the idea to mark the cuts with sound. I didn't, but I used that idea later in
Presents
.
MacDonald: Dripping Water
is another reductive, "minimal" film, though it's more complex, more subtle than it first appears. It seems to be one shot long, but if you're watching and listening carefully, you realize that it's not a single shot. A drop of water sometimes doesn't make it to the sink, for instance. And a multilayered space is created outside the frame by the soundtrack.
Snow:
I made the tape first as music. I just happened to notice this drip, and started to listen to it. And it's really fantastic. So I made a tape just to listen to that sound amplified. The original tape was longer than the film. Mike Sahl, wonderful guy, a composer who at that time did a new music program on WBAI, played the entire tape on the radio. That dripping sound on the radio: fabulous! Joyce had the idea that maybe we should make a film of it.
MacDonald:
There's an irony in the fact that
Dripping Water
announces that it's a collaboration of two filmmakers, and yet there's precious little to collaborate on.
Snow:
We just set the camera up together; and I guess we put the dish into the sink together [laughter].
MacDonald: Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film
has grown on me. It's a quirky film, but very interesting. If I remember the photographic piece
Glares
[1973] correctly,
Side Seat Paintings
has in common with it the idea that the process of recording something inevitably creates interference, which everybody normally labors to avoid, or at pretending it can be avoided. In
Side Seat Paintings
the many levels of interference, of distortion, become the primary subject of the work.
Snow:
That's certainly true. I think you could say that representations are all abstractions from some original given, whether they're photographic or verbal or whatever.
Side Seat Paintings
is a Chinese box, one abstraction within another, within another . . . until you get a new form. I've always tried to make the recognition of exactly what's happening part of the experience of seeing a film. In this case, the projection of the slides of the paintings becomes the film, and I think it really
is
transformed into a film.
MacDonald:
Of the films,
Back and Forth
seems the furthest from the other arts that have fascinated you.
Eye and Ear Control
combines music, painting, sculpture, photography
in
film.
Wavelength
has a musical element and, at the end, references to photography and
The Walking Woman
. By
Back and Forth,
you're really into film at a very intense level with, at most, vestiges of music on the soundtrack. Then with
One