Page 31 - Studio International - November 1973

Centrale ? importance, although it varies from situation the sound. What interested me also was that all
MS: The film's in constant motion. The X to situation. It's necessary, to get back to the stuff that's there is not art, but it's
fixes the screen. It transfers the movement in a painting, it's the same sort of thing as in a art-related, because it has to do with the other
lot of different ways each time it comes up. It's portrait; the head is the most important part but stuff that I did that I called art.
another kind of motion that's a kind of referal if you're a painter the upper left-hand corner is JDC: The description was recorded in one
back to yourself. Obviously it's also a functional just as important, because it's a painting. On the session ?
way to get from sequence to sequence because other hand you can give a relative degree of MS: I did it straight through, there in front of
I couldn't make it totally continuous any way, emphasis to all the elements, and the emphasis the thing, in the same place as the camera.
that was really impossible. And it's a title, a that I'm giving in this one is the kind of JDC: So the description is not a description of
reminder of the central region — the whole thing emphasis you get — I don't mean this in terms of the slide, you were studying the thing itself.
is about being in the middle of this — the camera quality — in Rembrandt or something like that MS: Yes. And it passes in and out of modes.
and the spectator. But first of all it was just where the head stands out so much more from Again, it's encylopaedic, I guess, because I
getting something that would hold the screen. the ground. I'm really working with that kind sometimes referred to something as a
Diagonals seemed to be the best way to fix it — of space, as opposed to a more modern sense of rectangle or as a black line and you can see
so there's no feeling of anything passing through space. The thing is really eighteenth century things that way in three dimensions in life but it
or whatever. Sometimes I wonder if other in a lot of ways. It's Rameau' s Nephew by tends to make it seem as if you're referring to
people see the things that it does, but it's really Diderot. the slide which is of course two dimensional.
fantastic — the shifts and falls and sinkings and JDC: In A Casing Shelved it looked as if you It's like there's a ghost of me in front of the
things like that. That also happens to the were interested in the way description can image of the shelves looking at them. It keeps on
building you're in too, the whole place seems to transform an audience's response to a given changing . . . whether I describe something as a
red spot or a line or as being a can of
turpentine, and the contents are sort of funny
because you can't see them. Other people
have pointed out that it's a bit like in art schools
where they analyse paintings that way — you get
a slide of it and the guy says notice how this line
goes down here and so on — which I didn't
think of before but it's a bit like a teaching thing
that way.
JDC: Yes, but it's not presented in that
didactic fashion.
MS: No, because it's pretty casual.
JDC: And because the process of selection,
the process by which you relate one thing to
another and so on is brought right out, a lot of
the content was the sort of decisions you were
making, the types of classification. . . .
MB: Yes, I wanted to say everything that
could be said about it.
JDC: It seems that what you like to do with
most of the things you take, is to take something
clearly delimited and then go through all the
possible ramifications.
MS: A Casing Shelved is a projected slide with
a separate tape sound. Being a movie would be
entirely another matter because it would
introduce motion . . . no matter what you'd do
you'd have the flicker and you'd have the things
Production still from visual piece. There were presumably other that happened in the projector. Slides have a
Back and Forth 1968-9 concerns. particularly frozen quality if you look at them
MS: One of the things I wanted to do there was for a while. It's really very interesting. It's
be sinking or swinging. make the motion a result of the sound. That was very funny about that movie thing. Bob Breer
JDC: Does your new film emphasize the frame like the germ idea. That coupled with a habit of told me that for a long time he thought A Casing
the way you've beeen emphasizing it in your looking at things and wondering how they got Shelved was a movie. I think that's very nice,
other films ? to be what they are. Like this table top here because it means that the thing is moving in
MS: The other films were trying to make a kind is a pretty interesting collection of things, and it time in a way that I really wanted the sound to
of equivalence of the whole field — so that keeps on happening. And that particular thing, do — and it is the sound that does it because if
everything has absolutely equal importance. But the bookshelf, I kept on thinking I'd had it for a you really look at it you don't see the effects that
I'm now putting the emphasis on the people. long time and I'd just kept on enjoying it as if it happen with films . . . that little bit of
With all the other ones I was trying to make the were a painting, a work of art, and once I just instability.
whole field work and I am in this in a way, but snuck up on it and took the instamatics that are
it's a different thing, it's more as if they're in actually in that slide. I didn't know quite what
relief or something — the people stand out from to do about it. I never arranged anything there, (Michael Snow was interviewed while in London
the rest of the field. In the other films there but when I started to become interested in it I recently for the first English showing of his film
isn't a centre of interest — there's a direction but became self-conscious about it and I decided I'd La Region Centrale, at the National Film
the whole field's moving. So you can look better do something about it. So I finally took Theatre, as part of the London Festival of
anywhere on the screen and it's all of equal the slide and then that tied in with the idea of Underground Film.)
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