Orion Cinema
Helsinki, January 2015.
Martin Grennberger: Both in your films and in your written theoretical works – like the recently republished book Materialist Film (1989), the polemical treatise on the «Theory and Definition of Structural/ Materialist Film» (1976), or in the essay «The Anti-Narrative» (1976–78) – you place a strong emphasis on what the work resists and goes against. There are two distinctive strands within your work which participate in an intensive dialogue with each other. There is a sense of negativity here, of negative dialectics, in your rejection of illusionism, narration, description, figuration and the use of metaphor.
Peter Gidal: That’s a lot.
MG: That’s a lot.
PG: That’s a lot, and it’s true.
MG: So my first question is: in your view, what are the utmost potentialities or possibilities of your work, of your practice?
PG: If it’s a negative practice?
MG: Yes, and in connection to your rejection of the things I mentioned.
PG: Well, there is always a problem when you define yourself against the dominant ideology. When I first started making films the fact that it was against certain things never seemed a problem in terms of practice, it never seemed a problem in making the work. So the simple answer is not what it is against or what it is for, but what it is. The simple answer is: what remains from the remnants of all that negativity against dominant ideology, against reproduction, against recognition, against figuration, is the film itself. What’s left is actually the work, and in a weird way – it’s not just a simple glib answer. What’s leftover still allows that quite considerable amount of work to be done, or films to be made. Daily filming, editing, screening is all the remnant of that. It’s simply that you limit your scope so far that – let’s say the example would be Room Film 1973 (1973) – what you are left with is the fact that you don't want to represent, and you certainly don’t want representation to allow for recognition. Or if there is some recognition, you certainly don't want recognition to have a temporal period of length which then allows it to take over, and allow for identification, allow for the individual viewer to identify within a space. If all that is taken away, the point is simply that it forces much more complex decision-making on the filmmaker, and – this fits with practice leading to theory – instead of theory to practice, it isn’t that you come up with that as theory, those are just polemical directions. What we learn from the film, or what I learned from making Room Film in 1973, was that light obliterates the image as much as darkness does. So instead of the convention, which is that when things fade out or go dark in Hollywood films and in other films (it usually means a slow passage of time, or overnight, or that they are having sex or God knows what) there is a fade out, dark, you don’t see; and light – in the rare times it’s used in films more recently, it never used to be used at all – when there is a fade to bright light and white, it usually means death, so it’s a metaphor for death. But if you find out that light and dark can simply be the obliteration of the seen, of the image, then that allows you, within the ideology of my own work, to use light and dark. And I can use it for a lot, for a long range of ways of reinforcing both the theoretical and the practical desire of my work, which is: to not represent. This huge range of light and huge range of dark, it’s productive. It has allowed me to make 30 films, has allowed me to make those films and still hold on to those ideas using the determinants of the cinematic apparatus themselves. Light and dark is left over, which is a pretty big world to choose from.
Room Film 1973
What could be left over would be the same thing with sound and silence. Instead of using silence just to mean the ineffable meaninglessness of life or the eternal existence of everything, which happens in some films when things goes silent – in other films, unfortunately, they use sound to metaphorize that – I realized that what you can do is use sound as a direct contradiction, for example, to what is happening in the visual aspect of the work. Therefore there is an enormous potential for sound, even if I hardly ever use it. The fact is that when it is used it can be enormously productive just in the way it might make, for a moment, the viewer anticipate something which is directly contradicted by the images. So it’s not completely a negative practice in that sense. It’s simply that you can use materials in this specific way, and this specificity is opposed to metaphor. For me metaphors are always a generalization. Every metaphor relies on what you already know about the subject to be metaphorized. When there’s a metaphor on death, every bloody person in the audience – whether they love it, hate it, are indifferent to it, have read about it, haven’t read about it, have studied it, all the different texts, they don’t have to know anything – know one thing for sure: what that metaphor is. It’s almost always crystal-clear. There's no contradiction involved. To exclude metaphor allows for contradiction. It allows you to be in a position of not knowing something, which also allows you freedom to think.
MG: And it also accentuates the inner conflict within the work?
PG: Yes, in the work and in you. That conflict enforces a conflict in you. If you're projecting meaning when you see an empty screen, the sound is disturbing because it doesn’t fill it with the meaning you want, which is the usual case in Hollywood: the sound fills the empty meaning. It’s that old story that some people would put on any film with any sound and it always looks almost right, it always fits, it gives it meaning. In my films the sound hopefully doesn’t fill the film with the meaning. In fact it makes as many problems as it solves, and the same with the image, so that it forces the viewer into a problematic state. It means that the viewer can’t put together a whole meaning at any given point, which is also difficult because it means that your viewers are not satisfied. But it also means that the viewer is, on some level, working.
MG: I was a bit surprised that several of your new works have sound.
PG: I was surprised too.
MG: The tensions and the ruptures between sound and image in the work you’ve presented here in Helsinki is quite prominent. Certain other filmmakers, mainly within the structural tradition, tend to emphasize the materiality of the inherent or self-referential sonic raw material within their works, like the machinery, the sound of the leader, the event of projection, the sprocket holes, and so forth, but your work with sound doesn’t have that dimension to it.
PG: It doesn’t have that. My films don’t represent the sound of their own making or the sound that would be the mechanistic material of film. The sound is opposed.
MG: Why this oppositional approach regarding the use of sound?
PG: If I did that, which is one way to use process (which I believe in), then it would be what I would call a fetishisation of the process. It would mean that the film yet again would be giving you a complete image of what it is. The sound fills the image – it fits. You hear the flicker, or you see the flicker of the image and you hear the tick of the reel, or the sprocket sounds, or tear of sprockets holes. Or you look back and think: is it the reel? Is it not the reel? It’s represented in the film and it helps to make the film coherent. I am trying to as much as I can to make each shot and each sound-image relation as incoherent as possible, so that any coherence has to be established artificially, both in the film and by the viewer, which means that the film doesn’t have a pre-existence. It only exists at the time of projection. If you can make some coherence artificially for that moment, fine, but then you’re making it in the present. It doesn’t come from beyond you and it. It doesn’t precede the film as projected at that moment.
MG: That is also connected to your discussion yesterday about projection, the singular moment of the film being projected, as a form of ahistoricity.
PG: Absolutely. If it is built into the film that the shape of the sound fits into the shape of the film on some level, or even if it contradicts it; as long as it is consistent, then you have a whole product. You might as well have violins playing when the person is on the horse going into the sunset, because it fits, and I am trying everything I can to make a film where there is a problem. Even if it’s beautiful, even if there’s a satisfaction in viewing it, the problem has to be with what preexists the viewing moment – which is of course not absolute, otherwise there would be no film, no viewing, no anything. But it’s as close to non-existence as possible, until you as viewer are part of making the meanings with what is given, but is not read as premade. So you're not interpreting them out, you’re not extracting: you’re making them. And the film is making them. Obviously, at some point there is a sound, let’s say in Key (1968): the loop sound doesn’t come right when it starts going out of focus. You think you’re in a peaceful moment. After 8 minutes it starts going out of focus, it’s going to be a letting go, it’s so grainy, and in film usually a dissolve is a moment of somewhat peace. You get that and after about a second that loop of John Cale, that searing noise disturbs the peace of the image. It even takes some effort on the viewer’s part to see both at the same time, to not let the sound overtake it and destroy the image, or try to eradicate the sound, it’s an attempt to make a struggle for the viewer. That’s the best I can say.
Key
MG: I still felt there were some, how should I put it, some dramaturgical intentions in the way you use the sound, it’s very rhythmic at certain moments. And that was something I didn’t expect to find in these works.
PG: You are right, it is there. And it's funny you pick up on something there. It’s funny to see three films in a row that all have sound, when most of my films are notorious for having no sound at all. And suddenly you see three that have dramaturgically actual sound. You set up a structured dramaturgy of sound, and it’s shocking, because of the 35 or so films I have made, I would say only about six have sound, five of which were here [laughs].
MG: One of the points you’ve made against conventional cinema, but also many works within the avant-garde or experimental realm, is that they insist on obfuscating two aspects that are crucial in your own work. I’m thinking of their obliteration of cinematic time and death. Could you elaborate a bit on that?
PG: Simply that film insists on the temporal at some level. The temporal, the passage of time, even if it’s frustrating, difficult, repetitive, even if you can’t see half the time but you’re trying to, is against representation’s main function. In my view, whether it’s photography or film or whatever, temporal persistence is to obliterate time. In that moment there’s a narrative action that you get so involved in that the notion of the passage of time and certainly your own death is – for those happy ninety minutes when you watch a narrative film – gone. You’re not in a sense where, even unconsciously, time’s passage persists. It really does disappear, and I think that’s the function of narrative art: to make that disappear. I think it’s a great danger if we're all put in that position, as if we're going to live forever. If we live in the persistence that we live forever then that makes «the other» the problem, our deaths don’t matter as long as we keep living. But if a film is there to make you persist in an impossibility to repress death, whatever else it does, good, bad, or indifferent, I think it at least puts you in a position of the discomfort of times passage. It’s actually discomfort. It doesn’t have to be, but in my case I think it is. This discomfort, the endlessness of persistence, Proust says in his book À la recherche du temps perdu, might sometimes be a great discomfort. But even there, the fact that death and time is ever present, is in the great Beckett quote in his book on Proust. He says «death is dead when time is dead». There is no death when time is dead. So the temporal, especially in film, is a very uncomfortable feeling because whatever else you are doing it is in time, it just is. It's very hard to explain. It’s very complicated for me. I don’t mean too complicated to explain now to you. It’s too complicated for me to explain to myself, but I do know that the repression of time is a main function of cinema. It really is, no question. Every time you see a film and you’re enjoying it, it’s precisely because whatever you are thinking of you are not thinking of that. You’re not in a position of experiencing it, so there’s a moment of suspension that I find really, even politically, rather dangerous.
MG: In your book on Warhol’s Blow Job, you find something of a resistance to this tendency. That's one of the main reasons he’s important for you.
PG: Yeah, very much so. Warhol is very important. That is one of the reasons why, 10-15 years ago, when you go and see a film like Henry Geldzahler (1964) only eleven people turn up. It was shown at the National Film Theatre in London – and he's not exactly unknown, this was fifteen years ago, not in 1964, this is in 1998 or something, – and just eleven people. Eleven people to watch 90 min of Henry and he actually becomes – it’s not a metaphor, just by viewing for 90 minutes – skull-like. Warhol doesn’t even change the light. It’s just that the light persisting so long on a face becomes skull-like, and I am not using this as metaphor, it really just is time. Time does that to the way we perceive naturally. The same thing is in Beckett's play Rockaby (1980). By the end, Billie Whitelaw and the stage production they have to exaggerate it, but it’s still the same idea. I think in Warhol it’s the same idea, and I think that’s why no one watches those Warhol films. That’s why they don’t. It’s not because they’re not interested in Warhol.
MG: You’ve never been tempted to work with double or triple screens, or with the temporal or spatial aspects or architectures of expanded cinema? How come that hasn’t been part of your thinking or practice?
PG: Wonderful examples. It’s funny because I have always been against it, but not for other people, just for me.
MG: I suppose you and Malcolm Le Grice talked about it back then when it was done a lot, though?
PG: He does it a lot, and he does it brilliantly. The way he does it is amazing. And William Raban has done some double and triple screen films, which I think are amongst the best films I know. But I know that if I use a second screen, for me that’s almost baroque. It’s almost like something else is happening. Maybe it’s about my own mind: it’s so reductive and so simplistic, or maybe just so obsessive, that I can’t focus myself on more elements. When I read I can’t have music on in the background, or else I can’t read, I don’t. I do it because I am probably more hooked on narrative than most people, so I can understand the pull it has and the way it operates. But I certainly don’t do it for that reason. I do it because I sit back and get the same pleasures as everyone else. It’s for the same reason that I can’t read or think or do anything when there’s music in the background. With Malcolm and a few others, such as Gil Eatherly and William Raban, who have the ability to do three screens, the temporal is very strong in their work, and really amazingly sophisticated, but I can’t concentrate on more than one thing at the time. It could be a personal inability but it’s not theoretical, there’s no theoretical position against expanded cinema.
MG: Do you feel that the issues that you're interested in could possibly exist in these expanded practices, in these variegated installational settings?
PG: They could exist. I am positive they could exist. But I must say that the few examples that I love amongst those works that I mentioned, they do exist, but even there, that particular element of the temporal problematic, I would think doesn’t exist to the same degree because there's just too much going on. It does exist and it’s not criticism at all. For me, it's just more the thing that I am interested in. So therefore I think in the end it’s temporal, but it’s all the stuff, too much interference. I don’t think it can be as pure. I think it’s more pure with one screen. It might not be as good. I am not saying pure = good. It could be lousy in my case, better in someone else’s, but for me it's more pure on one. The focus is simply like when you’re reading a book. To read a book while you’re seeing images flickering by takes focus away from it. It could be personal, psychic needs. Expanded cinema should be capable of this, it should be. In a weird way it’s a double answer. The temporal comes up more in expanded cinema, but not in as concentrated a form.
MG: Talking of concentration and reduction, I’d like to follow up on certain things that you touched upon yesterday, that you’ve made many of your films in rooms, which is both connected to compression of scale and, considering your particular way of handling this topicality, to a kind of anti-representational spatio-temporal continuity. Firstly we have the room as delineation, as a vector of movement and temporal excavation, and secondly, the prominence of clouds and sky in films like Coda 1 (2014), Coda 2 (2014), and Not Far At All (2014), recurring as almost obsessional imagery, as amorphous tropes without clear delineation: the compressed space, the open, non-representational space in dialogue. What could you say about this?
PG: To answer the second question first, I am surprised that the new film and the Clouds (1969) film from way back somehow relate to each other. I am surprised myself that suddenly for me the clouds became adequate, not as subject matter, but certainly as the thing I aim my camera at. I think in a weird way they operated for me in the same way that the room spaces did originally, which is that there is something there. Even then, if you make your film correctly – in my case correctly for me – with that endlessness of the sky or the clouds, you can operate so that it isn’t that. No subject matter should be a taboo in this sense, although many are taboo: figuration, metaphor etc. But even a cloud, which is used for metaphor all the time, is highly potent for great painting and I thought I should be able to deal with that as well. I thought that Clouds, by chance, was a successful film on my terms, so I thought that I have to be able to actually deal with eternal spaces, that are also not spaces, that have a specific delineation of meaning, but not the delineation that you expect. I should be able to make a film the way I make a film with clouds as much as with a wall, or an edge of a chair, or a dark corner of a room, so that’s what I attempted to do. And it’s strange because when you look back, suddenly, where are these room films? They disappeared somehow, and I don’t know what happened. [laughs]
MG: In connection to Not Far At All you’re saying, in a Beckettian manner, that you’re «tempted to say different yet the same, but not». Is this in a dialogue with the Clouds film?
PG: Yes, but not the same, obviously. The clouds film is a strange one because it’s really only 3 minutes of footage, 9 minutes of film, because everything is looped. There I was so interested in clouds, how you see the same repeating. But when it’s repeating 4 minutes later in negative and then superimposed, you actually don’t know whether it is repeating. I was then very interested in positioning the viewer in not knowing even the repeat, or when they recognize something, how different that is – meaning there is no one thing. Even recognition isn’t based in finally seeing, even when you’re recognizing clouds. In the sequence when the plane went this way, the other one is behind it, the cloud was grey and then moved, then we zoomed in. Even if you see it nine times you don’t know if it’s the same and it’s experienced in a temporally different way. That again brings up the temporal - there is always that element. It’s always about taking it away from a pure image.
Clouds
MG: It is also about not posing the viewer to receive clear-cut concepts or ideas.
PG: Yes, that is true. It isn’t the concept that is transmitted to the viewer. In fact, what you are left with is that you don’t know what is transmitted to you and you have to live with that even though it means you're in an area that’s called «experimental». What else would it be, if you don’t know what is being transmitted, because nothing’s being transmitted from A to B?
MG: Your work is, in a gesture of ardent generosity, constantly pushing the viewer towards states of perceptual liminality, obfuscating or complexifying the functions and workings of cinematic representation. Is there anything you want to add on this?
PG: I just want to say how extraordinary it is that people can sit through Room Film 1973 and go through all those changes that happen in that film, many of which are really in the dark, with some light, enough to know that cinematic representation is being dealt with. To be able to take the time to view film like that… For me it means a lot that there are viewers willing to do that kind of film viewing. Whether it’s mine or somebody else’s is almost secondary. For this, of course, you need filmmakers who don’t make the compromises that makers of 80% of the other kind of film does. I really am a purist in that sense, even though the films look like there’s an awful lot in them – there’s clouds, there’s sound, there is recognition of some things, if not others – I still try to make it so that in each moment you can never really be sure what it is you are seeing. I really don’t want the viewer to know.
MG: What would be the most gratifying reaction you can get from people who view your films?
PG: Just that they stay put and watch them. Then they would have to, during and after, reflect on what it was that might have been the reason, the impulse, to watch a film that positions them so differently but still keeps them there. That means something different can be done with cinema. That it’s enough to keep the viewer with a film like that makes you feel like there is room for that kind of cinema. And that would be great because, it would mean others would think that it’s a valid realm, the same way certain kinds of writing are valid. Or, not knowing yet – experiencing something as a process can be valid. Like you said, it’s a dramaturgy but one that allows for the inclusion of the viewer in the process of the film and for the process in the experience of the viewer. That would be wonderful for me. I am happy about that, if it happens.
Originally published in OEI # 69–70: On Film (2015).