Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film Page #5

My films are made like sculptures,

they are not made on an editing table

or with the help of the

projector because at that time -

it's not even my merit -

because I was too poor

to have a projector,

and too poor to have

an editing table.

I had just enough money

to film that minute.

In fact I had two

minutes of material,

one Arriflex reel of 60 meters

which is two minutes, that was all.

And I had one light

which I put on the wall

so I couldn't have even filmed the

faces, because there was not enough light.

It was only enough

to get silhouettes.

So an important factor in the making

of my films were my life circumstances.

So these are as much

sculptures as they are film,

but in addition, they

are their own score.

When you read the film like this,

and you know how fast you read,

and you can learn this much faster

than learning to read a musical score.

If you work on it for

two weeks you can do it.

Memorizing, you can memorize it.

And for example you

can measure the speed.

The way artworks are

handled now is very strange,

namely as a commodity

of business, you see?

It will change again, it will get

over, but today now this is horrible.

And it creates a completely

new genre of people

who do something which

they call art but it isn't,

it's commodities,

decoration, and so on.

So I wanted to ask you,

how did you guys meet?

It was December,

end of '63, December,

maybe it was the last day of the

year, in Knokke-le-Zoute Belgium,

in the experimental film festival

which was run by the great friend,

great guy, Jacques Ledoux.

-Yes, it was this guy.

So the screening of miscellaneous,

some so-so, mostly pretty bad movies

that many people liked and

applauded and had great time.

And then this film comes up

and it says Arnulf Rainer,

and the audience is

silent. Everybody's silent.

Then some people begin

to make some noises.

Then I think maybe there

were even some boos.

And then some left.

Reaction was to me so disgusting

that I left immediately, did

not want to see anything else,

and leave the theatre, and I

see this guy standing there,

sort of like he had been

beaten on the head with a board,

sort of, you know pretty quiet.

I said, that must be Peter Kubelka!

So I came and I said, boy that

was great! That was a masterpiece!

We stayed friends all

our lives since then.

We never had a falling out

and we always are friends.

And we do different things

and we are still friends,

we are friends despite everything.

There is a question of

solidarity and recognition,

that somebody else is doing

that is not commercial, not,

though it's something

very, very, very different,

but like somebody who is doing...

you feel solidarity with somebody,

that, yeah we are in

the same area, you see.

And influence is something else.

So there is like friendship, more than

influencing, you see, which gives you,

helps you to do the

way you want to do,

because somebody else is doing

the way he or she is doing

with no compromise.

"No compromise" is how Stan

Brakhage made his life work.

Over five decades he filmed

or painted close to 400 films.

He too struggled to make a living

even though he is considered one of the

most important figures in 20th century art.

He lived in Colorado.

Here we see him filmed

by Jonas Mekas in 1967,

and here we see him in New York

with Jonas, filmed by me in 2000.

Three years later I was invited by

French television to interview Brakhage,

sick with cancer, at

his new home in Canada.

It happened to be

his last interview.

He told me his films

were like poems,

and should be understood

and felt as poems,

an adventure in perception.

At least what my integrity was

that I did not fake being a poet

and for that reason I believe

that the muse who permits -

who is that part of human consciousness

that permits the creation of an art or not -

allowed me to do

something with film.

Huh! And you can say, what! For me?

Film for me? Thanks a lot!

Every time you turn around

it costs you a fortune,

it'll destroy your whole

life, you know, you can't...

Press the button but once and

you've spent fifty dollars, you know.

But anyway, that was the

gift that was given to me,

and so long as I remain true

to that and the other arts

(and I've always been very careful

therefore to do so, to be so),

I could be a filmmaker.

It is made with my

fingernails, with my spit.

"This is the spit of

the poet!", you know.

The spit of the filmmaker, as I

won't fancy myself as a poet, nope.

The spit of the filmmaker!

And it's made from

the nails themselves,

feeling, pressing,

making an impress

of whatever feelings there are

to them in space and shape and so.

So thus maybe a little film is

being born, maybe not, who knows.

But I'm trying, I'm trying.

I'm trying from this

sickbed to sing a song.

I miss Stan.

We had real serious shadow hunger,

and we were looking for

a movie to grab onto.

One time we walked into this theater

that was showing Green Mansions,

'cause maybe something might

be happening with that movie.

And it ended up with us trying to find

just something to have an experience.

Like looking at the film - it was

a color film, a big color film -

so if somebody was sitting and had some

gap between their arm and their body,

you might want to look at

the film through the gap,

so it would have this

shape, or upside-down.

And we ended up with our heads against

the screen looking up at it like this,

and an usher came and very politely

told us that we would have to leave.

But it was out of desperation.

The film industry was even less

receptive than the galleries.

Finally the filmmakers got together

and took matters into their own hands.

Led by the Mekas brothers,

they set up their own distribution

cooperatives and networks and cinematheques,

and these are still active today.

Nobody wanted to

distribute our films.

So we had to create our

own distribution center.

Possible, not possible,

there was nobody who wanted to

distribute them to begin with.

How did everyone know everybody

else to get together at first?

I called them, my brother, myself,

we called them in January '62,

said it's time that we create our own

film cooperative distribution center.

And about 25 filmmakers,

or about 20 or so,

came and we all

said yes let's do it,

and we created our own

distribution center.

OK, you're visiting the New American

Cinema Group, the filmmakers' coop,

founded in 1961 by a group

of 22 New York artists.

The coop was founded as

part of the counterculture.

It wasn't just isolated

New York Film Coop.

It was part of a movement,

like Free Cinema in England,

or the French New Wave.

And the manifesto is that

it's a personal vision.

It's:
anyone can make a movie; you

can make a movie for fifty dollars.

So what they did is formed a network of

distribution, exhibition, publication.

With money generated

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