Interviewing the Interviewer:
Scott MacDonald’s Critical Cinema

By Michael Sicinski

Earlier this year, the University of California Press issued A Critical Cinema 5, Scott MacDonald’s latest volume of interviews with experimental filmmakers. Over time it has become clear that MacDonald’s series, in its own unique way, is as much of an institution as Canyon Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, or the scholarship of P. Adams Sitney—a cornerstone in the struggle to preserve the achievements of experimental media-makers for future generations, as well as argument on behalf of their centrality to cinema history. Over the course of five volumes and 82 interviews, MacDonald has accumulated the thoughts, opinions, political broadsides, and aesthetic salvos of figures cutting a wide swath across the world of the avant-garde. Many of MacDonald’s interviewees have long been established as giants in the field (Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, and the late Hollis Frampton); some have seen their achievements more fully recognized in the intervening years (James Benning, Morgan Fisher, Peter Hutton, George Kuchar, Robert Nelson). Some represent a later generation of filmmakers building on and in some cases refuting the strategies of earlier group (Martin Arnold, Craig Baldwin, Su Friedrich, Rose Lowder); others are older makers who remain ripe for rediscovery (Robert Huot, Taka Iimura, Raphael Montañez Ortiz), and still others have produced work that has received but a fraction of the attention it deserves. (The disquietingly personal diary films of Anne Robertson and the patient, observational Hindi cinema of Mani Kaul come to mind.)

In the introduction, MacDonald intimates that ACC5 may well be the final volume in the Critical Cinema cycle. If this is the case, he is ending on a high note—the new collection is book-ended by extensive dialogues with two of the undisputed masters of avant-garde cinema. The first is Kenneth Anger, who reflects on his own work and the “underground cinema” movement with lucidity and candour. The final interview is with Ernie Gehr, a subject MacDonald has by his own admission been pursuing for nearly three decades. Gehr has sometimes been known for abjuring detailed artist’s statements for fear of clouding his audience’s reception of his work, but MacDonald’s questions elicit appropriately crafted insights from this most rigorous of filmmakers. These interviews, along with ACC4’s multi-stage discussion with the late Stan Brakhage, stand among the series’ finest achievements. In light of the possible conclusion of the Critical Cinema series, this seemed like a good time to turn the tables a bit and interview the interviewer.

CINEMA SCOPE: You’ve indicated that A Critical Cinema 5 may be the last book in the cycle. Why do you think this new book might be a stopping place?

SCOTT MACDONALD: Well, I don’t know for sure that it’ll be a stopping place. I started working on avant-garde film because there seemed to be very little information about the field in general. I was drawn to film but had little knowledge of film history and knew nothing at all about the avant-garde films I was seeing. I lived here [in Central New York]. Frampton at the time lived about 20 miles that way [in Eaton, New York], Bob Huot was 30 miles down the road from here [in New Berlin], Gottheim and Jacobs were 90 miles south [in Binghamton], so there was a lot going on in this area. The Critical Cinema interviews didn’t begin as a great big project, but as something I could do that would teach me something about these films. I just started to interview the filmmakers who scared me, who lived close by. “Scared me,” meaning I was intrigued by their films but knew I didn’t understand them. I wanted to talk to the filmmakers, not because I thought that the things they would say about the films would be the ultimate truth about the work, but because I figured that what they would say would help me start to understand the material. It was an attempt to do a service for a field that seemed to need that service, but at the same time it was a very exciting form of self-education.

I might stop at Critical Cinema 5 for a number of reasons. It’s not that there aren’t people that I’m still interested in interviewing (in fact, I’ve recorded conversations with Clive Holden and David Gatten), although I have to say that a lot of the people that I’m most interested in working with at this point don’t need me to interview them. I’m very interested in Kiarostami, Tom Tykwer, Todd Haynes, and Béla Tarr. Actually, I did try to interview Tarr for A Critical Cinema 5, but the language barrier was too substantial.

Also, while I’m not creating “The Essential Cinema” in these interview books, I am suggesting what my canon is. And while anyone’s canon is open-ended, I don’t want to suggest that it’s open-ended in the sense that sooner or later, I’d get to everybody. There are people who I’ve not interviewed that I should’ve interviewed—I look back and think, “Oh, you idiot,” for not dealing with Jack Smith, Harry Smith, Shirley Clarke, Paul Sharits. But I’ve also chosen not to interview a good many filmmakers because I don’t feel committed to their work. I’m wondering what else I might do to serve the field; can I do something more useful than the interviews? Another issue for me is, do I want to go into other areas—nature film, for example? So, it’s just a moment where five volumes seems a good place to stop. We’ll see.

SCOPE: In the trajectory from ACC1 to ACC5, you’ve sometimes included individuals whose work, in an objective, institutional way, is more aligned with 35mm international art cinema than with 8 and 16mm, small-gauge co-op experimentalism. In terms of the personal canon the series builds, your work draws connections between filmmakers, and asks readers to think about connections between them—say, Kiarostami and Benning. A lot of the institutions that support cinema—repertory theatres, festivals, magazines, academic journals—tend to keep those figures apart.

MACDONALD: Although lately Benning and Kiarostami is a connection that I’ve heard more than once. It’s a connection I’m thinking of writing about. The whole idea of place is interesting in the work of both filmmakers. But you’re right, I’ve always tried in these books to include filmmakers and films that you wouldn’t automatically expect to see in a book about avant-garde film. I think one of the weaknesses of the fifth book is that it doesn’t include enough of those figures who don’t seem at first to belong, but in fact do belong. I wanted very badly to interview Todd Haynes for that book, because he came out of experimental cinema and does amazing things with narrative features. The first book had John Waters. The second book had Godfrey Reggio and Peter Watkins, the third book had Sally Potter. A Critical Cinema 4 included Chuck Workman. The experimental filmmaker who becomes a commercial filmmaker and still reveals his/her earlier history—that’s an interesting dimension of the field. On the other hand, I have no interest in fighting for access to people. If some filmmakers get so big that there’s a line-up of people who want to interview them, what’s the point of my interviewing them?

Anyway, another issue that connects filmmakers from different segments of the film world is that the definitions of documentary and avant-garde film are no longer discrete. Avant-garde film doesn’t always include documentary, but “documentary” includes avant-garde film now. For instance, is Peter Hutton a documentarian or is he an avant-garde filmmaker? Well, at least both, in some sense. I think the interest in landscape and place over the last ten years in a lot of fields has broken down those genre borders.

SCOPE: One never necessarily knew for sure exactly what “avant-garde film” was, but certain definitions that may have obtained around the time ACC 1 and 2 came out have been problematized. There’s more hybridity with respect to film and video, for instance. But also in ACC4 and 5, you’ve dealt with certain figures whose institutional home is more the art and gallery world—Shirin Neshat, Sharon Lockhart, even Matthias Müller works between the film and gallery worlds. If you look at the films themselves, those connections make perfect sense. But I think we know that in terms of economics, there’s a segment of the avant-garde community that thinks, this is well-funded, this is institutionally not “us.” And from there, the next logical step is Matthew Barney.

MACDONALD: That’s right. Matthew Barney complicates things. I hate the films of his I’ve seen, but some of what I say about Barney is pretty much what people say about the filmmakers I write about when they hate them. I’m not sure whether it’s exactly the work I hate or the valuation of this work in comparison to everything else. Barney can take over the Guggenheim for a season, and have the entire museum for his film work (which mostly seems to me to be a pretentious rehash of the surrealist and visionary work of Kenneth Anger and others) when this whole film world that I write about is still so incredibly under-rewarded! The Museum of Modern Art could sell one painting, one Pollock, and endow its entire film collection and circulating film program, which seems very precarious right now, for decades.

I wanted to talk to Sharon Lockhart about the money issue, because it’s an interesting dimension of her career. I think she’s a very good filmmaker, and her roots are totally avant garde—Morgan Fisher and James Benning…But she seems to feel very conflicted about her status as a successful photographer who also makes avant-garde film. I wanted to talk to her about that because it seems to me that more filmmakers ought to know how to do what she does.

SCOPE: Right. It could be a new model for other filmmakers’ future productions.

MACDONALD: Exactly. Sharon doesn’t feel particularly secure in her position, in the way nobody ever does when they’re on that up-trajectory in their profession. What you’ve achieved never seems quite enough and you never quite feel secure. Established filmmakers look around and see that someone like Neshat, on the basis of an interesting but relatively small body of work, has a considerable reputation. They think, “I, on the basis of this large body of work, have this small reputation.” It doesn’t make any sense. For decades filmmakers have wondered how you make a decent living from avant-garde filmmaking, enough to keep your filmmaking possible, in a way that doesn’t co-opt you. Lockhart, who comes from a working-class background, has found a way.

SCOPE: Obviously with certain kinds of inclusion in the later collections, we can see that definitions of experimental film have gone in different directions over the course of this history. But it seems like in certain ways this was implicit in the earlier volumes, too.

MACDONALD: I’ve always seen the books as montages. Interviews should collide with each other, create a discourse. And each book should have a meaningful shape. Sometimes I’ve been cute, maybe too cute, like in the second book, with this little three-short-interview section with Anne Severson, Laura Mulvey, and Yvonne Rainer. At that point it seemed to me that feminist theory was the big issue, so I wanted to structure the book so that the “climax” was this “sexy” little montage that included shots from Anne Severson’s film. [Severson’s 1972 film Near the Big Chakra consists entirely of close-ups of vulvas.] I’ve always thought about the books as “works,” though as the years have gone by I’ve gotten more pretentious about what I’m doing with the series. Critical Cinema has seemed, more and more, to have its own life and its own coherence.

I started to take my work on avant-garde film more seriously at about the time that Jim Hoberman and Fred Camper wrote those essays about the end of the avant-garde, because I couldn’t understand how you could possibly think it’s over; recent decades have been remarkably productive. One of the things I was very conscious about early on was that each Critical Cinema book should be bigger than the previous one: I mean physically larger, thicker, literally. I had in mind a kind of anti-entropy metaphor that might suggest that this is an expanding field. ACC4 and 5 were supposed to be one really huge book. It didn’t work—the manuscript was too big—but the fact that the two books came out within a year of each other works, I hope, in a similar way. It should suggest that this amazing field just continues to open out. At the same time, while “A” Critical Cinema is a conscious response to “The” Essential Cinema, I do believe in canonizing. Life’s too short.

SCOPE: I don’t know if this was a conscious attempt in ACC4 and 5 to think through that canon issue, but it was really in the Abigail Child interview in 4 and the Peggy Ahwesh interview in 5 that I got the sense more than anywhere else in the collection that you took it upon yourself to grapple with films and filmmakers about whom you were deeply ambivalent.

MACDONALD: It’s very complicated, and it’s been part of all the books. I think P. Adams Sitney suspects that I’m too politically correct, that I do things to please what the academic establishment accepts at a given moment. I’m not conscious that I do that, but for example when I interviewed Vivienne Dick in volume one, I interviewed her because I was interested in her position on the scene. I was interested in this No Wave punk thing. I mean, I admired Beth B and Scott B’s films, those I found interesting and powerful. Vivienne’s films were much less clear to me, and yet I could see that lots of people took her more seriously than the Bs, and that she was important in relationship to this movement. So I thought, okay, I’ll do the interview and see if I can come to understand her work better.

Same thing with Peggy. She’s an important figure. I have to admit I’m not sure I completely understand what she’s doing, what she thinks she’s doing; it’s something that I don’t connect with very well. It’s not that I’ve never connected with any of her work. I particularly like the vision machine (1997) and The Star Eaters (2003). I feel comfortable with the films, and I like Peggy very much. She’s a very intelligent person. I admire that she admits to all levels of influence and doesn’t denigrate some over others. I mean, Frampton, in all the time I talked to him, never seriously admitted to being influenced by anything “lower” than Ezra Pound or James Joyce or Gertrude Stein or Bach—except perhaps commercial radio when he was a kid. His were all very classic-figure kind of influences, whereas Peggy’s influenced by horror film and porn and pop music and Charles Ives and Jack Smith, and is interested in thinking about all these influences. I totally relate to this. So in many ways I feel simpatico with her, but, yes, I did the interview because I felt I needed to grapple with my resistance to the films.

Abigail Child…I’d always been on the verge of doing an interview with her. It was the same with Sally Potter. There was stuff by Potter that I hated enough, and hated for so long, that I realized I couldn’t get rid of it. So I had to accept it, get interested in it; one way or another it seemed to mean a good bit to me, whether I liked it or not. This was also true for me with Yvonne Rainer. I told her once I used to drive around in the car practicing the statement, “Yvonne Rainer is the most overrated filmmaker in American history.” I tried interviewing her for the first Critical Cinema, and it was a disaster. I could see Rainer was important to everyone else, but I couldn’t figure out what the films were. I thought, “Okay, I’ll interview her, and maybe they’ll get clearer to me.”

SCOPE: They’re strange films, and what always struck me as strange about them is that they make sense within the Godard/Kluge framework. But the fact that the extremely formalist wing of the avant garde, people like Frampton, were seeing aspects of their own practice reflected and worked through in Rainer’s films was hard for me to grasp.

MACDONALD: Yeah, I think she always felt a little weird about that herself. As far as I can tell, Rainer never felt much connection to structural film or to personal film, the two schools battling for preeminence when she was moving into film. She was just in another place. You’re right, she’s much more Godard than she is Brakhage or Frampton. I think Frampton admired her because he realized this was something completely new, and he didn’t know what to do with it. It was a form of feminism that was shaking him and was interesting him.

So anyway, I did this interview, and went through the process I always do—transcribing it, editing it for months, and then I finally sent Rainer a version. I didn’t hear anything from her for a long while, which was a little unusual, but I didn’t want to pester her. Finally, after about three months, I called her up and said, “Did you get the interview?” “Yes, I got it.” “So how did you find it?” and she says—this I can remember verbatim; it’s tattooed on my soul—”I found it singularly boring and redundant.”

So I never did anything further with that first interview, except feel embarrassed about my stupidity. Rainer was right, of course. I didn’t know what to ask that could open the films. I didn’t get that you could have a character speak a text written by somebody else, and that as viewers, we’re supposed to recognize that this is a person speaking this other text, and know what that text is, ideally—and that this could be a statement about how we’re all creatures of the texts we read and that others read, that we’re all saying many of the same things at the same time. It’s a way of dealing with the issue of community. All of that seems so obvious to me now, but I didn’t get it at the time. Then, years later, when Privilege (1990) came out and I saw it, and because Pat [O’Connor, MacDonald’s wife] had just been through menopause, it was like, jeez, that film’s pretty clear! [Cultural attitudes toward menopause, versus women’s embodied experience of it, are a major theme in Rainer’s film.] Watching Privilege, I suddenly understood not just Privilege but the whole body of Rainer’s work.

I called Rainer and we made plans to do an interview on Privilege for A Critical Cinema 2. During the taping, she gave me an incredible gift. We get to the end of our conversation and I decide to ask one last question. There’s a visual text in Privilege that ends: “Now that I did not appear to be looking for a man, the state of my desires seemed of no interest to anyone.” During my preparation for this recording session I thought, “She wants to be asked!” So I said, “One last question. What is the state of your desires?” She says, “I’ve become a lesbian.” Now, Yvonne was one of the first people on the scene at that time to decide to be a lesbian, both because I assume she’d recognized a desire she hadn’t credited before, and also because politically, it made more sense to desire that way. I remember thinking “Oh my God, I may be the only person in Manhattan right now other than her partner who knows she’s a lesbian!” I was staying with Su Friedrich at the time, and I ran up to Su’s office after the interview. I said, “I have a surprise for you!” I played that portion of the tape, and Su was screaming.

So, yes, to get back to your original question, sometimes there are figures that enough people admire for reasons that seem pretty legit that even if I don’t get it, I feel I’m obliged to deal with the work. I can’t not deal with it anymore. At the same time, I have to really want to look at the work with the kind of care an extensive interview requires. A couple of summers ago, at the Flaherty Seminar, a friend of Phil Solomon’s came up to me and said, “Phil Solomon wants to know why you don’t interview him.” (And I’m a smartass. I answered, “Ask Phil Solomon why he doesn’t make a film about me.”) A few years later, I remember thinking, “What am I going to study this summer? I think Phil Solomon would be a pleasure.” At that moment, the idea of looking at all of Phil’s films sounded exciting, and that’s absolutely crucial for me. I have to want to look at all the work and in detail, carefully. I would never interview somebody whose work I didn’t want to look at just because somebody else thinks it’s important.

SCOPE: And yet sometimes, like the Ahwesh material, a desire wells up to go back and look at work you’re not completely convinced about.

MACDONALD: Yeah. Sometimes avant-garde work is like this poisoned dart in your ass, and finally you’re infected by it and you just have to deal with it. That was true with early Sally Potter, that was true with Rainer at first, and it was true with Ahwesh. I think Ahwesh suspects that it’s because I’m a man, and it’s a male/female problem.

SCOPE: But then again, if there’s a way to group these filmmakers, it’s not just that they’re women. They were all working on the problem of feminism in this very textual, semiotic way. Child is like that too.

MACDONALD: Right. Which maybe, being a man, I didn’t understand. Or maybe it took me longer as a man to get it. I mean, when Peggy said it, I thought, “No, no,” just like every guy always does. He always thinks, “Oh no, I don’t have that problem.” But who knows. I do look very carefully to include women in the collections. I still think there are fewer interesting women filmmakers than male filmmakers. I wish it weren’t true. But it’s harder to find women I’m excited about as filmmakers. Of course, the entire field of avant-garde film, not just the films of these particular filmmakers, was at first that “poisoned dart” and it took me awhile to come to terms with it.

But this relates back to the canonizing issue. Sometimes you see films and they’re just important to you. For example, Peter Hutton’s films have become tremendously important to me on every possible level. I love to watch them, I think about them, and as I look at my world I see my world through them. But then there are also films and filmmakers that are important for my teaching. I finally decided to interview Tony Conrad, for several reasons, especially because I was interested in asking him questions about The Flicker (1966), one of those films I can’t teach without. Same thing with Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973). I’ve always thought of these films as particularly at home in the classroom, in the same way that poetry and serious literature has been for several generations. For me, academe (and only academe) is the place where the work happens, where you can do something with the work in terms of audience.

SCOPE: That’s a very encouraging assertion. I always worry that for viewers, students especially, the negative institutional associations of the academy will rub off on these beautiful films—that you bring the films into a classroom and everything from last week’s math test to the uncomfortable seating will prevent people from engaging with them as a cinematic experience.

MACDONALD: I’m of the generation that grew up right after WWII. I’m not a Boomer; I’m slightly older than the Baby-Boomers, and I was the first person in my family to go to college. For me, college was a life-changing release into a bigger world, a world in which the arts and the people who cared about them earned respect. As a result, the argument that academe does damage to artworks has always been untenable to me. I’d never have experienced Faulkner, Stein, Brakhage, Frampton, or Friedrich had it not been for academe. Academe can and should support avant-garde film, should support it far more thoroughly than it does at the moment. Once the best work has found a place in academe, it’s virtually academic-proof.

SCOPE: One final question. The Critical Cinema series has documented your journey through a segment of the film world that is often thought of as existing on the margins or as the radical fringe. If our culture considers Ozu marginal, for example, and figures like Straub/Huillet even more so, then where does that place Ernie Gehr, or Luther Price for that matter? But from within that fringe, there has occasionally been an assertion of centrality—Nathaniel Dorsky says this explicitly in your interview with him, and over the years Jonas Mekas has repeatedly said, “We are the cinema.” So what do you hope to leave behind for the cinema? What do you hope to have accomplished with the series?

MACDONALD: Well, I’ve never thought of the filmmakers I interview or their films as “marginal,” or “on the fringes of cinema.” Normally, these terms are referring, I guess, to economics. But we don’t use this kind of economic distinction with any other art form. Dickinson, Whitman, and Thoreau were far from the most economically successful writers of the 19th century in this country, but would anyone now call them “marginal”? The filmmakers I interview are as central to the history of cinematic exploration and accomplishment as are Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Kiarostami, Ozu, Herzog, whomever you want to mention. Dorsky is right. And even the canonical histories of cinema are, more and more, recognizing this. Besides, don’t most new approaches to any art form seem on the margins at first?

What do I want to accomplish with the Critical Cinema books? I’m going to really date myself here, but for a long time I’ve lived with a fantasy that evolved from my own experiences as a graduate student in the ‘60s. I see a young scholar in a large research library, cruising the stacks (see how out-of-date I am?). The scholar has found herself in the aisle where all the film books are shelved. Like most people, she is interested in film, and as she walks along the aisle, she notices a set of books all with the series title A Critical Cinema. Like any scholar, she recognizes that signal cultural achievements are usually the subject of not just many book-length studies, but of sets of books: the Olmsted papers, Goethe’s writings, etc. And when she sees this set of Critical Cinema books, she stops for a moment, wondering what “critical cinema” might be. She opens one of the books and finds that she knows very few of the names, and thinks to herself, “Ah, film seems to be a bigger field than I realized!”

Privilege

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