In the 1980s, I imagined a series of films, one section of which would examine sexuality. I had just read Sade's texts (in the then new Grove Press edition) and was excited by the pyramidal structure of the writings. By 1986, I was ready to begin the Sadean section of Is This What You Were Born For? I used the film as an opportunity to explore Noir lighting and to reshoot Noir from a feminist, anarchist position. I had multiple heroines, impossible plots, and organized the “scenario” around the sound tracks from Mexican cable television soap operas, abetted with recordings of my own and, ultimately, a session with four downtown musicians: Shelley Hirsch, Christian Marclay, Charles Noyes, and Zeena Parkins. The work explored the film gaze, then the obsessive subject of theorists, pushing at the boundaries or contradictions of the contemporary discussion. When shown, the film caused much dissension, attention, riots (even).

A delicate and humorous narrative commissioned by the English Post Office. Both inventive and strange, the film uses music as a basis for romance. The film stuck with me over time and is asymptotically reflected in the following two works.

Saw this in college, in a first film class. Obviously influential even if I hadn’t realized it for a while. All of Lipsett’s work is worth reviewing, his sound conjunctions to image brilliant and his images themselves, literally found on the cutting room floor – poetic detritus of our culture’s effluvia.

I saw this at Anthology in the 1970s and liked it best of the Menken films I saw at that time. Only later, when Scott MacDonald asked its influence on me, did I think again of her work and how it affected mine. In its speed, fragmentation, and diary-like recapturing of the daily, in its humor and lack of pretension – I had found an ally.

An early exploration of structure and linkages. I begin to look for the difference between shots. For every time I could turn a corner – I was interested in how far I could go to have things not match up, but have them still fit together. So it became corners of linkages rather than surface that Brakhage focuses on. So I started by matching, not texture exactly, but contrasting color and shape: a circle to a circle, in a totally different space. It became this vortex, a submerged narrative.

Sonbert was colleague and friend, arch, prolific (particularly when diagnosed with HIV), a companion for movies and the opera he loved. We talked of montage intensely and what I admired of his work was not only its richness of color, but its interlocking structure and the way political concerns began to increasingly appear in the works. I myself had trouble with the “merely beautiful” and always felt the need in montage to go deeper into the culture – how things mean and affect us as citizens – stemming from my college studies in ethnography or perhaps just coming through the 60s. With Short Fuse, we see Warren approaching these worlds.