Alfred Guzzetti Progam I introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Alfred Guzzetti.

Transcript

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Alfred Guzzetti - Progam One with introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Alfred Guzzetti. Sunday March 26, 2016.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

March 26 2016, the Harvard Film Archive screened Program One of Short Films by Alfred Guzzetti. Films included A Tropical Story, The Tower of industrial life, Calcutta Intersection, Still Point and Time Present. This is the audio recording of the introduction by Haden Guest and Alfred Guzzetti, followed by intermittent introductions by Alfred Guzzetti, and then a post-screening Q&A and discussion.

Haden Guest  0:35  

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest, I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce tonight's program, which is the second in a series of programs dedicated to the work of Alfred Guzzetti. Guzzetti, a filmmaker, a video maker and installation artist, whose career has traced a quite, I think, extraordinary trajectory. Alfred Guzzetti is also I say, with no little pride, a professor in the department—in which I teach as well—as the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. More than just a senior faculty in VES, he's really a foundational figure, a cornerstone, to this very, let's say, different department, a department that has given a very important place of prominence to cinema, to the moving image—an open and expanded idea of cinema, of the moving image—that I think is reflected and expressed profoundly in Alfred's own work. This is showcased in tonight's program, which brings together a group of video work from the late 90s, up until just a few years ago. And it's work that really needs to be seen and discussed in the presence of Mr. Guzzetti himself. So I'm really pleased that we have this occasion here tonight. The films will be presented structured with two pauses during which Alfred will offer a few words and then we will be returning at the end for a Q&A session. So please stick around. Please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have on you. Please refrain from using them. And please join me now in welcoming Alfred Guzzetti!

[APPLAUSE]

Alfred Guzzetti  2:50  

So thanks, Haden, and thanks to the Harvard Film Archive for doing all the enormous amount of work that goes into something like this. It's been done very carefully, beautifully, and I'm very happy about it. And thank you all for coming. I'm going to be brief at the beginning here…

When people ask me what I do, I say I'm a filmmaker. And then inevitably, the next question is, “What kind of films do you make?” And here I screw up my courage and say, “Documentaries and experimental films.” It's a lame answer. And I know it, and I've never been able to think of a better one—at least to be able to say in three words to people who are heading for the cheese table at a party, or I don't want to detain them. Why documentary and experimental films? What is an “experimental film”? It means practically nothing, the phrase. But I would like to say just a couple of things about this. In what I have done in my own films and videos, there is a deeper link between the documentary and my versions of experimental films. For one thing, the experimental films use only documentary materials, so to speak. There's nothing in the image or in the sound that's really transformed. It's material that could be in a context that is a documentary context. And that's not the practice in all experimental film. So the experimental films are really a kind of experimental documentary, and in my versions of things, the two of them have a kind of kinship. And we can talk about this later, where it will make more sense, but the one thing I would say is that I've always been interested in the documentary and the limits of the documentary as a form and as a set of conventions. And I'm also interested in the broad swaths of human experience that lie beyond the boundaries of the documentary and that film could address—but not address successfullly or comfortably—by respecting those conventional boundaries.

So tonight's program is made up of what could fairly be called “experimental” films. There’s six of them. And because the films are demanding and dense, I'm glad that Haden has agreed that the way to present them is to show two of them, and then take a pause for a moment for me to say something. It isn’t that I have anything very urgent to say, it's more that I think all of you, including me, need a moment of breathing room so as not to be buried under the onslaught of six difficult films in a row. They’re not all equally difficult.

I should say one thing... that the earlier films, say the first four, were really conceived not to be projected. And they've had to be projected, because that's the coin of the realm in the world many, many times. But they were really composed to be seen on a monitor in a small situation. And we can talk about that later. The projection here is wonderful; I've never seen them look so good, but the conception behind them isn't of a great scale. In the case of the last two videos, they were conceived to be projected, and I think that their aesthetic procedures are rather different accordingly. The first video tonight was made and finished in 1998. It's called A Tropical Story, and it's been followed by The Tower of Industrial Life, which was made and finished in 2000.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  7:04  

And now, Alfred Guzzetti.

Alfred Guzzetti  7:08  

Here with Haden's permission, I've added a videotape to the program. So it's not on the printed program. It's eight minutes and forty seconds long, and it's called Down From the Mountains. And by way of accounting for this transition…. After a number of these pieces that use many things, including a lot of language, I decided to try to make a piece that didn't depend on language at all, but just on the images and sounds. And in which the image was more composed, and more interfered with than I had done before. So this was finished in 2000. And I think Down From the Mountains is 2003.

Afterwards, the next piece—which we’ll show together—is called Calcutta Intersection. And it really is a picture of a Calcutta intersection. And it's the opposite extreme. The entire ten-minute video is a single shot, and the rest of it I needn’t describe. But it comes out of a very concrete situation. Deborah and I were staying at the American Institute for Indian Studies, and this in Calcutta. And this was shot from the balcony. It was an intersection I looked at all the time, especially during certain times of day when it was very busy. And the newspaper excerpts and headlines that form part of the film are all taken from the day in which the film was shot. So I chose the day, chose the time of day, and after I shot the film—or maybe before—I went to the local newsstand and bought all of the Indian newspapers for that day, which there are many. I bought ones, primarily in English, but I also bought ones in Hindi and Bengali, and that's where the material comes from. And the soundtrack, as you’ll see, is very, very simple. So it goes to the opposite extreme of Down From the Mountains. So let's look at those two now.

Oh, I should mention one thing. You didn't see the main title, there was an error in the projection of The Tower of Industrial Life. Before you see the lake at night, which is the first image that you saw—it is the first image of the film—there is a main title which gives the title of the film only: The Tower of industrial life.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  9:58  

Now Alfred Guzzetti

Alfred Guzzetti  10:03  

I came to the moving image as a filmmaker and I worked in 16 millimeter film for many years. And I was aware of video and I always regarded video an inferior substitute for film; I was not interested in it. My two partners, Dick Rogers and Susan Meiselas went to Israel for a visit. And Dick bought a high-8 camera and brought back stuff from Israel in high-8 and showed it to me on a good Sony production monitor. And I was interested, most of all, in the color palette. Those of you who have seen high-8 know that it's a non-saturated palette. It had its own look; it was its own color space. So I bought a camera. I bought the same camera, of course. And I worked with that for some years until digital came along. And what you're seeing here is the period when as soon as digital came, I think probably A Tropical Story was the second video that I made with digital. And what I tried to do was to be interested in what video could do that film couldn't do. For example, good sound. (16 millimeter film, I mean.) Stereo sound, and the great lightness of the camera meant that you could have a small Steadicam and move it around smoothly through space. And I tried to take advantage of the things that one could do easily in video, and could do only with great difficulty in films such as combining one image with another, dividing the image and things like that. What I was trying to do mostly was to compensate for what I felt to be a tremendous deficiency—the main deficiency of video—which was that the resolution was poor, the rendition of colors wasn't great. The colors didn't really stay inside their boundaries, the saturated colors leaked out to infect neighboring colors. And I longed for high-definition which was then known and in the works, but it was a big deal. It took very big cameras. And in 2005, the first high-definition small cameras came out. And I was first in line at the store. I'm usually not an early adopter, but I had been waiting for this for years. Because I wanted to be able to not be as confined as I was by the video medium. I continued to work in film a bit. And the next piece is the first one that I made with high-definition. And I went back to, I think, what is a dream over the decades of many, many filmmakers, which is to make a film which is pure cinema—that doesn't rely on anything else—that doesn't rely on a narration, doesn't rely on things that happened, but is composed in time in the same way a musical composition is composed in time. And it's an idea that's haunted me and I've tried it in various incarnations. This turned out to be extremely difficult. I thought of the precedents of lots of Americans still photography and this piece—called Still Point—has a kinship with still photography, as you’ll see. The text in the program says that there's still images. They are still images in the sense the camera doesn't move, but they’re motion picture images; they take place in time. So now the technology gave me the opportunity to really try this. And it turned out unexpectedly to be a difficult thing. And a very long project—for me, a very long project; it's only fifteen minutes long. I started in 2005 and I worked at it and didn't really get the composition of it finished until 2008 and then tweaked it a bit in 2009 so this is Still Point and then I don't think I need to say anything about the last piece. It was also finished in 2013 and it's also in high-definition video. You have to pull a magic string...

John Quackenbush 14:36  

And now Haden Guest.

Haden Guest  14:39  

Please join me in welcoming back Alfred Guzzetti!

[APPLAUSE]

Well, Alfred, I thought I'd begin with a few questions from here and then we'll hand out microphones to those of you with questions or comments.

Thank you so much for this really rewarding program. And I think this series of films is a really remarkable showcase for the ways in which…. You spoke about your films as testing the boundaries of what is a documentary, and I feel like within these films, we see you testing the possibilities of the image to document a time and place or the imagination of a time and place. And I think one of the great things is a slippage in perspective where we're not sure at times. There’s a sense of a dream or reverie… And we also see in this set of films the ways in which you've explored different kinds of montage. And that's maybe what I wanted to start with asking about a montage. And if you could help us, perhaps, to understand some of the principles or ideas that guide the montage in your films. Here we can see this as a roughly chronological program. We can see you moving from the more rapid montage in the two early films to this kind of meditative deceleration of the image and the montage and in these last films, to then, of course, Calcutta Intersection where it's the single shot. So maybe let's start by speaking about montage and the kinds of strategies and structures that guide you in editing your films.

Alfred Guzzetti  16:43  

Since maybe not everybody in the audience is a film aficionado, should I say what montage is?

Haden Guest  16:52  

Please do.

Alfred Guzzetti 

It's the production of meaning through the juxtaposition and conflict of elements. It's an aesthetic that can be applied to anything but the Russian filmmakers applied it very vigorously to film, so whatever the elements are—one shot and another shot, image versus sound, one element in the image versus another element in the image, light versus dark, diagonal versus straight, or things like that. But in the ordinary usage of montage, it's just the French word for editing, for putting things together, assembling things.

The cutting is much more rapid in the earlier films, and one thing I was responding to, because I think, when I've worked in 16 millimeter, I didn't necessarily cut rapidly; there was one possibility, among others. And I felt because you could see only a limited amount in a video image if you really stared at it. It didn't yield detail, it was a low-resolution image. And then I tried to compensate for that by making the relationship between images count for more and move it along. And I welcomed the opportunity. I welcomed my experience with film all my life, and I also welcomed the opportunities that high-definition afforded me. So I didn't feel that urgency. I felt that if I wanted to have a long take, I could, because the things that one was supposed to see, you could see in the film, and I didn't feel uncomfortable about it.

There's a wisecrack that British engineers always made about NTSC—which is our television system here: standard definition—and the European system was somewhat higher resolution. And they felt that American editors cut more rapidly because you simply couldn't see enough, especially in long shots. Long shots are, you know, made from a distance. So when I got high-definition, I thought, well, here's the opportunity not only to have long takes but to have long shots where you could have pictures of landscape and not feel like I'm not seeing it. So that's one element in it.

And then the other things that come along with it, are a view of the world... a chaotic, cacophonous view of the world in A Tropical Story and The Tower of Industrial Life. What I was feeling and thinking at those times, I'm sure that that's all part of it. The Tower of Industrial Life was finished just before 9/11, and then, you know, somebody wanted to do a very prominent showing in New York of The Tower of Industrial Life. And I said, “I don’t know.” There’s a key section in which there's this dream of an airplane falling from the sky and rushing to see what had happened. It didn't seem like the moment, but it seemed at least one time in my life, I sort of crossed paths with what was happening in the world. I’m not sure that's an adequate answer.

Haden Guest  20:33  

Well, I mean, I'm really interested in this idea of your films as personal films. As we watch your films, we start to recognize certain topi, certain places that you're drawn to: traffic, the ocean, the woods. And I was wondering if you could speak to this in a sense, because these films offer different constellations of these places that create related but at the same time, I think, quite distinct moods from this maybe more dispassionate humor, say, of Calcutta Intersection to this sense of something more ominous in these later films. How do you deal with both this kind of map that you have, and at the same time, this desire to go different places from the same or similar or related places?

Alfred Guzzetti  21:40  

I've thought about that a lot. I certainly have an image vocabulary that I've come back to. There have been times when I've said to myself, “I will swear-off people in cars.” [LAUGHTER] And things like that. I don't really know why those particular images or why those particular categories of images seem to belong in my vocabulary. I'm not certain about that. But I do know that they're polyvalent enough, so they can enter into relationships with other things, and I can try to figure out both what they are—which I'm never certain about. But I think you can find painters and poets who use the same thing, recur to the same images, the same ideas, and try to get them in different configurations. The feeling I have is trying to get it right, or trying to revisit it, but also trying to understand what it is those things are telling me. So it's not only that I speak in certain images, it's that I attend to certain images in which the world is speaking to me. and I try to understand what that is by using motion pictures. Maybe it would clarify things if I said that at the beginning of any one of these pieces—and to some extent at the beginning of the documentaries too—I haven't the faintest idea of what I'm doing, really.

I think that the name of the series is actually—I wouldn't have named it that—but I think it's actually pretty good: Point of Departure. I do start with a point of departure. And often I don't know exactly what it is that makes that germinal for me. And often, those points of departure do wind up early in the piece. So in the case of Still Point—which is one of them that you've just seen—it starts with a woods, and that particular woods was something I'd seen before. And when I saw it again—I had my camera with me—I thought that's the beginning. Now, the beginning of what? So that's actually what drives me, that's what my fascination is in making films, it’s the beginning of What is this telling me? And I have no idea. And one of the ways in which I explore it is to see what follows it, and I'm not certain and I make this image, make that image and then there seem to be some images that follow and then some images that clearly don't follow it. So it's a kind of exploration. It's like the old proverb: “I don't know what I mean until I see what I write.” But I am interested in the revelatory process of making a film. So I'm not shocked by the fact that when I look back, I see myself invoking similar vocabularies to explore a new understanding or a more recent understanding of the same thing. And I think if you go to the museum and look at paintings, you see painters doing that constantly. They don't feel that bad about it.

Haden Guest  25:26  

Well, let's talk a bit about language, because I think this is really also very striking: the ways in which different strategies, different ways in which language is present or absent in these films. And in the first two films, I think, there's a sense of almost a threshold almost being broken in the sense of, you know, this dream narrative in A Tropical Story. The limit to what we can read and also the tension between text and image. And then we go into the world of the news, and then also back into dreams. I was wondering if you could speak a bit about the relationship between image and language? And let's start with the first two films, for example...

Alfred Guzzetti  26:19  

Well, what interests me about the language in which the dreams are recounted is that the dreams in my consciousness interpenetrate the reality that I see. And then I search in the film for some relationship between the text and an image. I try different images, I try modifying the text and try different texts. And what interests me most are places where there is some dissonance between the image and the text in the same way that there is in the origin of the image—well, maybe not so general… You remember in A Tropical Story, there's a picture of a tree and I go to a house and then in the house, there are windows, but they don't look out at real things, they look out on pictures of real things. I think that using dreams in this way makes me think of Freud, and the way the Freud says, the immediate origin of dreams is often the day's residues, something that has happened during the day that the brain cooks up in a different fashion. And I'm not sure of the timing of that dream, but I think I know what the day's residues were. On the top floor of the Free Library of Philadelphia and Logan Circle, there is a reproduction of the study of one of the members of the Widener families. It’s the same Widener as Widener Library. They’re a wealthy Philadelphia family. My high school is next door to the Widener School, which was a charitable school for orphaned children. And this Widener gave his book collection to the Philadelphia library with the proviso that his whole library and study and his, you know, well-to-do house on the main line of Philadelphia, would be reproduced exactly, including the views out the window, so the windows are his windows, but they don't look out on central Philadelphia; they look out on paintings of what he saw when he was sitting in his study reading. So I'm sure that's what Freud would say the day's residues are, but what interested me in working with that dream is the way in which there's a thematic replacement of a view of reality by an image, and what that image is turns out to be important in the film. First of all, you know, it’s a reference that's closed to the viewer, but I know that is a landscape in a way that the window looked out on a landscape. So the window looks out on a landscape, and so the film on the film invokes that. But the landscape that it evokes is this blasted tree. And the tree in the film lives through various seasons. This is not stuff that I figured out at the beginning. As I worked with it, I figured it out. I figured I had to go back and see that tree again, and see it at a different season, and it would die, and then it would come to life. So there was something involved in making the image about death and the cycle of death and life. And there are several things there. And what I am interested in above all in this sort of experimental mode is the sense of polyvalence to things. There are connotations that go in different directions at the same time, and no one of them is definitive. So in one direction, it reminds me of the idea that Cocteau famously set in stone saying, “To see film is to see death at work,” and what he meant—I'm not sure what he meant— [LAUGHTER] —but I think that there's something true about that. And that the cycle of time, there was not in the painted picture what is invoked in that cycle of the tree coming back at different seasons. And many of the details have that kind of, you know, thinking about them.

For the language of the dream…  Dreams are much more discursive. So in my notebooks, probably that dream goes on for a very long time, and I have rewritten it and condensed it in order to sort of get to the point. Dreams don't have a point, often. They often kind of meander. So the language to me is very consciously what Freud called “secondarization.” I mean, every memory of the unconscious is an elevation, Freud said, from the primary process, which is truly incoherent, and truly without words—although Lacan thought it had the words in it, I don't know—to the level of writing, so to speak, where the writing articulates it and sets it and makes it live in our world. So it lives in our world equally with that tree, so to speak.

In that film, there aren't any newspaper headlines that I remember. There isn't anything from the newspaper, but in the next film there are. So there's an attempt on my part, to broaden out that perspective of consciousness to also install the stream that comes from the daily news of things that also one does not see before one but is there very much, is there all the time in our consciousness. And interestingly, a lot of the things are so bizarre that one reads, that they have a kind of kinship with the way that we write down dreams. And I mark that in The Tower of Industrial Life, just by using the newspaper text as is without retyping it. It comes from the newspaper, and then the dreams don't. But it takes some figuring out and I really want the audience to be in this zone of ambiguity—because I feel that's where the film comes from—of trying to find the frame to put around it to be able to say, “that's a dream,” but without dismissing it as a dream or discounting it. And to see it in relationship to these dreadful things happening on the other side of the world, which are, from our perception, dreamlike. I could go on and on about that. But it's really something like that about language, and particularly, the contradiction or—I don’t know if “contradiction” is really the right word—the incongruence of the things that is said in language with what is said in the image and what is said in the sound, either simultaneously or in contiguity. And there are a few times in films that I haven't shown tonight, where there's an outright contradiction between what is said when the thing is rehearsed more than once.

Haden Guest  34:03  

To bring in Calcutta Intersection too where, similarly, there's a kind of—I mean, you described just taking the newspapers, and there almost seemed to be sort of a process of automatic writing here where you're taking selected fragments from selected articles from selected newspapers which came to you depending on which newsstand you went to. And at the same time, I'm thinking about these films as documentaries—yet open documentaries—where you convey a sense of a time, a place, but also the sense of the imagination, a dreamlife of that place and of yourself. And I think that the ways in which the text is both literal and at the same time open, I think is one of the key motors for that rich ambiguity within the films—both of the place, and yet, somewhere else.

Alfred Guzzetti  35:02  

I think of Calcutta Intersection as very different. I think of that as really a documentary. And I know that probably that claim isn't accessible from inside the film itself, because the idea was so simple and came to me so simply. The two people who took care of the American Institute for Indian Studies was an elderly couple. They were the caretakers and the cooks. When they finished their morning work, they sat down on the balcony outside, and they read the newspapers all the time. And I watched them. And of course, they didn't read the English newspapers, they read the Bengali newspapers, but there were plenty of English newspapers. So I watched them all the time. And I thought, here is a kind of consciousness, and you can make a little documentary about these two figures. And that's what the Calcutta Intersection is. They're absent, but it's the collision of this daily exoticism, which to them is not exotic; it's completely normal. To me, it's completely exotic, starting with the fact that the car is driving on the wrong side of the road. But, I'm seeing it from the outside. So it's an outsider's view of some kind of subjective experience. It's one of the reasons there's no montage in it, because it's a unitary kind of rendition of consciousness, in my mind. But also that's not a big project. That's a project that I made in a month which is very unlike me.

Haden Guest  36:27  

I think a very, very rich one.

Let's take some questions from the audience. If you have a question or a comment, feel free to please raise your hand and we have a microphone.

Audience 1  36:41  

Hi Alfred. I'm just talking about the Calcutta film. I think it's so open-ended that my reading is absolutely completely strangely different than yours. But it's a shot in which you keep anticipating that something is going to happen, clearly that someone's going to run into somebody. There's gonna be some crash and there almost is with that terrible blue car backing up at that one moment. So it's, you know, a kind of shot you often see in movies, a setup shot for danger for melodrama, or something. And then below you have all these melodramatic things happening in the same city, [INAUDIBLE] to what might happen, but never does happen.

Alfred Guzzetti  37:28  

Including somebody getting killed by a car. No, I totally see that.

Haden Guest  37:36  

It's also a return to sort of a Lumière idea, I think, of actualité. You know, the sort of single shot and just let the world roll by.

Alfred Guzzetti  37:44  

Let the world be what it is.

Haden Guest  37:47  

Let's take the question in the very back. Yeah.

Audience 2  37:50  

Could you describe your process, especially in the montage sequences? Do you notice things just in your daily life and then decide that that's what you want to film? Or do you go out with a camera? How does that work for you?

Alfred Guzzetti  38:09  

Both things, but often I go out shopping, because I'm in the middle of something, and I think I need something like this, soo I go out looking for it. At other times, in order to get going, to sort of catalyze it, I collect a certain amount of material like in The Tower of Industrial Life. One morning—or more than one morning—I recorded all the stuff from children's cartoons on Saturday morning, so I had that fund of stuff. And, you know, I knew by using it, I would also need some other stuff that's in those montages. And in some cases, I went out with a shopping list and looked for them and shot it. So it's a combination of things. And also there's a backlog of images. So I've feel like since I shoot a lot during those periods, I have an image library that I can dip into but also influences me about what the sequence is about. But I don't have all the material before I edit. I mean, there's not a separate editing stage. You know, I start if I have a starting point. The first job is to find the point of departure. This, I think, is a very an idiosyncratic method and I would not recommend it to anybody.

[LAUGHTER]

Audience 3  39:38  

Going back to the Calcutta, I just have a quick question. How long was the original take?

Alfred Guzzetti  39:47  

Well, I did several takes and probably not a lot—probably three takes—and the takes were probably fifteen minutes long. I'm remembering now. Ten years ago. But I also watched that intersection for days and noted when the children got out of the school that was down that street, when the factory that was down this other way—it makes some kind of inexplicable iron objects—ehen the workers got out for that, when the tea wallah opened his business over here, and I picked the time– Also where—for a filmmaker, crucially—where the sun was; the most important thing of all. So I picked the time of day. And then I knew I had a certain number of days before we left Calcutta. So I went through that day, and then in that period, shot, and I did several takes, and I thought, “Well, if this is a film, now I've got it,” and went out and bought all the newspapers. If it's not a film, I won't know until I get home when it's too late to do anything about it.

Haden Guest  40:58  

It's a film that I think also speaks to... You spoke about polyvalence. I feel like your films often wear many different hats at the same time. This is a structuralist film, we could say. It's also, I think, the subtlest of ethnographic films. So there's a playfulness here that I think is a playfulness, not just in the ludic sense, but again, in this sort of movement between these different genres that I think is really striking and important.

I wanted to just ask a question about what filmmakers, what films are most important to you, could you speak about, throughout your career? I mean, I see so many. I feel like there's a rich dialogue taking place here across these films. I see the work of Godfrey Reggio coming up in these last films. I see the work of your mentor and colleague, Robert Gardner, here as well. I see some Soviet cinema. So I was wondering if you could maybe reflect a little bit upon that. I know this is a question that many filmmakers run away from, but I thought I'd put you on the spot here.

Alfred Guzzetti  42:08  

Well, the reason they run away from them, and the reason I would like to run away from them, [HADEN LAUGHS] is that I don't want to disappoint you or confound you. You know, for instance, I really hate Godfrey Reggio films. I don't hate him personally. I think he's probably a nice guy. But I don't like that at all. [LAUGHTER] And what I'm influenced by is just all the films I've seen. The most powerful influences were the films that I saw when I was much younger, in the 60s and the 70s, and especially European cinema, and you know, especially Godard. Whether that produces the kind of imagery that can be exported, and I can use, it isn't that so much. The idea is that the sound/image collision can be rich, in a way, and that montage can come alive again, in the way that the Soviets didn't imagine, because the long view of film history is that this in the silent period, the Soviets made a tremendous case for montage being the engine of meaning. And then it basically, in the mainstream cinema, got smothered and that wasn't the way meaning-making happens, even now. But montage is the way in which television made meaning and still makes meaning, especially television commercials, when things need to be sold. So I was interested in the people who had serious intentions not just to sell things, who were making cinema and making images believing that the images really count. So the filmmakers that I admire most are the ones who make the images count, and who have original relationships between the image and the sound. So those people's films, I think, don't necessarily look much like mine. It's like Bresson and Godard. And on the side of things that are more experimental, only a few experimental filmmakers strike me as being on my page. One of them is Bruce Baillie. And another one is Peter Kubelka. And those are the ones that are closest. Hollis Frampton, yes, but most of the American very subjective avant garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, I mean, I admire Stan Brakhage from a distance, but it's not me. It's not what I'm doing. Also, I feel my formation is very different from those people.

One of the points I think I have in common with Fred Wiseman is that I don't look exclusively to the cinema when I think about models in the arts, especially the art of time, I think much more about relation to the art of time about music. And music does not have clear analogies with film, in the West anyway, and even in the East. Music is made up of notes. And it's a limited vocabulary, limited world. And there's nothing like that in the cinema. If you want to say the notes are like light tones and the dark tones. Yeah, you can make the kind of analogy but as a working thing, the analogy doesn't exist in that way. But it does exist in the level of form. So that when time is organized, the only possibility is not the narrative. If you look at musical examples, there's some music that pretends to have a kind of narrative; music isn't very good about narrative. But the way the form works, and the way things are developed, things are repeated. Things are repeated with variations and then a development happens. And it goes toward a destination, or even the division of a discourse into movements, those musical models have always been much more important to me. But not all musical models. It’s just things that are close to my heart are the things that I think of and I listen to over and over again. So I think I'm not very good about answering about influences. I think you see it from afar more clearly than I do.

Haden Guest  46:51  

Other questions? Yes, right here.

Audience 4  46:57  

Actually, that was a great kind of segue to the question I was going to ask, which is about Still Point, and how you made a comment that it's like an example or attempted example on pure cinema, that you sort of saw that as a composition in time similar to music. And right along with that, I was thinking, okay, in music, you have motifs and themes in there, you've explored with variation in combination with layering and stuff like that. And here, I was wondering if you could say something about—as [UNKNOWN] was saying you don't have an exact analogy, but there's some correspondence there—how that would happen with images. And I noticed that there were these things were sort of like oblong shapes, especially with the sky and the clouds in the background, and they had variation in combination on that. So if you could say something more about that, it would be kind of cool.

Alfred Guzzetti  47:54  

All I can tell you about it is that I had to proceed image by image. And I couldn't tell in advance whether—it's a pairing always; it’s the pairing of an image/sound combination, followed by another image/sound combination—whether a particular sequence of two pairings would interest me or strike me as rich. And I don't even know what the criteria are. Once they do strike me as rich, I can reason a little bit ex post facto and say something like that. And occasionally, I know that if I do something that's geometrically obvious, I can do that if I've established that the procedures of the film, through a number of combinations, are not geometrically obvious. So for example, there's a place where there's a landscape in the desert where the horizon line is in the middle—which when I was visiting China, my host told me never to do that, because they were taught in school, you don't put the horizon line in the middle, which I do sometimes—followed by a shot of Walden Pond in the depth of winter where everything is frozen, which has the same geometry. But the fact that the film isn't based on that, isn't based on those geometrical rhymes, means that if I have the opportunity of doing it once in order to break the procedures of the film– When I started the film, my notion was that there wouldn't be anything about the change of seasons or anything, or there wouldn't be any fade-outs or fade-ins. It would be a continuous succession of images that would go for, you know, maybe twelve minutes, one after the other. And I found that after about seven minutes, no matter what I did, I could not find the next image that would extend that length and I don't understand that. It may be that somebody else could have done that. It may be that it's me, or maybe it's the kind of material that I was using. But I feel that when I work, I have to listen to that. That after I batter my head against an idea that's not working, I do what all filmmakers do, which is you revisit the idea. And then I thought, well, there has to be another chapter and there has to be a chapter marker. But that wasn't a beginning idea. And also the structure of it, the results in that, is quite odd, because you have an uninterrupted forward thrust of something like seven minutes out of the fifteen minutes of the film, and then the next cluster of shots, I think, only includes two shots, and then two shots more. And what happens is the seasons change in those things. So it turns out to have a chronological structure which I didn't think it would have at the beginning. But it seemed without the chronological structure, it didn't work for me. It means that it probably had the implications of the chronological structure at the beginning. I was resisting them and I wasn't seeing them. I was fighting them with another idea. Which is the whole reason filmmaking is interesting to me, it's the way the reality contradicts what I think all the time.

Haden Guest  51:32  

Do you have any other questions for Alfred Guzzetti? Yes, right here.

Audience 5  51:40  

You mentioned before the last two films, like a quest, an ongoing quest, to make a film that was driven not by language, or text or narrative, but just as images and sounds, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, and maybe what sorts of attributes films that you make have that succeed in that project? Like, maybe when you were making the last two films, at what point in that process, did you decide that you had kind of achieved that goal, or...?

Alfred Guzzetti  52:13  

Well, I think it goes back to the earliest films and the early period of cinema. There are films left to us [that are] three minutes of pure cinema: one of them is a view from a train passing through the landscape. And I think it may be a chimera. It could be the idea of a pure film contradicts exactly what the nature of film is, which is that it's impure. It's contaminated by the chaos of the world. So the dream is, you take something which is open to the world and distorted by its chaos, because the lens pulls that in. And it gives you that. It’s as Pasolini said, it's the language of reality. So reality is there in all of its disorder and all of its disruptive quality. And then the dream of the filmmaker can be and is—I have given in to this from time to time—to make something which is pure about that. I mean, not to purify what's contaminated in it, but to work with it, and to make a cinema which uses the language of Western cinema—which is either a single sustained shot or moving camera or the camera goes from one shot to another shot—which uses no other principle, except what is seen in the image. And now, seen in the image and heard in the sound simultaneously, which certainly complicates it. I mean, it ups the ante a lot. So it may be that it’s the kind of impossible idea that motivates people to get out of bed in the morning because you won't really admit to yourself that it is impossible. But struggling with an impossible idea doesn't mean you've made an impossible film. Both Matt and I wrote essays for a book called Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and I think that when I was asked to do that, the idea appealed to me. Can't do them before breakfast.

Audience 6  54:36  

How do you work the cadence of the shots that you're executing with the kind of long range dynamic of the project?

Alfred Guzzetti  54:48  

By “cadence,” you mean moment to moment, the way the rhythms fall? I think there are interior cues in shots about cadence, and that if you live with them for a while, you start to feel the cues. And you start to feel, this is where the shot has finished speaking, and I can go to the next shot. Of course, that feeling is very contextual, because it depends on what's happened before and what happened afterwards. In fact, at a conference in Colorado a couple of years ago, James Benning, I guess you know this famous experimental filmmaker, asked me exactly the same question, but he asked me in more jargony filmmaker terms, “How do you decide to make the shots this length?” And since I was answering James Benning, I knew how to answer the question, but I did not answer James Benning asking the question, because if you know his work, he makes what I would call very structuralist decisions, and he allows them to play out. And I really do the opposite. The answer to the question is that I live with the length for a certain time. I come back to it the next day and the next day, and then sometimes a month later, and then I have a clearer outside view of it. And my view over time stabilizes both about cadence, and also whether things should be in or not.

So look at Time Present. Now, Time Present was made by the same person who's standing here, right? I think The Tower of Industrial Life wasn't made by the same person standing here. That person who was alive in the year 2000, sixteen years ago, I can maybe get in touch, in a kind of artificial way, with that person. So I'm not sure I could go back and re-examine the cadences of that. And, you know, if I tried to change them, I would make them worse. And I've actually had that experience. Because now God help us, you can go back and change things. And it's really not a blessing. And when I've tried to do that, I've always made them worse. But the talk about Time Present, I look at it now, and I wouldn't change any of the cadences. I don't know if I've gotten them right, but I've gotten them to the point where they're still convincing to me. I don't come out and see it as a mistake. But these are very unreliable reactions. If I've not seen a film for a while, if I see it in an audience with a projection, I can't tell whether I'm going to feel that it's completely empty and has no life at all in it, or whether I’ll feel really reassured, that it’s something I thought I didn't know about, I thought, Oh, that's really good, after all. So the fact that I have a range of reactions once I'm far away from the thing, means something about my reactions or something about human reactions. I know there are many filmmakers who don't look at their films afterwards, and they have different reasons for it. But I see one reason which is there’s a sense of its life that you lived with so long, might evaporate, or you might have exhausted it in some psychological way we don't understand.

A friend of mine was writing a book about Antonioni. And through intermediaries, he finally got an audience with Antonioni. It took years. And he had questions for him, of course, you know, because of this book, he had drafted the essays and everything. And the first question he asked him, Antonioni, was, he said, “I've read that Eclipse–” I don’t know if all of you have seen Eclipse. It’s a great film. It's really amazing. “–originally started with another sequence, and at the last minute, you cut the sequence off and started it, you know, in the room with a fan or the woman's legs.” (I'm saying that. I’m saying that to remind you.) “And it started with the sequence which is the second sequence. Is that true?” And Antonioni looks at him and thinks for a while, and then he says, “Remind me. How does it start now?” [LAUGHTER] And to me that says a truth about filmmakers, that Antonioni finished that film and it was his past and he moves on and makes other films, and didn’t think about it anymore. Or is that or just playing, pretending.

Haden Guest  59:41  

Well, we have much to think about tonight thanks to Alfred Guzzetti. Please join me in thanking him for this program!

[APPLAUSE]

And there'll be two more opportunities to see more of Alfred Guzzetti’s films. Take a copy of our calendar and check it out. Thank you.

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