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 Where did the impetus
for making
this piece come from and what is the over all meaning of it? It's really
dense. I find that this work, particularly, has many different things in
it. I think there's a lot there about women's identity and
dealings with culture, and things like that. So, if you could just speak a
little bit generally about it...
 Well, it started
actually about ten years ago. I had read this book
about a man who had lost his memory by actually being shot in the head.
And it just started a kind of series of readings and paintings and
different things on the issue of memory, and through that gestation came
this story of this woman who loses her memory through a fall. That's the
literal starting off point. It's about a woman who has lost her memory,
but that becomes a more metaphoric kind of story, too. In this loss of
memory, she has aphasia, which is known as short term memory loss. And when
you have that, you really lose a lot of your ability to communicate and to
hold thoughts in your mind. And it started me thinking about how language
is so important to identity and how we're defined culturally a lot by what
we say, what we think, and what the culture says about you. And so there
are a lot of images in the film, say, where she's writing and the writing
disappears immediately. Without this sort of intersection point into
culture, you know, and without memory, you have no sense of your own
identity. You kind of lose who you are. So that's the literal place where
it all comes from.
But then from there, the way that I work is using a starting
off point and then associating in different directions with that. So one
thing that happened is that while I was working on these ideas, I had this
dream that felt like it was part of the story -- I was watching these hands
writing in the dirt and they were writing these hieroglyphs, and then the
hieroglyphs turned into architect's plans. It made sense with the piece
somehow -- the architecture of the body, and images of home and body, and
how women are so associated with those kind of places. So, that formed
another thread through the piece. And then also leaving it a
question as to how she has this fall. There is this male figure that's
kind of haunting her through the piece. You know, thinking about people
like Anna Mendietta, the artist -- did Carl Andre push her or did she jump
or fall? So that's kind of woven in there, too. Was there some
malevolence involved or not? So those are some of the main threads.
And what happens is there actually is somewhat of a line that goes
through the piece, but it's almost like it starts in a flashback where she's
on this operating table. And you see her sort of traveling through spaces
and up this elevator and into this hallway, and then you see this fall. And
then the hallway returns again and again, as if she's trying to get home.
And in the end, she comes to this door and opens it up and it's like
she's come home. But nothing is solid, so the room is spinning around and
when it finally stops then the city outside falls down. So, she's
completely lost all of her base, and it's just very hard to live and define
yourself.
I think the thing that's really interesting about the
piece is the way that it's, for the most part, languageless. There's that
little bit of text that you were referring to that disappears; there's the
little bit of text that is uncovered. It's the same way she's uncovered,
her face is uncovered. And there's a little bit of chatter in some of the
soundtrack. But for the most part it really doesn't have any language.
And was that a choice partly to point to this loss of language that she
might have been going through?
Well, sort of the incomprehensibility. But it's also that I really like to
work without dialogue a lot. It's a preference. I mean, I work with
language also, but to me [working without dialogue]
kind of a freer place to work. And with this
piece I wasn't trying to, make a literal narrative, but more what I call an
emotional narrative. You're going through something, but I don't
necessarily expect someone watching it to get the literal story that I'm
starting out from. But I think you get some kind of feeling that comes
through. And that's going to be very subjective in terms of how you see
it...like some people say, "Oh I see so much about how hard it is to live
in New York City."
Well, in fact, you took so much from the city because there's the
soundtrack itself which is so rich with these industrial sounds. How did
you create that? Was that a process of going out and collecting sounds?
Some sounds I collected, and then I worked with this sound designer,
Bale Moralis, at Harmonic Ranch and we just, you know, started collecting
sounds that we liked. And it was a fairly long process creating the sound
track, working back and forth, sitting there with ProTools and just playing
with different things that we liked against different parts of the film, and
coming up with this very dense sound track... You know, the density has to
do with the indecipherability in some way - for [the woman in the film].
Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the choices you made in
terms of the animation techniques and just how those processes happened?
I made several little painted books as
I was thinking about the film and came up with key images that I knew I
wanted to create in the film. It's all painted
backdrops and painted cut out figures, and a few photographic figures that I
painted on also. And so the first part of making the film was simply
painting and gathering materials until I felt that I had critical mass
enough to begin to animate. And so I started with the animation of those
key images, but then as I was working on those, other ideas would suggest
themselves. It was then kind of a phase where I would
combine and recombine some of the things I had made, or make more things or
find certain things. Like I had seen years ago in this store on Fifth
Avenue that sells miniature, little miniature sets of silverware, so that
came to mind. I thought with this kind of domestic memory that she has to
have that this silverware falling would work. So some things were suggested by
materials I knew about or had seen, or saw while I was in the process of
making the film. It took about a year working on it off and on. I didn't
work on it continuously and that was kind of a good process because new
ideas would come and materials would come to me, and certain things I just
found on the street. And I knew I wanted to use a lot of superimposition
in it. So then really developing that process and getting better at doing
that -- it's all done in the camera. So it was kind of a long gestation
process with this film.
Do you have an animation stand that you work with?
I have a 16mm Bolex on a tripod, and I work either just putting
materials on a table or on the floor. I don't really have an animation
stand. Some of it...when she is falling over the city, I made this city
that was kind of almost between two and three dimensional.
It's two dimensional, but it's mounted on a background standing up in such a
way that it creates shadows. So
that's about as technical as I got doing that.
You mentioned one image that came out of a
dream. But there are a lot of dreamy images in this. Where there images
that just kept coming back to you? And how did they crop up into your
consciousness?
Well, this image of the body being split apart was very early a key
image, and it's one of those images that kind of just came to me, and I
trusted that it was right. There was something about these hands coming in
pulling her body apart which felt emotional right for her predicament.
And then also the way that the medical field responds to certain
personal issues, and how they try to fix it or not fix it in ways that
aren't always helpful. So that was one of those images. And that was one
of these things that the first time I shot it, and I shot it in different
sections, it came out just right. The sections even functioned as
edits that I didn't even have to cut. And that doesn't happen very often.
The rhythm of it was really right, somehow I had been thinking about it
enough that it turned out right. And the last scene where the room is
spinning around was something that was also just kind of an intuitive image
that I felt the necessity for the circularity at the end and the confusion
of that. And that was three different passes in the camera. So, luckily
that one I got right the first time.
There is this notion of circularity that comes up a lot. I mean, even in her
going up this endless elevator, and there are lots of things that just keep
repeating and repeating. It seems as if she's trapped or as if
her life has become very elliptical in a way.
Right, that's a good word for it.
Was that something that you set out to do or
was that something that developed in the process of making the film?
I think that that really developed in the process and then came to
fruition in the editing. You know, when I was editing first, which I often
do, I kind of set it out in a more linear way to just get in everything
that I wanted to use. And then I knew that that wasn't right, so I started
working with this more elliptical structure of large circles becoming
smaller and smaller as the film went on. Like something that starts out
sort of slowly rolling down a hill and then picks up speed as it gets to
the bottom.
It's also interesting how you've conveyed these
ideas of things being obscured and becoming revealed in it. As I said
before, images like the dirt being rubbed away from the book, and then also from her
face later on...
Yeah, there's also images with a key, which is one of the real objects in the film.
Before she falls, this
key falls, and it's a very "Alice in Wonderland" kind of image to pull out
but those are from all of our collective unconsciousness. There is
something about a key to the door. And so the key appears and
reappears. And it sets off the very last sequence, too, that she finally
gets the key in the door, and then actually everything that was moving in a
certain direction now starts moving backwards, so the circle kind of moves
in a different direction. And the sound goes backwards at that point for a
little while. So it's that she finally gets to the door, but then it's
almost like a tornado hits.
And what about the choice of the colors?
Again, right when I first started thinking about the piece and making
these paintings, [the colors] just happened. And part of that was this dream that
I had was in black and white and red. There's something about the limitation
of that, and then the archetypal quality that it adds to the piece.
Sometimes limitations actually open things up, and I think that that's what
that did for this piece.
Yeah, there's something kind of frightening about that -- the combination
of those three colors in this piece -- that works.
Right, and it's also without ever showing blood, you have the feeling
of blood.
And then, also, something is sort of ominous because
things are really very graphic and very dense in this, too. Did
you have anything unusual or funny happen while you were making it that you
want to talk about?
Gosh, because I'm just working by myself most of the time, if something
funny happens nobody is there to see it.
Over all thoughts on the production?
It was one of those pieces that really needed time. You know how
some things that you make you're fairly clear about it, or there's some
concise quality about it that allows you to just go forward. But this was
one of these pieces in which I didn't set out with a deadline, and I
was really happy about that because I allowed it to develop in this way
that I think was a lot richer for having the time to do it. This isn't
always a luxury that we have, you know.
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