INTERVIEWS AND CONVERSATIONS WITH WILLIAM E. JONES
[EXPANDED AND UNEXPURGATED]
Stuart Comer, “William E. Jones,” Tank, vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer 2008) pp. 162-163.
Until recently, William E. Jones’ documentary films revolved around “revealing the previously unexamined historical content in the marginalia of gay porn” without actually featuring any sex. His most recent work, though – 45 year old police undercover footage – finally gives sex a starring role. While in Beirut for a conference, Jones talked to Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer about Hollywood’s relationship with gay porn, the excesses of the internet and kids today.
Stuart Comer: Your first film Massillon pits exactly that kind of highly personal recollection of your sexual awakening against a striking Rust Belt landscape of Great American Institutions: Church, State, School, Law, Library, Industry, and the Road. Your subsequent work generally has addressed pornography as both a rich subculture and another essential component of the American cultural and political matrix. Why have you decided to position gay porn within a broader continuum of ‘legitimate’ art, cinema and image-making?
William E. Jones: In America a pervasive sense of puritanism has done violence to our visual culture. It goes beyond censorship, although that has its place in the discussion as well. The division between the realm of the explicit (pornography) and the non-explicit (the mass media) serves to legitimate the latter, but really the two realms exist in symbiosis. Where would porn movies get their best titles, if not mainstream movies? And, more importantly, where would gay men of a certain disposition, geographic isolation, or social class learn how to have sex? For many years Hollywood gave gay men little other than a guide to being invisible, then committing suicide. Consequently, porn occupies a place in old school gay culture that it could never have in the culture at large. These circumstances had a major impact on careers, as has been widely noted. In this regard, I’d like to mention Tom De Simone, a filmmaker of talent who emerged in the early 1970s. At that time he was unable to direct dramatic films with gay themes in Hollywood, so he made narrative gay porn films, often under the pseudonym Lancer Brooks, including the remarkable The Idol.
As a fan of movies, I entertain the utopian notion that there isn’t porn on one hand and theatrical film on the other; it’s all cinema. This disregard of boundaries that I have come to see as arbitrary has led me to embrace (along with pornography) instructional films, home movies, and surveillance footage, all of which I have used in my work. Among the artifacts dismissed as marginal true revelations can be found.
SC: Tearoom, your most recent film, is frequently lumped together with your work around pornography, but is in fact police surveillance footage and not pornography at all. What is the relationship between these bodies of work, and how would you distinguish your approach to appropriation in both?
WEJ: I have challenged audiences’ conventional genre expectations, perhaps most outrageously in Finished (1997) a porn star biography without any sex. My works that derive from vintage gay porn are also quite chaste. In videos such as v. o. and All Male Mash Up (both 2006) I am interested in revealing previously unexamined historical content in the marginalia of gay porn. It is a project that continues the work of The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) which begins with the line, “Even in an unlikely place, it is possible to find traces of recent history.” Insertion shots and “money” shots have changed little in the last 40 years, aside from the introduction of condoms to mainstream gay porn. As far as I’m concerned, purely functional, commercial representations of the sex act have little to say to us. On the other hand, the scenes that most consumers ignore – establishing shots, dialogue sequences, and almost random details of décor – speak volumes.
I had always withheld explicit sex from the work. I was holding out for an important reason to show it. Finally, I found my justification for a sex film in the context of an indictment of the police. Essentially a found object, Tearoom (1962/2007) consists of unedited police surveillance footage that was presented as evidence in court. I thought it was important to impose as few of my own decisions on the material as possible. The cameraman who shot the footage made many decisions about duration of shots, camera angles and subjects. For instance, when an attractive young man enters the men’s room, the camera seems to devour him, and I want the audience to see that. I also want the audience to give thought to what is not seen in the footage: hours of dead time, and most importantly, a reverse angle of the man doing the observing. All we see are fleeting reflections. The Mansfield, Ohio Police Department put the footage to use when it prosecuted dozens of men for having sex in public. They later used it in Camera Surveillance, an instructional film they produced to show how to make such arrests. In these cases, the intended audiences (jurors, policemen) were told what to think about the footage at all times. I am interested in a contemporary audience having an experience more like that of watching an experimental film – Tearoom is presented completely silent – and coming to their own conclusions about what they are seeing. It may even be possible to understand through a brief immersion what gay sex before liberation was like. There is certainly something profoundly unsettling about watching this material in public and in close proximity to other spectators. Even people who disapprove of my exhibiting the footage admit to being aroused by it. Tearoom brings out something at once complicated, raw, and primal in spectators. Perhaps it has something in common with pornography after all.
SC: Porn is seen to be something that addresses or fulfills immediate needs, usually with a degree of anonymity. Your project treats it not only as a rich historical archive of images, gestures and politics, but draws out individual personalities for considerable research. Perhaps you could discuss how this process led you to the filmmaker Fred Halsted, and where your current investigations into his life and work are taking you.
WEJ: Fred Halsted’s early work held the promise of a new genre: the sexually explicit, autobiographical experimental film. In this respect, it anticipated the work of George Kuchar’s protégé, Curt McDowell, who also awaits his proper place in film history. Through the late 70s and 1980s, as “gay cinema” became progressively more commercial and tame, and porno adhered more closely to its own conventions, the breakthrough moment that Halsted was waiting for never came. He died in 1989, so he didn’t live long enough to see key aspects of his aesthetic explored by Bruce La Bruce.
An important part of my practice involves looking for continuities across generations and factions that in their day didn’t speak to one another. A sense of historical discontinuity and disavowal has nearly blinded young gay men to the amazing riches created by their predecessors. This body of films and videos forms a tradition available for reinvention; it also provides hints on how to raise some hell and have some fun.
When I first saw Fred Halsted’s L. A. Plays Itself, I thought it was, from the point of view of aesthetics, the greatest gay porn film. Nothing in the thousands of films I have seen since then has changed that original conviction. Not everyone shares my opinion. When I met Chantal Akerman in the late 1990s, I mentioned more or less by chance my interest in L. A. Plays Itself. She gave me a perplexed look. How could anyone devote serious attention to such a movie? I asked her how she had seen it. She told me that in 1972 she had worked in the ticket booth of New York’s 55th Street Playhouse. Her co-worker, a statuesque drag queen who called everyone regardless of sex or station in life “Miss Thing,” taught her the useful skill of stealing from the box office. During her tenure as ticket girl, Chantal managed to skim $4000 from the receipts. At that time, the sum was enough to fund the short La Chambre and Hotel Monterey, her first long film. L. A. Plays Itself was the film playing during the entire period of her lucrative job. In an important sense, Fred Halsted helped Akerman at a formative stage of her career. Some years after I heard her story, it appeared in Chantal Akerman. Autoportrait en cinéma, though in this version, she doesn’t mention her absent and unwitting benefactor’s name.
This conversation may have had further repercussions in the history of cinema. It took place in the house of Thom Andersen, who at that time was just beginning the massive project of researching how Los Angeles has been represented in films. A while later, he borrowed my Halsted tape for use in his compilation film, which bears the title Los Angeles Plays Itself.
As soon as I had the opportunity to teach an experimental film course, I showed Fred Halsted’s work. I chose Sex Garage (a short film Fred shot in 1972 while he was waiting for L. A. Plays Itself to have its theatrical release) because the version of L. A. Plays Itself that was available on video had been mutilated. The video’s distributors removed the final fisting scene because they considered it likely to attract the attention of federal law enforcement authorities. In the present legal climate, there is little hope that the climax of the film will ever be restored for commercial release. I taught this course as a sabbatical replacement for film scholar William Moritz. I found out much later that Moritz and Halsted were in the same graduating class of Abraham Lincoln High School in San Jose. Unfortunately, he died of cancer in 2004, before I got the chance to ask him about his former classmate. Still, Moritz will have his place in the work. Only recently I found a positive, thoughtful review of Halsted’s 1975 film Sextool that Moritz had written for Entertainment West, a Los Angeles independent gay magazine that ceased publication long ago.
SC: You recently commented that the moment you present sex in your work, no one is happy: it’s either too much or not enough. Do you think our societal inability to deal easily with pleasure and eroticism and our tendency towards cultural and historical amnesia go hand in hand?
WEJ: I hesitate to generalize about these questions. I can only make a few remarks on what I notice in teaching. I suspect that the students in my classes feel a revulsion toward the devastation of AIDS – I hope not toward the people who have it – and a jealousy of the hedonism their parents’ generation enjoyed, yet they are too polite or inarticulate to voice their reaction. They say that they’ve seen it all, but they’ve actually seen very little; they’ve just spent a lot of time on the internet. Today we are faced with an unprecedented barrage of consumer choices. An immediacy and a leveling of distinctions, while potentially radical and enriching, often has the effect of depriving young people of a sense of history accumulated through lived experience. From their point of view, how can films by Carolee Schneemann or Kurt Kren, to site only a couple of examples, compare with the access (and excess) of YouTube, DudeTube, XTube, UbuWeb? At the same time, I don’t get the impression that these kids, for all the world-weariness, are getting much sex.
I must admit that it would be hypocritical for me to condemn the youth of today. I was once a grad student, and I was annoyed by tales of the “good old days” that happened right before I arrived on the scene. I also have my own regrets. I was far too dismissive of the hippy gender benders who made their impression in the early 70s, and of the gay clone culture that wiped all that away a few years later. I was young. What the hell did I know? I should have spent more time talking to my elders.
Marcia Scott, “What the Hell Is That?: Uncovering Secret Histories and Questioning the Boundaries of Art,” Film Arts, vol. 31, no 1. (January/February 2008) pp. 38-39.
William E. Jones asks questions. In recent work he has been asking questions of found footage. After finishing Is It Really So Strange?, about Latino fans of British crooner Morrissey, Jones wanted to make videos that required less production; appropriating 
footage was the obvious choice.
In 2006 he made four films, including v. o. and Film Montages (for Peter Roehr). This year, he began presenting Tearoom (1962/2007). In each film Jones employs a different strategy for unearthing latent meanings, always contributing his keen sense of history and genuine affection for the stigmatized and forgotten material he uses. I was fortunate enough to meet Jones after a screening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Mash-Up
Jones describes v. o. as “a variation on what DJs call a ‘mash-up’.” Using sources with little to no commercial distribution, he combined scenes from gay porn produced before 1985 (the last year 16mm was used) with sound largely from European art films (by Renoir, Schroeter, Buñuel, Debord, among others), and notably, from an ornery interview with the French writer Jean Genet. Jones’ provocative vignettes resist easy assumptions and illuminate neglected margins of gay experiences and history. The porn excerpts, for example, are notable for their slow pace, their texture of place, their beauty. I asked him about their significance:
I’ve heard the complaint that I have cut the sex out of pornography, but I prefer to see what I do as emphasizing gay porn’s margins, where the most idiosyncratic, least redundant aspects of the films can be found. One advantage of using scenes that are often quite sexual, but not explicit, is that my work does not necessarily exclude anyone. Most of the people who come screenings of v. o. are cinephiles. If I addressed only gay men interested in porn, I would be better off just making porn.
The industrialization of gay porn took place over a period of 15 years from the time of the first public screenings of sex scenes, or “loops,” in 1969. At first, directors who wanted to make gay-themed movies, but who were denied access to the mainstream film industry, and experimental filmmakers who were interested in filming sex, could produce interesting porn. Slowly, their personal ambitions were subsumed to the exigencies of industrial production. Here is a concrete example: in the early 1970s it was possible to have an hour-long gay porn film that included only 20 minutes of sex. (That was the case with L. A. Plays Itself.) By the mid-1980s, any less than 50 minutes of sex in an hour long video was unacceptable.
The adult video industry of the present day has reached a critical moment. Straight porn production has slowed considerably in Los Angeles, and most of what little gay porn production there is has moved to San Francisco. This shift has happened very recently and very quickly. Although the industry still makes immense profits, few (if any) people can support themselves exclusively as porn directors. The very idea of a gay porn movie embodied in a discrete object like a DVD is being abandoned, in favor of pay-per-view scenes on the internet. The requirements of that form are incredibly restrictive, and I doubt that anyone will be able to inject some interest into the genre, let alone make a masterpiece.
I am fascinated by what is left behind in successive waves of obsolescence. I think that it is possible – even necessary – to treat gay porn films as historical artifacts, though nothing could be further from the original intentions of their makers. Various disruptions, brought about by developments in capitalism, by the devastation of AIDS, by new forms of political reaction, have erased a whole world. Curiously enough, pornography is one of the best places to look to gain an understanding of what has been lost.
When asked about all the shots of antiquated audio equipment in his videos, Jones had the following response:
Joe Gage loved to explore the erotics of the recorded voice. The most obvious example is in one of his best movies, Handsome, about which James McCourt wrote an excellent appreciation in his book Queer Street. The separation of the voice from the image in that film is one of the inspirations for v. o., though this strategy has been prevalent in my work from the beginning, in one way or another.
The quality of sound systems was a great and abiding obsession in 1970s gay culture. At the time, all of this was considered “high tech,” but now it is the focus of fond, nostalgic feelings. The sound of analogue synthesizers in porn film soundtracks contributes to this sense of the antiquated. When I showed some of my recent work to a young gallerist who is also a musician, he became quite excited and said, “No one makes music like that anymore.”
Incessant Repetition
Peter Roehr was a German artist from the 1960s who died young; he created montages by isolating and repeating fragments of advertisements. In Film Montages (for Peter Roehr), Jones loops both the sound and the image of non-explicit gay porn footage up to eight times in succession. Though the principle is simple, my experience of Film Montages was revelatory. While some images expectedly became more familiar, others seemed to grew distorted. As the number of repetitions increased, both the act of repetition itself and the tone of the represented sex came to feel more aggressive, in my view even grim. In an essay on Roehr, Jones writes, “The noises of daily life under capitalism, estranged from meaningful contexts and arranged in musical compositions, threaten to derange the senses of listeners. The irritation that characterizes effective advertising gets intensified, at times almost beyond endurance. Lifting the principle of repetition from Warhol, LeWitt et al, applying it to film and taking it to an extreme, Roehr makes manifest a certain sadism latent in the modernist enterprise.” I asked Jones about these complex issues of aggression in form and content.
I admire Susan Sontag’s defense of excruciation in works of art. As she herself admitted, she staked out her position before seriousness became an outmoded value and the truly unbearable overtook mass culture. Now “the worst film ever made” has become its own genre, with practitioners such as Michael Bay bludgeoning audiences with every new movie. Compared to these enormities, the sadism one can detect in modernist art seems positively charming. I don’t assert this to belittle modernism; I only wish to suggest a sense of proportion for the question.
I made Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) out of my love for Roehr’s underrated work and for the voluptuously degraded, sleazy video footage that I used as source material. I have never been able to trace the S/M scenes at the end of the video, so they have a certain mystery about them. I don’t find them grim at all. In the context of porn, standardization is grim. (I should mention that looking at hundreds of hours of it in my job as a producer of DVD compilations of gay porn films from the archive has informed my judgment.) I am attracted to whatever moves me to ask, “What the hell is that?” in porn as well as in films for general consumption. I aspire to make movies that provoke a similar response.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts wrote the following in their program: “Given the increasing reluctance of many gay and lesbian film festivals to show experimental cinema, this opportunity to experience Jones’ unique vision is all the more vital.” Jones comments on what in his view accounts for this increasing reluctance, or more generally on the state of experimental cinema, gay or otherwise:
I consider my project analogous to poetry or experimental literature. I make works on an economy of means (in digital video, using appropriated footage) but the audience, while devoted and engaged, is small. As long as I don’t depend on earning a living from my endeavors, I can continue.
When I began attending gay and lesbian film festivals, I was interested in seeing experimental work unlikely to get distribution in the United States. Examples included some of the films I later used in v. o., like those of Werner Schroeter or Heinz Emigholz. In the hope of attracting the largest, broadest audience, contemporary gay and lesbian festivals concentrate on films likely to get at least an eventual DVD release. These festivals are more involved in uniting and affirming a community, and indulge little of the old cinephilia. There are interesting exceptions to this trend, for instance MIX, but they are definitely programming against the grain.
I have often threatened to withdraw entirely from the gay and lesbian film festival circuit, and finally it seems that the programmers are making that decision for me. Hardly any festivals committed to showing Film Montages (for Peter Roehr), even though it is one of my personal favorites. (To be fair, I can’t imagine the short film program that could accommodate such a work.) I have no complaints. My career doesn’t seem to have suffered from this indifference.
Direct Exposure
v. o. uses appropriation to rescue and renew largely forgotten cultural histories; Film Montages treats similar material more formally and abstractly. With Tearoom, however, Jones addresses the ethics of appropriation with new and bracing directness. In Mansfield, Ohio in 1962, police learned that the men’s bathroom under the town’s central square was a rendezvous for “sex deviates.” Using a two-way mirror and a law that defines common spaces outside the stalls as “public,” two men took turns filming the sexual encounters over two months – a sting operation that secured the conviction of 31 men for sodomy.
Jones tried to incorporate the footage into a documentary, but after multiple versions (in each he intervened less) he decided that the footage was strongest on its own. What results is a historical document whose significance has compounded since it was first used as evidence: every camera movement, every gesture, every interaction, every physiognomy becomes hauntingly relevant. Acutely sensitive to the disturbing circumstances and extreme intimacy of this document, Jones chooses to present it personally, following screenings with public discussions. His decision to present it at all can excite controversy; but in my view Jones honors its unwitting actors by presenting them as individuals without dehumanizing black bars over their faces. He respects us by not interpreting, by giving us the redemptive opportunity to ask the difficult question, “What is that?” Jones posts information and historical documents about the case on his website – the perfect forum for accommodating Tearoom’s expanding content, Tearoom will be shown in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and Jones is finishing a book to accompany it.
After the sting, the bathroom was sealed off and Jones said no trace of it remains. He remarked that the central square is littered with monuments, and suggestively asked what kind of monument would be appropriate to honor these men – a humorous question, but one that poignantly reminded us of the significance of what we had just witnessed.
Natalie Zimmerman and William Jones, “out there where nothing is,” Camerawork, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2006) pp. 8-15.
Natalie Zimmerman and William Jones are filmmakers and photographers living and working in Los Angeles. Camerawork introduced them and commissioned a piece for publication. This conversation took place between the artists via e-mail in May 2006. Jones’s book Is it Really So Strange? was published in 2006 by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Zimmerman’s film Islands will be exhibited in Camerawork’s San Francisco gallery in January 2007.
William Jones: I have no car, and I have discovered that being a “pedestrian filmmaker” is a serious challenge in Los Angeles. It occurs to me that Islands could almost have been made without a car, since many of its exteriors are fairly accessible and most of the piece was shot in one room.
Natalie Zimmerman: Since the “locations” to which I traveled were purely psychological, a consistent, neutral physical space was crucial. The exteriors were ancillary.
Islands was conceived shortly after seeing the exhibition The Passions by Bill Viola at the Getty. The emotional content of the work seemed to have been emptied—leaving only artifice and the rote execution of acting exercises.
I started thinking about what happens when the narrative basis of gestural language is removed. I began wondering if it was possible to identify any de-contextualized emotional expression as authentic. This led me to consider two conflicting views of what it means to act well: Can a good actor be an effective mimic, or must a truly convincing actor draw on lived experience?
This goes right to the popular view of actors as shallow vessels in pursuit of the temporary meaning conferred by fame or (more positively) a satisfying role—and because I live in LA, the industrial center (without a center) of this pursuit, this notion of a people and a place both defined by dislocation (psychological in one instance and geographical in the other) began to emerge...
Jones: I was struck by two references to Hollywood, one in Islands and one in an earlier piece of yours: Therapeutic Space. A psychiatrist in the latter piece refers to the zip code in which he has his office, 10021, as the most desirable in America, after Hollywood. It is obvious that the closest he has ever gotten to 90028 is seeing it on television. Islands includes a shot of the loveable but much-maligned Hollywood sign, looming over the mythological “center” of the film industry—Culver City and Burbank actually have more movie studios—because a crumbling advertisement for the Hollywoodland real estate development was saved from demolition. These references suggest the vast gap between received wisdom about Los Angeles, especially its image in the mass media, and a real experience of living here.
Zimmerman: I think it’s clear from our vantage point that the mythic LA and the Los Angeles of lived experience are fairly incongruent—the NY psychiatrist’s comparison of his upper Park Avenue zip code to that of Hollywood, the other “most desirable zip code in America,” demonstrates this naïveté.
But regarding Los Angeles and Hollywood, I’m actually more interested in the constant erasure that takes place. So much of the city's history gets recycled into myth. The Hollywood sign is an example of this. This also seems to happen to those who are drawn here. There is this notion, popularized by the city's early boosters, that people could come here and find whatever they were looking for—sever ties with their past in favor of a reinvented or reconstructed self. This may be why I always have a sense of transience—every geographical point in LA is peripheral. The sense of emptiness that comes with a de-centered urban space can sometimes be quite palpable. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York, I found this to be psychologically debilitating—but I now find a creative freedom in it. You can still find things and places that are undefined, oftentimes left in a state of transition because of the city's “inefficiency” and geographical expansiveness—and the geological instability mirrors these social and cultural landscapes.
I was working with these ideas in Islands, and it is why I was interested in your film Finished and your investigation into the “true” identity of Alan Lambert. Perhaps your stated frustration at failing to find the "true" Alan/Alain was due to his own confusion and transitional state. His messianic dreams stand in stark contrast to his instrumentalized role in the porn industry. His life seems to serve as an extreme metaphor for the many "actor/dreamers" who hope to find redemption/fame/transformation in LA.
Jones: The supposed lack of history in Los Angeles does provide some with a sense of personal freedom. People still come to the edge of the continent to reinvent themselves. Geographical displacement leading to personal transformation is one of America’s most durable myths. In other ways, the boosters’ attempts to erase history—deeply and outrageously fraudulent—have had a strong impact on the people who must live in the spaces they have willed into existence. An urban landscape in flux creates waves of nostalgia. Even recent arrivals in Los Angeles find themselves asking what the area was like “before,” though when and if “before” took place rarely gets specified.
I am fascinated by changes in the landscape of Los Angeles, and I am not immune to nostalgia. I take many pictures of buildings, especially old ones put to new uses by their current owners. I seem to have the uncanny ability of finding buildings that are on the verge of being demolished or renovated. In fact, some of the still photographs in Is It Really So Strange? are of places that are no longer recognizable. These color cityscapes were originally part of a large photographic series called The Golden State. In 1999, I began scouting locations for a film of that title. Because a grant provided me with extra money for pre-production, I was able to shoot location photographs rather than relying on sketches and notes as I had done for previous projects. I enjoyed this mode of work and its results so much that eventually making the photographs became an end in itself, and I put the film project aside. During that period, I acquired an extensive knowledge of the geography of Southern California. Later, when I contacted people I wished to interview for Is It Really So Strange?, I discovered that I knew where most of them lived, because I had already photographed their neighborhoods. The coincidence led me to insert this previous body of work into a movie other than the one for which it was originally intended.
Inez Parra, who appears in Is It Really So Strange?, asks why so many tourists from the heartland flock to Hollywood. Whatever they are looking for, they seem to have come to the wrong place. Those aspects of Los Angeles that make the city most daunting to tourists – its sprawl, its diversity, and what one might call its unknowability—are what make it an especially rich environment for artists. With an intimidating tradition of documentary photography coming immediately to mind, a photographer in New York might think that every interesting street photograph has already been taken, but the list of available subjects in Los Angeles seems inexhaustible. It is only a matter of finding them and ridding one’s self of some preconceived notions. What we see of Los Angeles on television and in movies is surprisingly limited, has been digitally altered beyond recognition, or is actually Vancouver.
From what I gathered, the concept of alienation was a regular theme of Alan Lambert’s conversations with friends in Montreal. He no doubt felt personal alienation when he came to Los Angeles, a city where he had few connections. But Alan was also talking about more general forms of alienation. His performances were instances of alienated labor: he received a small payment with no further financial stake in movies that circulated long after his death. These videos were also consumed in an alienated way: spectators had no access to Alan, except as an image, and he certainly had no way of knowing them. A latter-day radical of profoundly idiosyncratic convictions, Alan could not reconcile how others saw him, as a pretty and rather passive porn star, with how he saw himself, as a potential revolutionary leader. While making Finished, I came to understand that Alan’s messianic fantasy functioned as a compensation for his surrender to an industry that made use of him in ways he could not control.
Zimmerman: I’m interested in these concepts of surrender and control you mention with regard to Alan/Alain in your film Finished. There is an irony in the story of his parallel lives, and death, being revealed through the eyes of a complete stranger. In a way, you’ve asserted the ultimate control. By profiling a relatively unknown actor after his death, your voice-over—both literally and figuratively—becomes the last word.
I’m curious as to how you feel about this. I constantly struggle with issues of control and propriety. I want my work to initiate dialogue and communication rather than answer questions or make assertions. I want to learn throughout the process—which means relinquishing a certain level of control. Sometimes this means my voice is suppressed in order to allow unforeseen things to erupt or emerge.
One of my particular difficulties with Islands was in trying to find a balance between my subjectivity and a certain fidelity to the actors’ stories or performances. I felt somewhat responsible, as they were given certain freedoms during the filming; they were left alone with the camera and given control of both duration and content. My directives were simple and I was not present during their performance. Ultimately, each actor was free to interpret them as he or she liked.
After watching many hours of these tapes I decided that the piece would be a single-channel video rather than a multi-channel installation. I felt strongly that I didn’t want the work to be over-determined or closed to interpretation. I wanted certain themes and questions to emerge, but without any definitive resolution. I wanted to allow the viewer to adopt the role of confidante.
Usually in my process, I try to set up parameters or situations conducive to revelatory moments for both my collaborators and myself. Perhaps this is the central tension in my work—I’m always asserting some form of control while my voyeuristic impulses threaten to compromise it. Sometimes the form fails because of this, but for me that risk is essential.
Jones: The question of control is a loaded one, especially when it comes to documentaries representing people’s lives. I maintain that a documentary filmmaker always exerts control over the material at some stage of the process, if not in the viewfinder, then in the editing room. It is his or her main job. Every reasonably informed spectator is aware of that. In an era of reality television’s extreme manipulations and a saturation of product placement, control over nonfiction images has been increasingly usurped by an array of producers, censors, advertisers, and lawyers. It is still possible for independent filmmakers to make personal statements that they own; indeed, this is one of their few real advantages over the mainstream.
My films employ a significant amount of first-person narration, and the main point of view they represent is mine. The limitations of my knowledge lead to problems and contradictions that in turn serve as devices propelling a narrative forward. In Finished, Alan Lambert becomes a character of my invention, as I realize that access to Alain, the real person who lived and died, has to a great extent been foreclosed. Spectators sometimes take exception to what they perceive as a heavy-handed approach to biography. I think their complaints arise from rather conventional expectations of documentary films, especially those that produce an “objectivity effect.”
To put it somewhat facetiously, I grew tired of making films about myself (or about someone who couldn’t talk back), so I opened up my process when I made Is It Really So Strange? I wanted to make a movie that included other voices and orchestrated them with my own understanding of the subject, in this case, the contemporary generation of Smiths and Morrissey fans. Is It Really So Strange? is more variegated than Finished in terms of its tone, but no less controlled. I draw a distinction between a filmmaker’s responsibility to control the form of a film and the abusive practice of taking away the voices of the people in it. For Is It Really So Strange? I resolved to delete from my voice-over any theme that was taken up at length in an interview, never to use a shot of someone speaking as a cutaway in the editing, and to give everyone in the movie at least two segments or speeches. I wanted to respect the intimate revelations my interviewees gave me. This approach has its risks, and some spectators have mistaken my sympathy for credulity. I deplore the mean-spirited approach of filmmakers who wish to do little more than prove themselves cleverer than their subjects, and if I err on the side of apparent naïveté, then so be it.
I haven’t worked with actors, as you did in Islands, so I can only guess that the actors you shot considered your “hands-off” approach a gift.
Zimmerman: Throughout filming and editing this piece, the most difficult issue for me was the question of structure. At the outset, I was determined to show each actor’s performance in its entirety. I gave them certain freedoms during filming and I thought that the best way to convey this freedom was by refusing to cut in at all. In theory, such a strict ethic was crucial to the integrity of the project. But as I started analyzing the material, I found this approach severely limiting. This forced me to confront the meaning and form of the piece as emergent quantities.
The initial framework I set up was straightforward. The actors were given two directives. The first was “to cry.” The second was “to talk about what you were crying about.” The actors were asked to turn off the camera upon completion of each segment—creating a break between performances and an actual break in the tape. Each actor was allowed to use as much time as he/she needed. These “auditions” took place in my home, while I waited outside. The actors were not given any information on their performance until moments before they were in front of the camera. Many of the actors were thankful for the freedom and others were overwhelmed, awkward, had difficulty starting and/or stopping. I think part of this happened because boundaries became blurred. Certainly I initiated this by inviting them into my home, and then leaving them alone to cry. Sometimes they would leave remaining sad. At other times they would linger in a state of awkward intimacy. Many of the actors expressed appreciation. I think it must have allowed some to reach a type of catharsis. This continuous cycle of auditions in my home created an emotionally and psychologically charged space. This made me feel a certain sense of responsibility, as it became clear in many instances that this space of constructed intimacy allowed them to become vulnerable in ways they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to in other acting situations.
So to return to your question, I chose to use this actor to represent the difficult nature of the exercise and to call attention to the structure I imposed—at one point in his performance I enter the frame and we have a number of verbal exchanges. Ultimately, I chose to use his performance but without revealing its more explicit details.
While editing there were two tendencies between which I tried to maintain a consistent tension. The first was a very Brechtian impulse. Providing critical distance while calling attention to structure and context. These are moments when I tried to pull back and emphasize the structure—Brecht refers to this in terms of acting as an “Alienation” or “A-effect.” I could see how the viewer could receive these as uncomfortable or oddly comical in a way. The other impulse was to allow the structure to recede a bit, foregrounding what is being revealed in order to allow for viewer empathy. However, this structure introduces complications. One is never sure if the actors are using the method approach well to assume the identity of a fictionalized character, revealing some real-lived experience, or blending the two approaches. I imagine in some instances the actors aren’t even certain.
I chose to use Los Angeles landscapes as cutaway sequences throughout to mirror the sentiments that emerged from the performances. I also wanted to provide context and space for viewer reflection. These tended to be distant and flat, but subtly undulating. In order to find these I was drawing on my own lived experience and relationship to this landscape, and certainly informing this, if not only unconsciously, was my return to compelling images I’ve collected in memory over the years: New Topographic photographers like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, as well as Uta Barth and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who use the camera to experiment with time and space—also the social, political, and psychological cinematic “landscapes” of Chantal Akerman in On the Border and Andrey Tarkovsky in Nostalghia.
There is so much to discuss that lies beyond the scope of our exchange, but I was intrigued at the path your work has taken from the intensely personal Massillon to the more anthropological Is It Really So Strange? It is fascinating for me to notice our work moving in opposite directions. My last completed project, Between States—a book of my writing and photographs that explore isolation and psychological dislocation—is possibly the most personal, subjective project I’ve ever done. I’m curious to know which direction you think your work will go from here.
Jones: Because I depended on so many interviews in Is It Really So Strange?, my goal was to have a final product that was as accessible as possible to the people I represented. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could make a documentary in a conventional style. Wresting a coherent movie from the seventy hours of raw footage was hard work, but I found the process fascinating and exhilarating. Now that I’ve had that experience, I don’t think I will be returning to a traditional form any time soon, even though audiences appreciate the movie in an immediate and (for me) very gratifying way.
My new body of work was inspired by my parallel career as an archivist in the gay adult video industry. In the course of viewing hundreds of hours of porn, I have developed a fascination with its marginalia: establishing shots revealing urban landscapes of the recent past, charmingly inept dialogue scenes, and close-ups of performers, many now dead. This material, while of no particular commercial use, can be seen as an invaluable document of a lost world of eroticism and sociability.
In the editing room, I employ a variation on what DJs call a “mash-up,” combining segments of sound with segments of picture, and making decisions based upon the length of the segments rather than their content. All Male Mash Up, the primary video in my most recent solo exhibition, draws from the nonsexual scenes of gay porn films made before 1985, the last year that 16mm film was used as a production format. The somewhat arbitrary juxtaposition of diverse “found” materials often yields surprisingly appropriate results, suggesting a new narrative space, and paying tribute to a former era of gay life and cinephilia.
My latest videos, v. o. and All Male Mash Up, would seem to be an abrupt change from Is It Really So Strange?, but they involve a return to subject matter I have been dealing with for years. My work does not depend very much on the notion of a “signature” visual style. Each project should dictate the style in which it is realized. What unifies the body of work has more to do with a range of concerns or a narrating voice or even a general sense of circumspection. Nevertheless, I think a major shift has taken place. I came of age in the 1980s. I have recently become interested in assimilating the past, and in reckoning with what has changed since I was a young adult. Is It Really So Strange? and the new pieces have this ambition in common. I have been making films for about twenty years, long enough to have a sense of historical transformations, and I am now more interested in what has changed about the world than in what has changed about me during that time.