Stan Brakhage on Music, Sound, Color, and Film

Mid-April, 1966

Dear Ronna Page,

Jonas Mekas will have whatever material has been salvaged on and/or by me — old clips, "stills", etcetera — as I make a practice of sending them all to him for Film-Makers' Cooperative files.

As to quotes out of my past, I imagine you have ample material in Film Culture issues and my book Metaphors On Vision. I am presently working on a long film (16mm) to be called: Scenes From Under Childhood. It would probably be of particular interest to your Parisian readers to know that this work-in-progress is to some extent inspired by the music of Olivier Messiaen and, to some lesser extent, Jean Barraque, Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (all, I believe, former pupils of Messiaen).

Fifteen years ago I began working with the film medium as primarily shaped by the influence of stage drama. Since that time, both poetry and painting have alternately proved more growth-engendering sources of inspiration than either the trappings of the stage or the specific continuity limitations of any "making up a story", novelistic tendencies, etcetera: and the first departures in my working-orders from "fiction" sources gave rise to an integral involvement with musical notation as a key to to film editing aesthetics. Some ten years ago I studied informally with both John Cage and Edgar Varese, at first with the idea of searching out a new relationship between image and sound and of, thus, creating a new dimension for the sound track, as Jean Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity had created in me a complete dissatisfaction with the conventional usages of music for "mood" and so-called "realistic sounds" as mere referendum to image in movies, and Jean Cocteau's poetic film plays, for all their dramatic limitations, had demonstrated beautifully to me that only non-descriptive language could co-exist with moving image (in any but a poor operatic sense), that words, whether spoken or printed, could only finally relate to visuals in motion thru a necessity of means and/or an integrity as severely visual as that demonstrated by the masterpieces of collage. The more informed I became with aesthetics of sound, the less I began to feel any need for an audio accompaniment to the visuals I was making. I think it was seven/eight years ago I began making intentionally silent films. Although I have always kept myself open to the possibilities of sound while creating any film, and have in fact made a number of sound films these last several years, I now see/feel no more absolute necessity for a sound track than a painter feels the need to exhibit a painting with a recorded musical background. Ironically, the more silently-oriented my creative philosophies have become, the more inspired-by-music have my photographic aesthetics and my actual orders become both engendering a coming-into-being of the physiological relationship between seeing and hearing in the making of a work of art in film.

I find, with Cassius Keyser, that "the structure of mathematics is similar to that of the human nervous system" and have for years been studying the relationship between physiology and mathematics via such books as Sir D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth And Form: and following those "leads" along a line of music, I've come to the following thoughts (which I'll quote from an article of mine which appeared in the magazine Wild Dog):

I'm somehow now wanting to get deeper into my concept of music as sound equivalent of the mind's moving, which is becoming so real to me that I'm coming to believe the study of the history of music would reveal more of the changing though processes of a given culture than perhaps any other means — not of thought shaped and/or Thoughts but of the Taking shape, physiology of thought or some such . . . I mean is there anything that will illustrate the feel of chains of thought gripping and ungripping, rattling slowly around, a block-concept, an Ideal, as Gregorian Chant, for instance? . . . and doesn't The Break occur in Western Musical thought in terms of melody, story, carrying blocks, making them events, along a line? (Or, as poet Robert Kelly put it to me recently: & event is the greatness of story, i.e., where story and history & myth & mind & physiology all at once interact" — and is not THAT the greatness of Bach, the interaction of blocks becoming events as they inter eachother in the act, in the course, of the line of melody? (I'm reminded here that Gregorian notes WERE blocks in manuscript, stems attached later to make flowers of 'em, and then, still later, strung along lined paper, etcetera. And sometime later, when the notes were well rounded, flowering right-and-upside-down, sporting flags, holes, etc., and all planted in the neat gardens of the page, all in rows, it was possible for Mozart to play Supreme Gardener; but there lurked Wagner who would, did, make of each line of melody a block, specifically referential, so that the French could image melody as a landscape, all thought referential to picture, i.e. to something OUTside the musical frame of reference. But then Webern made of it a cube, all lines of melody converging on some center to form a cluster or what composer James Tenney, writing about Varese, does call "a Klang." And it does seem to me that with John Cage we are, thru chance operations, to some approximation of Gregorian Chant again — not held to links, as of a chain-of-thought, but rather to the even more rigid mathematical bell-shaped curve.

J.S. Bach has been called "the greatest composer of the 20th century'; and his current popularity is probably due to the facts that (1) he was the greatest composer of his own time and (2) most of the western world has, in the meantime, come to think easily in a baroque fashion — come to think naturally baroquely, one might say were it not that this process of thought is the result of these several centuries of cultural training. The most modern baroqueists in music were, of course, the twelve-tonists: and my Anticipation of The Night was specifically inspired by the relationships I heard between the music of J.S. Bach and Anton Webern. The crisis of Western Man's historical thought processes struggling with the needs of contemporary living (technological as against mechanistic) has never been more clearly expressed than in Webern's adaptation of Bach's "Musical Offering" (which piece has inspired several films of mine, most dramatically the sound film Blue Moses): but the most essentially optimistic (if I may use so psychological a word) force of musical thought has come from Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Roussel, Satie and even Lili Boulanger, etcetera — all moving along a line of hearing into the inner ear (the sphere of "music of the spheres" being now consciously the human head) . . . just as all visual of The Illustrative have centered the occasions of their inspiration in the mind's eye (so-called "Abstract Painting" having a very concrete physiological basis in "closed eye vision").

I seek to hear color just as Messiaen seeks to see sounds. As he writes (in notes for the record of "Chronocromie"):

Colour: the sounds colour the durations because they are, for, bound to colour by unseen ties.

I find these "ties" to be sense impulses of the nervous system and find them to have exact physiological limitations but unlimited psychological growth potential thru the act of seeing and hearing, and/or otherwise sensing, them. Messiaen goes on:

When I listen to music, and even when I read it, I have an inward vision of marvellous colours — colours which blend like combinations of notes, and which shift and revolve with the sounds.

I recall first hearing shifting chords of sound that corresponded in meaningful interplay with what I was seeing when I was a child in a Kansas corn-field at mid-night. That was the first time I was in an environment silent enough to permit me to hear "the music of the spheres", as it's called, and visually specific enough for me to be aware of the eye's pulse of receiving image. John Cage once, in a sound-proof chamber, picked out a dominant fifth and was told later that he was hearing his nervous system and blood circulation: but the matter is a great deal more complicated than that — at least as much more complicated as the whole range of musical chord possibilities is to the, any dominant fifth . . . for instance, any tone of the inner- ear seems to  be hearable as a pulse, or wave of that tone, of irregular rhythm and tempo, "waveringness" one might say: and yet these hearable pulse-patterns repeat, at intervals, and reverse, and etcetera, in a way analogous to the "theme and variation" patterns of some western musical forms. External sounds heard seem to affect these inner-ear pulses more by way of the emotions engendered than by specific tonal and/or rhythmic correspondences: whereas the external pulse perceived by the eye does seem to more directly affect ear's in-pulse. But then that's a much more complicated matter, too, because the eye has its own in-pulse — the color red, for instance, will be held, with the eyes closed, as a retetion-color with a much different vibrancy, or pulse, than red seen with the eyes open, and so on — and the rhythm-pattern-flashes of the eye's-nerve-ends, making up the grainy shapes of closed-eye vision, are quite distinct from inner-ear's "theme and variations" . . . so much so that no familiar counter-point is recognizable. Well, just SO — for these fields of the mind feeling out its own physiology via eyes and ears turned inward, so to speak, are prime centers of inspiration for both musical and visual composers of this century who take Sense as Muse (as do all who recognize the move from Technological to Electrical Era of 20th century living) . . . and there is very little historical precedence in the working orders, or the achievements, of these artists.

Well, all of the above essaying (which grew way beyond any intended length) should at least serve to distinguish my intentions and processes, and whatever films of mine arise there-thru, from most of the rest of the so-called Underground Film Movement: and (as you asked specifically about this in your letter) I'll take the opportunity to emphasize that I feel at polar odds and ends therefrom whatever usually arises from that "movement" into public print, especially when journalists and critcis are presuming to write about myself and my work. I'm certainly nothing BUT uneasy about the any/everybody's too facile sense of mixed-media, which seems by report to be dominating the New York Scene, at the present. Whether the "mix" is per chance (operations) or per romance (opera) or per some scientic stance (Op) or just plain folksy, Gran Ol' Opray, dance (Pop), I've very little actual interest in it, nor in The Old Doc- (umentary) school, with its "spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down" either — all these socio-oriented effect-films being related to "The Cause" rather than Aesthetics . . . and some of them, naturally, working beautifully in that context; but most of them, these days, causing sensibility-crippling confusions in the long run, because all are sailing into import under the flag of "Art," leaving that term bereft of meaning and those films which are simply "beautiful works" (which will "do no work" but will "live forever," as Ezra Pound says of his songs) lacking the distinction that there IS that possibility for cinema, as established in all other arts, of works that can and must be seen many times, will last, have qualities of integrality to be shored against the dis-continuities of fashionable time. I do not ever like to see a "Cause" made of, or around, a work of art; and I strive to make films integrally cohesive enough to be impregnable to the rape of facile usage (shudder at the thought of Hitler shoveling eight million Jews into the furnace off the pages of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," etcetera, for instance). To be clear about it (and to answer another of your questions about my attitude toward increasing censorhip): I've many times risked jail sentences for showing films of mine which were, at the time, subject to sexual censorhip laws, and will do so again if the occasion arises: but I have never, and will never, force said works upon an unprepared or antagonistic audience, have never made them party-to/subject-of (and/or)/illustration-for "The Cause of Sexual Freedom" or some-such. I made those films, as all my films, out of personal necessity taking shape thru means available to me of historical aesthetics. I risked imprisonment showing them in order to meet the, as requested, needs of others.  To have forced these works upon others, because of my presumption of the good-for-them in such occasion, would have been to blaspheme agaisnt the process out of which the works arise and to have eventually destroyed myself as instrument of that process . . . freedom, of expression-or-other, can only exist meaningfully out of full respect to the means of its becoming: and a work of art does never impress, in the usual sense of the word, but rather is free-express always — and it does, therefore, require some free space, some fragile atmosphere of attenuated sensibility, in which to be received . . . the social strength of the arts is rooted in human need to freely attend, which demonstrates itself over and over again in that people finally DO create such an UNlikely (free of all likenesses) space wherein aesthetics (shaped with respect to his/somebody-else's and history's means) can be received. Let society's sex-pendulum swing "anti" again, if it will (tho' I hope it won't), the works of art of sex impulse will continue to be made as surely as babies and to have an eventual public life as surely as babies grow up.

Blessings,

Stan Brakhage

 Film Culture n° 67-68-69, 1979

Era uma vez o tempo em que havia cinema

 

Extraído do catálogo da mostra "ERAM OS ANOS 80", Cinemateca Portuguesa, 2010

Pequenas lembranças portuguesas

Extraído do catálogo da mostra "ERAM OS ANOS 80", Cinemateca Portuguesa, 2010

I didn’t know you, but I’ve been the places you’ve been

Blues anti-blues

...

(Stephen Calt, "Texas Worried Blues (Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929)", 1989)

[...] The research required an immense amount of time and energy, more than it might appear that a man like Thomas could justify. But there were two unique aspects of Thomas that kept McCormick on his trail. First, since Thomas would have been between 53 and 56 when he made his recordings in the late 1920s, he is probably the earliest-born bluesman ever recorded. His songs, in all probability learned during his formative years in the 1880’s and 90’s, are the best examples we have of that early blues music: blues, if not in its infancy, at least during early adolescence. And what completely appealing and satisfying music it is. Thomas’ powerful voice is both wise and benign, his guitar playing infections; and, alone among recorded bluesmen, Thomas also accompanies himself on a homemade instrument of reed pipes which were known as quills. They add a lyrical and melodic tone to his songs that supports Albert Murray’s contention in his recent Stomping the Blues, that the blues, sad as the lyrics might be, is really good-time music at the core. (Gregory Curtis, "A Case of the Blues", Texas Monthly, may 1977)

Tastes without clichés

Cycles of horror films are between six and seven years, then they go out in pop­ularity. We've reached the end of one cycle and there are not going to be horror films. The last one we did, The Comedy of Terrors, was the transition film, which leaned to comedy. Comedy of Terrors as a script was a beautiful script. It was a parody on Shakespeare, a comedy on hor­ror films. It had to do with a funeral en­terprise in 1900-1904 and it was a comedy, naturally—and it's a finished film that was not, I believe, understood very well. My wife and my friends say 'We don't like this film at all.' They say 'It's not you! Why did you do it?' I loved it and I'm sure that in Britain it'll be much more understood because it was cynical, cynical comedy, a little bit in the old René Clair tradition and no-one knew what it was all about in the States.

Roger Corman—his films, as far as I'm concerned, are adapted to young people, children—they're not for adults. Ours was extremely adult. That's what's wrong with it. because the people who go to the films today — especially the drive-ins in the States — are 19 years old and under. No­ one over 19 goes to the cinema in the States and our film was deliberately aim­ed at the mature thinking people who appreciate satire, who appreciate cynical humour—therefore it was completely lost on the kids who were looking for horror and they didn't get it.  There was no horror in it. It was a comedy about a mortician. We had a 15-day schedule and at four o'clock on the fifteenth day we were finished-couldn't shoot another scene if we wanted to — so we made a little trailer from four o'clock to five thirty, a little trailer for the film.

There are now in the States three hor­ror half-hour television shows every week, starting last September, and they've taken the edge off the horror films because they've made them so ridiculous that it's very difficult to frighten anyone now, so for the next five or six years the cycle of horror films will be dead as far as we're concerned and from now on it'll be ad­venture stories. In other words, City in the Sea is an adventure—it's on a par with Three Weeks in a Balloon, Journey to the Centre of the Earth—what we call the far­ out adventure film. The story basis of this is a poem, a short poem by Edgar Allan Poe called The City in the Sea.

It's in the Disney tradition in the sense that it's completely fanciful. It takes place in 1880, it's about Lyonesse which is a par­allel to Atlantis. Lyonesse is off the coast of Penzance. It's somewhere between the island of Sicily and Land's End, quite deep, and in 1880 at the equinoctial tides twice a year they heard the big bell—this is essence of the poem by Edgar Allen Poe. And there was an interesting red glow that occurred when the tide was ex­tremely low. Our adventurers by accident are caught in a maelstrom and sucked down to this city which is populated by fish-men which are mutations. And the city's been down there encrusted with bar­nacles and there's a thick forest of sea­ weed everywhere. These mutations of fish-men who have learned to live down there cannot come up into the air at all and the volcano, which is down there, which has not erupted but which is fomenting, has kept them alive with its heat. Principal photography is thirty days which is six weeks and then after that we'll have. I imagine, a week or ten days of underwater things.

I'm a devotee of anything that audiences haven't seen and I'm a fighter against the cliché within the limits of what I'm given.

In the average film you'll see someone receive a letter—well, I'll make a deliber­ate point of having that person if it's a day scene get up, go to the window and read it—if it's a night scene, go to the lamp and read it. If someone has to pick up a phone in a scene, I never have the phone right there. In the Dana Andrews film [Night of the Demon], he was in the hotel room, a man had to pull the phone—it was the wrong way round—because that happens in real life. I walk to the phone—this is the average film—in deadly silence I dial, six, seven, eight, nine times, you know—then I say hello. In my pictures l save my last sentence that I'm talking with you about. Before I get a chance to say the last sentence the phone rings. I walk to the phone and while dialing I say what I'm supposed to say. Result­—flow. Nobody else seems to do that—they have dead footage. There are certain tradi­tions which I hate. When the man pays off the taxi, he never gets any change. How many times have you seen the boy and girl are having a drink in a café—they get in an argument or something­—they leave. Nobody pays. How many times have you noticed that? These are dramatic licenses that I don't like. I fight these things.

I never look in the camera—camera­ men hate a director who is always look­ing in that thing—because I know pretty well what's on it. But I'm very adamant and descriptive about the source of light­ing, and if he doesn't give it to me I can tell on the set and I say, 'Look, this won't do. There's no logical source.' Most direc­tors from my observation take much too much time looking into the camera for the framing and forget the essential part which is the lighting.

I'm a great believer in cause and effect. To me a mistake is to show a man shootining a gun—you must see the effect. I don't care if it's a vase, if it's a window, or someone — immediately follow cause by effect. Because subconsciously they say, 'Gee, there was a bullet in that gun', but if a man fires a gun they know damn well it's a blank. We liked that woman [in Wichita]—we had to kill her. You feel more sorry for her if you see the splinter­ing door to show the terrific impact before it hits her rather than just hitting her dir­ectly with what's obviously a blank.

I've always fought second units. Whenever I have any authority at all I just don't have them. There's no second unit at all in Berlin Express. I was on that about six months. I think it's very unfair to criticise a film that's done on a very modest budget in 12 days in the same way that you'd criticise a 93-day film like Berlin Express. We don't have a chance to do anything interesting on a 12 or 14 day film like The Fearmakers. The script is written for a quickie. When you're mak­ing a long, long schedule thing, the script is written with many situations—and you do much more coverage, spend much more time rehearsing, you get a much better film.

I did a lot of research on Night of the Demon because we were rewriting it any­how. That's why Night of the Demon has a pseudo-honest approach. It's a vulgari­sation of the truth and next time I'm go­ing to do the truth about parapsychology. To me, Night of the Demon was two films. Three-fourths of the film to me was honest and in a pseudo-scientific way cor­rect—it was science fiction psychology but it was almost honest. Then the one-fourth of the film which had to do with the with the delineation of that monster belonged in another type of film which is the teenager horror film. Now had we carried on and made the whole film believable and logical and if we’d suggested that monster we would have had a completely honest film, but to me it’s two things. Actually the monster was taken right out of a book on demonoIogy—3-400 year old prints copied exactly—and it looked great, I must say, in a drawing so I said, ‘Pine, go ahead’. Then they put this thing on a man. I thought it was going to be suggested and fuzzy and drawn, in and out, appearing and disappearing, like a cartoon, animated. The film was edited after I left. It was my intention to use that panther but to edit it go that you’d say at the end ’Did I see a panther or didn’t I?’ whereas it was edited in such a bald way — when you really saw that was a stuffed animal, that was stupid. In the draughting room [of The Cat People], we had a black panther going between the tables. The panther was black—we kept everything black—so that you saw it but, you know, ‘Did I see it or didn’t I?’ We were so successful with the theory that anything your mind can conjure up will always be better than anything we can show that I’ve tried ever since, since, but ever since I’ve done independent films in which I go onto other films and they play with the film after I’ve left.

In the old days when you were under contract to studios, you were there all the time, you were expected to follow through on the editing and you could change the editing. Now. when you’re a journeyman director, according to the Director’s Guild ruling you’re allowed to look at the first rough cut which doesn’t mean a thing. You make notes—I usually look at a reel at a time and I have a stenographer there. They don't have to follow these directions. They go ahead and do what they want. Then you’re gone and the first time you see your film is in a cinema somewhere and you see crazy things— they’ve added scenes, shot great big close-ups of extra people reacting or, if it’s a laughing scene which I try to cover discreetly, a crowd laughing, after I’m gone they’ll take five dollar extras, big heads, ha ha ha ha, six seven, eight like that, and put it in the film. And it's got my name on the beginning. People say, ‘Gee Tourneur’s stupid’ 'He’s slipping’ or something. That exact same thing happened on Timbuktu—the producer shot one or two days with a lot of extra people shooting close-ups, inserted those in the film, and hurt it terribly. The ambulance ringing [in Night of ihe Demon]—that was done after I left. There was no ambulance in the film. They added miles and miles of an ambulance—you don’t know who’s in it.

I started directing in 1932—was editing from 1928 to 1932. I was a contract director to Pathé-Natan, paid by the month, and I was directing features and I was getting around $50 a week which wasn’t much money. And we hadn’t been married too long—my wife and I—and of course I had been brought up in California and I went to school there, I liked the climate. And I made a mistake—I thought it would be very easy, I could quickly get a film in Hollywood having done four features in France. So we just packed up and took a chance. We said we’Il go over there—if it doesn’t work we can always come back. Then it took me a year or two—I had to do second units, but even doing second units MGM was paying me $100 a week which was twice what I was doing features for.

I worked for three months [on A Tale of Two Cities] — we had a unit which was called the French Revolutionafy Unit of which Val Lewton was the producer. I was the director. We had our own script which Val Lewton wrote which had to do with all the storming of the Bastille, that bit of it. So we were responsible for that and I shot 10 or 11 days. That’s how we met Then Lewdon went to RKO as a producer, he asked for me and we did The Cat People and a few other films.

The Department of Justice asked Mr. Louis B. Mayer if he would make in his short subjects a two-reel subject about the Federal Penitentiaries. So since I was doing shorts they sent me to five or six . . . all over the United States. Then Mr John Higgins wrote a two-reel Crime Does Not Pay story with actors about that. The two-reel thing comes out and Mr. Louis B. Mayer looks at it and says, 'This is interesting. We’re now doing featurettes, we’re going to do four-reel films to complete the programme.’ They said call back Johnny Higgins and write two more reels. So we had an awful time getting the actors together. They were all over the place. We had to wait a month or two before we could get them all together.

We cut that together—three months go by—Mr. Mayer looks at it: ‘This is four reels—this shouldn’t be a featuretter—this should be six reels and be a full-length feature.’ We wait, get all the actors together again and we finished with a full length feature called They All Come Out which  unbelievably  made  good sense. Looking at it you’d never think it was first two reels, then four reels, then six reels. It  was a tour de force on the part of Mr. John C. Higgins and that’s how I did my first feature, at MGM. Then they put me into Nick Carters and those things.

 
I did the first two Nick Carters and then they made more and I left and went to RKO. The first A feature was the one with Gregory Peck [Days of Glory] — that was a very big budget. There were 35 people in it, not one of whom had ever been on any screen beforer—an experiment by Casey Robinson. There was one exception—Hugo Haas had in Hungary or wherever he was made one or two little silent films. In those days they were exalting the Great Russian Guerilla. Four years later it was anathema.

All B fiIms and especially horror film in those days were done in terrible taste—a general lack of taste. Val Leyton we a man of innate good taste and we worked beautifully together. I think Cat People was a bit above the average and so was I Walked With A Zombie. I Walked With A Zombie was to me the best. It was very poetic—a horrrible title. The film had nothing to do with the title. It was all at night and it was an authentic, documentary approach to voodoo in Haiti. We showed the real voodoo rites — we had real voodoo people come in. We used for the first time in any fitm a calypso singer—he told the story. It began and whenever we were having a dramatic scene somewhere in the street at night he’d go by singing and he was observing this drama going on and telling us, just like the old Greek tragedies. This gave a wonderful poésie to the film. It was Jane Eyre really. We were looking for a subject—well, it was public domain so we said let‘s take Jane Eyre and put it in Haiti with a voodoo singer.

Joel McCrea's a friend of mine and one day he gave me the book [of Stars In My Crown] and said, 'I'm going to make this picture at MGM.' Well, I read the book and I fell in love with it because it was such a heartwarming story about a boy and his father, a wonderful story. I went to see the producer at MGM and I said, 'I want to make this picture'. He said, `Jacques, I'm sorry, it's a B picture, a quickie, and we're going to put a contract director on it.' So I went to see Eddie Mannix who was the boss. He said the same thing: 'It's a little B picture. We can't pay your price'. To which I said to Eddie, 'I'll do this picture for nothing'. He said, 'Do you mean it?"Yes. Now that's cheaper than your contract director.' He said, 'I'll call you Monday.' Well, he called me Monday and he said, 'We're not allowed to pay you nothing because there's a Guild and we'll have to pay you a minimum.' So I said, 'Fine. Pay me the minimum'.

I shot the picture very quickly and the picture came out. Nobody saw it, nobody saw this picture. It had a bad title, it's the best picture I've ever done, the one I like the best. I didn't get any money and it lowered my price. I was way down, I couldn't get any more money, but it was worth it because I loved every bit of that picture.

My favourite film for years and years and years is Lilies of the Field. It was a 12-day thing. It cost nothing. I voted for that at the Academy as Best Picture of the Year. I don't see many films. I do at the Academy—once a year I see about 30 or 40 in the spring when we vote. I saw Tom Jones three times and liked it better the third time.

This director Sam Peckinpah worked with me as dialogue director on one or two films—he was on Wichita and he always said he admired my style on Wichita. He was very anxious to become a director and by accident one day I was downtown in Los Angeles and I had nothing to do and I saw Ride the High Country [Guns in the Afternoon]—it was just great. It was John Ford when John Ford was good, 10-15 years ago. It was the first honest western I'd seen in years and years and years. I'm very anxious to see Major Dundee.

I'm a great, great believer—I'm not a nut on this subject but I've been a student for forty years—I'm a great believer in parallel worlds — you know, to do with vibrations—which I'm certain of. I've never in my whole life initiated a film—I've always taken what they've given to me. But I'm starting now.

There is a parallel world. I want to show it. I'd like to make almost a documentary on parapsychology—using actors. I'm going to use all the scientific things as against ghosts. I'm going to make my own mistakes now. I'm either going to make a great film or a terrible film.

(Adapted from a tape-recorded interview with Allen Eyles and Barrie Pattison).

Films and Filming n°12, November 1965

Jean-Claude Biette "Neuf questions aux nouveaux cinéastes"

Cinématographe n° 49, juillet 1979

Nick Ray

Cinématographe n° 49, juillet 1979

Marcel Hanoun

La revue du cinéma nº 265, novembre 1972

Luc Moullet

 

La revue du cinéma nº 265, novembre 1972

contre-champ (II)

 Contre-champ n° 6-7, octobre 1963

contre-champ

 

Contre-champ n° 6-7, octobre 1963