An Ethics and an Aesthetics of Interviewing

My decision to interview independent filmmakers as a central dimension of my research came as the conclusion of a long wrestle with the question of how I could best serve my field. By the time I was finished with graduate school (I received my PhD in English from the University of Florida in 1970; my focus was American literature during the period from Gertrude Stein through Richard Wright; my dissertation was "Narrative Perspective in the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway"), I was dubious about the value of scholarship, at least to the extent that scholarship was written criticism of authors' works. I know this will sound arrogant, but having read all the scholarship I could find on narrative perspective in fiction and on Hemingway's short stories and novels—it took the better part of a year—I came to feel that my time would have been better spent had I simply reread Hemingway and/or had broadened my experience of modern fiction. "Publish or perish" had already become an academic mantra, and it seemed to me that the function of most of what was published, at least on Hemingway, had less to do with discovering new insights into his work than with climbing the academic ladder toward financial security and social status. Especially to a young man rebelling against the values of suburban America, this did not sound like a particularly worthy goal.

By the time I finished my graduate work, I had become fascinated with film history (an interest shared by many English PhDs of my generation), as well as with literature, and had taught a basic film course during my final semester at Florida. Once I was lucky enough to find a teaching job (at Utica College of Syracuse University) that allowed me to offer courses in both fields, I tried to forget about publishing or perishing, so that I could focus on my teaching. While I felt reasonably comfortable with the American literature courses I was assigned during those early semesters, I struggled to understand what films to teach and how to teach them. Like many of my colleagues who began teaching film without having had the opportunity to study it in any organized academic context, I was desperately trying to learn enough about film history to feel comfortable teaching in this new discipline.

My desperation led me to any and every film event I could discover in the Central New York area, and especially to the Cinema Studies Department at what had just become the State University of New York at Binghamton (it had been Harpur College), where Larry Gottheim had established a beachhead for avant-garde film in the academy. As a result of the events I attended at Binghamton, and a summer institute I attended at Hampshire College sponsored by the University Film Study Association, I became fascinated with American avant-garde film in much the same way that, years earlier, I had become fascinated with modern American fiction. Before long, I wanted to share my new fascination with students and with my colleagues at the college and beyond. I began offering public screenings of films by Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Larry Gottheim, Hollis Frampton, Carolee Schneemann, and others, and in doing so, I realized that for most audiences (as well as for me), these screenings raised a good many questions that I was ill prepared to answer effectively.

Remembering that one element of the research I had done in American literature that had seemed valuable was reading Malcolm Cowley's interviews with American writers, I decided that by interviewing filmmakers whose work, albeit fascinating, seemed particularly difficult, I might provide a service not only to myself and others working to come to terms with the films, but to the filmmakers themselves. It did not take long to realize that making avant-garde film was a poorly rewarded challenge for the makers, and that they and their work often remained in relative obscurity, regardless of the accomplishments of their films. At base, I wanted to avoid what seemed to me an exploitive use of these filmmakers; I did not want...