The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

L’âge d’or
137
quickly. The do-it-yourself aesthetic of music in 1977 took a long time to
bleed through to film, that’s for sure.
You’ve talked about Buñuel and Dalí as film novices, as primitives, and
the kind of accidents you have when you’re a klutzy novice filmmaker
that lend themselves to surrealism. But has technology made breaking
into film harder or easier?
Maddin: I don’t know. There were all sorts of other underground films that
were pretty exciting that had already found their maximum audience. I later
discovered them and then quickly started making my own pictures. I began
to realize that it would never catch on in a big way.
It just seems like people who watch films expect more earthbound things
from the medium than they do from any other art form, because a lot of
people forget that it’s art, and that it’s even artificial. You hear people complaining
all the time that movies aren’t realistic, as if they have an obligation
to be realistic, or if they’re even trying to be realistic. I hate using the word
realistic. You don’t hear people complaining about music being unrealistic
or paintings being unrealistic or photographs being unrealistic. “Hey, a
photo only has two dimensions—what’s with that?”
For some reason, even if you took the most hardcore mohawked punk
rockers from 1979 and showed them an experimental film, half the time
they’d walk out of it. They’d rather watch a big-budget Hollywood movie of
the time. Now it’s different. And I expected more when I watched art films
or experimental films with dancers. You’d expect them to be more openminded,
but they would complain that the film was unrealistic. A lot of
people have trouble with melodrama because they find the performances
over-the-top. That’s an expression you hear over and over again.
It just seems like primitive film—the same thing as melodrama. So, many
people when they sit down to watch a movie, all of a sudden get . . . I guess
they get sucked into the spell of film and actually start watching it for signs
of surface implausibility, continuity errors, and all sorts of other odd things.
Thank God jump cuts are starting to proliferate. In the past few years were
those books, which logged all the continuity errors.
Roman Soldiers Don’t Wear Watches. I remember that.