INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 2
Friday 16 November 2012, at 8pm
Barcelona Xcèntric CCCB

Mark Webber: Could you tell me about the making of Soft Fiction?

Chick Strand: I had a friend named Beverley Houston who, with Marsha Kinder, wrote books about films and were film historians at USC. We’d all been to an art show down on Wiltshire Boulevard and as we were leaving, we were sort of lingering on the staircase with our hands on the banister, just sort of gossiping, and Beverley told me this story about the time she went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. She said there was a piece that was a banister, a three dimensional banister … I don’t know who it was by, I don’t think it was George Segal, it was by somebody else. She was stoned at the Norton Simon Museum, and she began to wonder what it would be like to be that banister and have people touch you. Then she moved on to the David statue and also wondered what it would be like to be that and feel everything, rather than be the person that feels. It was such a bizarre story to me that I thought, “I gotta put this in a film,” so I filmed her telling the story with a borrowed a lipsync camera. For a while my friends would say, “What you working on Chick?” And I’d tell them, and they’d say, “I have a story, I have a story …”

There was a story about the girl and her grandfather … she would never say ‘abused’, but she was molested, I guess, by her grandfather. In the film, she finally says that he was ‘teaching’ her, in a way. It was before all this crazy stuff over here, like the guy who’s 18 and screws a 16-year-old girlfriend and gets put in prison as a sex offender, but it’s really not right that the grandfather did that. She was my student and I would make my students write journals. I’d say, “You can lie. If you don’t want to tell me, you can lie.” Anyway, she wrote this story in her journal and I asked her if she would repeat the story, and not only that but would she come naked? Could I film her in a kitchen naked making breakfast while the story’s going on?

With the rest of them it was the same kind of thing … There was the woman who fucked all the cowboys. None of that went over in the 1970s at all! People in the audience would say, “How could you do that, how could you make guys think we want to fuck all the cowboys?” And I said, “And how many erotic daydreams do you have about guys fucking you?” It was sort of over the top at the time but now it’s pretty ordinary I suppose. I’m talking about honesty or whether these stories are real.

There’s another woman that talks about a heroin addiction and the guy she was going with was just a killer, meaning he was so good looking … only a lot of people took it that meant he was a serial killer. I don’t know to this day whether that was real or not. I don’t want to know, because that’s part of what film is, you know, you get what is given and that’s the interesting thing.

MW: What kind of reactions would you get from people at the time?

CS: Well, nobody said too much about the grandfather story because that was really intimate. I guess she had accepted it. The whole idea of the film, finally when I got to those stories, was that these women are not victims. They can say, “Fuck you!” at the end of their experience, which is, I think, the goal. They’ve not been victimised, they go beyond it in a way. But the audiences didn’t like the screwing of the cowboys, and not only that but going to the horse stall, which was better than the dorm room, and blowing this other guy! You know, in our wildest dreams we’d love to do it once or twice, this anonymous orgy kind of thing, I suppose. She didn’t want to be shown in the film, so I found this other woman to read it. She’d never seen it before I gave it to her to read on camera. So she’s commenting about it, “Oh, she’s saying this … of course, blah, blah, blah.” Feminist ladies didn’t like that much at all. They didn’t say much about the heroin addiction either. I mean, Johanna’s so sure of herself, you know? “And I quit and I never did it again.” But by then she’d had these two young teenage boys … so we’ve always left it at that. And nobody said much about Hedy Sontag, who was Susan Sontag’s cousin, and who was the little girl in Poland sitting on the Nazi’s lap.

MW: What was the male response to the film?

CS: After I shot it I would say I wanted to make one about men, which I did want to do for a long time, but I never did. I would get some interesting stories, like from a Vietnam Veteran, another one of my students, who just described bodies being turned inside out … this close to death, close to craziness experience. Another was going to be Pat O’Neill, who had a near death experience when he had an aneurysm. Then there’s the young beautiful guys that are sort of wild that I wanted to use for the musical interludes, an idea I got from Mexican films – only five minutes of story and then there’s a song. Why not? But I never did do it.

These excerpts are from an interview with Chick Strand was conducted on 15 March 2008 for the forthcoming book “Critical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond”. Initial research for this project was funded by the British Academy.

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