<\/p>\n
INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 2
\n<\/strong>Friday 16 November 2012, at 8pm
\n<\/strong>Barcelona Xc\u00e8ntric CCCB<\/p>\nMark Webber:<\/em> Could you tell me about the making of Soft Fiction<\/em>?<\/p>\nChick Strand:<\/em> I had a friend named Beverley Houston who, with Marsha Kinder, wrote books about films and were film historians at USC. We\u2019d 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 \u2026 I don\u2019t know who it was by, I don\u2019t 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, \u201cI gotta put this in a film,\u201d so I filmed her telling the story with a borrowed a lipsync camera. For a while my friends would say, \u201cWhat you working on Chick?\u201d And I\u2019d tell them, and they\u2019d say, \u201cI have a story, I have a story \u2026\u201d<\/p>\nThere was a story about the girl and her grandfather \u2026 she would never say \u2018abused\u2019, but she was molested, I guess, by her grandfather. In the film, she finally says that he was \u2018teaching\u2019 her, in a way. It was before all this crazy stuff over here, like the guy who\u2019s 18 and screws a 16-year-old girlfriend and gets put in prison as a sex offender, but it\u2019s really not right that the grandfather did that. She was my student and I would make my students write journals. I\u2019d say, \u201cYou can lie. If you don\u2019t want to tell me, you can lie.\u201d 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\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n
With the rest of them it was the same kind of thing \u2026 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, \u201cHow could you do that, how could you make guys think we want to fuck all the cowboys?\u201d And I said, \u201cAnd how many erotic daydreams do you have about guys fucking you?\u201d It was sort of over the top at the time but now it\u2019s pretty ordinary I suppose. I\u2019m talking about honesty or whether these stories are real.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 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 \u2026 only a lot of people took it that meant he was a serial killer. I don\u2019t know to this day whether that was real or not. I don\u2019t want to know, because that\u2019s part of what film is, you know, you get what is given and that\u2019s the interesting thing.<\/p>\n
MW:<\/em> What kind of reactions would you get from people at the time?<\/p>\nCS:<\/em> 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, \u201cFuck you!\u201d at the end of their experience, which is, I think, the goal. They\u2019ve not been victimised, they go beyond it in a way. But the audiences didn\u2019t 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\u2019d love to do it once or twice, this anonymous orgy kind of thing, I suppose. She didn\u2019t want to be shown in the film, so I found this other woman to read it. She\u2019d never seen it before I gave it to her to read on camera. So she\u2019s commenting about it, \u201cOh, she\u2019s saying this \u2026 of course, blah, blah, blah.\u201d Feminist ladies didn\u2019t like that much at all. They didn\u2019t say much about the heroin addiction either. I mean, Johanna\u2019s so sure of herself, you know? \u201cAnd I quit and I never did it again.\u201d But by then she\u2019d had these two young teenage boys \u2026 so we\u2019ve always left it at that. And nobody said much about Hedy Sontag, who was Susan Sontag\u2019s cousin, and who was the little girl in Poland sitting on the Nazi\u2019s lap.<\/p>\nMW:<\/em> What was the male response to the film?<\/p>\nCS:<\/em> 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 \u2026 this close to death, close to craziness experience. Another was going to be Pat O\u2019Neill, who had a near death experience when he had an aneurysm. Then there\u2019s 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 \u2013 only five minutes of story and then there\u2019s a song. Why not? But I never did do it.<\/p>\nThese excerpts are from an interview with Chick Strand was conducted on 15 March 2008 for the forthcoming book \u201cCritical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond\u201d. Initial research for this project was funded by the British Academy.<\/em><\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 2 Friday 16 November 2012, at 8pm Barcelona CCCB Xc\u00e8ntric As one of the instigators of Canyon Cinema, Chick Strand (1931-2009) was at the heart of 1960s West Coast avant-garde. Her body of work, comprising of found footage and personally photographed material, has an astounding strength and vitality. Strand\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chick-strand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}