Metaphors on vision (1963)

envaled in the ideal of toasting the budding spring and here was this decaying, stinking corpse right beside the path where we had to walk, and he literally did not, could not, or would not see it. All three attitudes, I think, arise from the same source. When did you decide to film the body? I filmed it all during that winter and did the last photography the day right after Parker and Charles visited. At that time the corpse was all torn up. I, sobbing each time, went out alone with camera and photographed it. Jane said something after watching me photograph it that made me realize the deep form taking place. She knew dogs. She told me that every time I went to photograph that body: 1) I was trying to bring it back to life by putting it in movement again; 2)1 was uprighting it by taking the camera at an angle that tended to make the dog's image upright on the screen; 3) (which was really significant) Jane had often watched dogs do a strange dance around dead bodies not only of their own species but of others (It's like a round dance: the dogs, individually or in a pack, often will circle a dead body and then rub the neck very sensually all along the corpse perfuming themselves from the stench of decomposition). Those were literally the kinds of movements with which I was involved in making SIRIUS REMEMBERED without realizing it. Jane threw open the whole animal world; that is, the animal parts of myself that were at that moment engaged in filming the body. I also find two intellectual parts: 1) the influence of very tight, formal music — possibly Webern - and 2) Gertrude Stein who has always influenced you. Now, where were you in relationship to the musical forms? At this moment I was coming to terms with decay of a dead thing and the decay of the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast out of probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my source of inspiration for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm structures or rhythm intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of song. I won't try to guess out of what urgency. But was not Webern an influence? Not at this point; I had been through Webern's influence. Webern and Bach were strong influences on ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT. But the structure that was dominating rhythmically would be like jazz. ..no not jazz. ..it would be like song, simple song, plain song - plain song, that's what it was clearly— Gregorian chant! That kind of howling would be the rhythm structure that was dominating SIRIUS REMEMBERED. Where were you in terms of perceiving Gertrude Stein? i would say the greatest influence that she had on SIRIUS REMEMBERED was by way of my realization that there is no repetition; that every time a word is "repeated" it is a new word by virtue of what word precedes it and follows it, etc. This freed me to "repeat" the same kind of movements. So I could literally move back and forth over the animal in repeated patterns. There are three parts to the film: first there is the animal seen in the fall as just having died, second there are the winter shots in which he's become a statue covered with snow, and third there's the thaw and decay. That third section is all REmembered where his members are put together again. All previous periods of his existence as a corpse, in the fall, the snow, and the thaw are gone back and forth over, recapitulated and interrelated. Gertrude Stein gave me the courage to let images recur in this fashion and in such a manner that there was no sense of repetition. You've spoken before of effects of snow and whiteness. This was the time before PRELUDE, while you were making THE DEAD. You've spoken before of the power of whiteness, and you have images of snow in SIRIUS REMEMBERED. Can you see how this would be a motif? Yes , there are certain motifs that emerge through all my work, but some of them come together most clearly in SIRIUS REMEMBERED. One example would be "the tree." 0ver and over again the camera pans from the corpse up a tree. I had no sense of why I was doing that at the time, but now I realize I was planting the first seeds of my concern withthe image of the white tree which dominates DOG STAR MAN; and remember the dog star is Sirius. So there for the first time the dog star is emerging, and then man's relation with dog or my pitching my sense of self into the dog corpse. My abstract senses of death were conflicting with the actual decay of a corpse. First, when it wouldn't decay and turn into clean white bones and then when it did. What we finally had to face in terms of those bones was ironic. We had already gotten a new dog called "The Brown Dog." We wanted him to be the opposite of what Sirius was. He was a bum that we saved from death in the dog pound. He