Metaphors on vision (1963)

o in c O) CO O < I o O UJ Q UJ Q. E O o 5 ro CQ co DEAD — ARE dead. They're the walking dead; but he was a living dead. So he became my double in a sense - my "stand-in," you might say. He was the image that was most immediately available for me to cast out there as statement: "Do you want this? ... Do you want to be trapped by all those symbols? ... Do you want to be trapped six ways sideways by concepts that are ahead of where you actually are? " And then my answer was: "No! " Then I could structure THE DEAD by way of the concept of the future as that through which we can't live. When we're living through it it's different from the concept of it. It's comparable to how you can't live through death. So the question becomes one of all that is pitched out of life; how the walking dead come to be that; and how what is sculpted IN stone becomes concept of what is sculpted OUT OF stone; and how the living people do relate to that, and how even trees, shaped that way and so ordered and structured, become living dead and like the walking dead, who are people so dead on their feet that you can't even use the word "living" in relationship to them... well ,not Kenneth. He was shining with all that beauty and concern with life; and yet he was trapped six ways sideways by forms he had pitched ahead of himself - all that he wanted to do (such as film MALDOROR) and could not find the means or the money to do. This was intensely painful to me. I would have given anything to have found a way for him to do what he wanted, not only to see MALDOROR done by Kenneth Anger, or maybe not even formost for that reason, but to let Kenneth have a way to accomplish it so that he could have gotten through it and could have gone on. He was ultimately defeated. There's new hope for Kenneth now because he did escape from that trap which MALDOROR posed for him and he IS back in the United States and has a new film in progress. Europe, weighted down so much with that past, was THE DEAD. I was always Tourist there; I couldn't live in it.The graveyard could stand for all my view of Europe, for all the concerns with past art, for all involvement with symbol. THE DEAD became my first workin which things that might veryeasily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making THE DEAD kept me alive. How did you gt> about editing PRELUDE; and what do you mean by the Freudian dream aspect of it? ° ' Right from the start I had some sense, and I don't quite know where it came from, that the work would be in four parts with a prelude. Once Jane and I had gone through the whole gathering process to get that total world and had survived the sense of death that was postured by collecting the material, the next step was to get a sense of the form of the film. At first I could only think of that large a work in symbolic terms. I thought, for instance, that the man climbs the mountain out of winter and night into the dawn, up through spring and early morning to midsummer and high noon, to where he chops down the tree. ..then I don't know what: but I know that there's a Fall - and the fall backto somewhere, midwinter - my idea of what that fall will be still remains nebulous. I thought of DOG STAR MAN as seasonably structured that way; but also, while it encompasses a year and the history of man in terms of the image material (e.g. trees become architecture for a whole history of religious monuments or violence becomes the development of war), I thought it should be contained within a single day. Then I thought about what any day's form-structure touches off. One thing I knew for sure (from my own dreaming) was that what one dreams just before waking structures the following day. That dream material is gathered from the previous day, and therefore is a gathering of all previous days, ergo contains the structure of all history, of all Man. I hadn't been involved directly with Freudian concepts, or even psychology, since I'd departed from drama as major structurer of my work; but suddenly drama, and psychodrama therefore, became pertinent to me in a new way. The first step in recognition of this was that I began re-reading Freud intensively to learn those early structures of dream experience. I had the sense that I could make a prelude before creating any of the rest of the work. Generally in the history of art, preludes are composed of parts and bits from the work to follow. Now I wanted to compose the prelude first, rather than last (as is usual), so that the rest of the work would spring out of the prelude. I had only a vague concept of the four parts that would follow. So I realized that whatever happened within this prelude would determine what was to come; and in that sense I wanted it to be as real from the very beginning as life happening. I wanted PRELUDE to be a created dream for the work that follows rather than Surrealism which takes its inspiration from dream; I stayed close to practical usage of dream material, in terms of learning and studying, for a while before editing. At this time I left strict myth considerations out of my study process as much as possible. But there is much myth in it. isn't there? Naturally, there's much myth in it. But that was not the primary concern at this time.