Conversation with Keith Sanborn (Spring - Autumn 2006)

Keith Sanborn:

“…You had
to be there
at the time
to be truly seduced by them.”


Svitlana Matviyenko: The effect produced by film depends on how its image and sound get layered with my private: my memory, my desires, my fears, and my fantasy. To some extent, it depends on the social codes as well. The private and social distort one another.

You said your films are about filmmaking. But would you agree that they are even more about perception of films, about your experience as a viewer? For instance, I think of Joan’s face while she is burning at the stake -- the fragment from Karl Dreyer’s film you used. In your film, her face looks so erotic. That's how you saw her in Dreyer’s film. In your piece, you are working with a sudden effect of your perception. And it is very personal. It makes your film be not “about” Dreyer’s filmmaking, not “about” Joan of Arc [cannot believe, but I’ve just twice misspelled her name -- “Joan of Art” -- where is my Lacan?], but “about” Keith Sanborn.

How much do you depend on the material you work with? In other words, what is your starting point: your experience of film or an idea, thought, concept?

Keith Sanborn: My starting point is always a moment, an experience of a film. Sometimes that means a particular shot, sometimes it might be an image which repeats in a film, or just something which strikes me. The image of Joan of Arc which I took from the Dreyer film, in the original had actually been cut up into several pieces. I discovered this when I put them back together to try to extend the length of the shot. I also slowed it down of course. So, in this case, oddly, I reconstituted a part of the shooting of the film, which does not exist in the prints we have of Joan of Arc, even the best one. My experience, in short, my private experience of a film is always primary. Sometimes I try to work in terms of a theme, but this seldom pans out. As soon as I start to talk about it I lose sight of the language of images from which a film must come into being. So, in a sense these do come out of a personal experience of watching the particular films I include, but images always come trailing their historical baggage behind them. The problem is that the context of the original becomes invisible. Histoire du soldat inconnu by Henri Storck is a prime example. While we appreciate something about its form, as someone born in 1952, rather than 1900, the work simply does not have the immediate historical impact for me that it would have for one of Storck’s contemporaries. He was playing with the references, the meanings, the immediacy of the images he used. I have also show A Movie by Conner to a number of generations of students. It seems to come in and out of visibility: to some it’s merely a kitschy collection of images, or less. The concept of kitsch itself is almost completely outmoded as audiences loose consciousness of a sense of history, let alone admit the possibility of historically bounded modes of consciousness. Others have more sensitivity to the strangeness of the images he employs and to the nuances of his efforts at montage.


SM: In my next question, I want to bring up the issue of copyright that having been discussed widely. What does the copyright own? Do you see any contradictions of this low?

KS: Your mention of Lacan and Joan of Art calls attention here to low and law. There’s a slight deflection here; maybe just a typo, but it’s a starting point: how we enunciate words and how they exist beyond us; yup: parole and langue. We speak from the intersection of the personal and the social. We are plural beings in that sense, especially when we step across linguistic boundaries. When we move from one language to another, we always drag along with us, our experience of language, including and especially our “first” language, our regional dialects, etc.

Copyright is structured as a kind of mediation between the author of a work and his/her/its public. I include “its” because corporations, who can conceivably live forever, also “own” works, though they are only remotely the authors of them: they finance them—with the possible exceptions of works of collective authorship like Q and the Reena Spallings novel. Though in the latter case the authors are more properly called “collectives” than “corporations.” To return to where I started, it’s the “mediation” which is important and problematic. One starting point in my work would be “The Artwork in the Age…” I point to this problem: what is copyrighted: the message which interdicts reproduction or the work which follows? The injunction NOT to copy normally is understood as pointing to the work which follows it; if so, can it also point to itself, if it does not explicityly do so? I would argue not. How can something which points beyond it also point at itself. Artworks do this all the time, but in law such a point, I believe, must be made explicit.

This comes to bear as images proliferate and determine our worldview to the same extent as and in competition with language. We might say that “images have a language of their own” but we should never forget the medium of this observation: it is linguistic, and that is to say it is a metaphor, a transference of meaning. This is not just a relativist banality. We communicate through our structuring of images and through our structuring of language, but normally we only think of language as having critical status. My work attempts to argue otherwise. It is a kind of critical discourse via images and what makes explicitly critical is precisely the reuse of pre-existing images. Public images have more the status of “langue” than parole; they come dragging something of their public meaning, their public identify as signifiers, as part of a vast network of signifiers, along with them whenever they appear. I’m not sure if “aura” is translatable into “langue”; I like to think of “aura” has having more to do with what we might think of as the phenomenological, or less problematically, the perceptual existence of the work.

SM: Does an image or fragment you use get entirely uprooted and detached from its initial context and source?

KS: To answer your question about an image being uprooted, I would have to appeal to Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “A word means whatever I choose it to mean… It’s a question of who’s to be master, that’s all.” That is, there is an absurdity in the claim that we can use language in an utterly personal way. That’s a contradiction in terms: language has an inherently public aspect, an Impersonal one and at the same time we know that those who govern try to manipulate the use of language: War is Peace, Saddam Hussein caused 9/11, Iran is a Nuclear threat. And those who put images into the “public sphere”—mostly only corporations or governments—seek to control us through their images and through the use that is made of them, including the interdiction to reproduction them. In short, we can either master the language of images or be mastered by it.

These insights can be expanded somewhat prismatically: one can easily argue that any film participates in an entire history of representation, whether its explicitly acknowledges that debt in a legal sense. Scorsese speaks of “Dreyer shots” he’s included in various films, and yet he never copies them photographically or digitally at a literal level. His reproduction of Dreyer is see as licit, mine probably as illicit.

SM: I’ve been thinking about two different ideas -- Walter Benjamin’s “aura” and Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” –- they both suggest that the medium is what brings a viewer “closer” to a piece of art, although they see the way the medium functions differently.

SK: I’m not sure these two ideas are equivalent, though they may be related. Aura for Benjamin is first of all a function of scarcity: it derives from the hiddenness of the work, its not being available. A condition which is altered by technical reproduction and as he actually says reproducibility (Reproducierbarkeit). But the aura returns with the “star.” The star lends his or her numinous presence to the work; the star carries legends and myth which exist outside the film in the press above all. In a sense aura is reborn precisely within repetition: one sees a film repeatedly, the star becomes the object of personal fantasy (for millions), dreams, masturbatory reveries. Baseball trading cards are like Saints cards. Interestingly, there has recently been an extraordinary rise in touring by “big name” music groups. People want the “live” “real” experience to supplement their experience of the recorded work, which is how most people now experience music. Correlative to this is the lack of respect for musicians. No one wants to devote themselves to learning music (at least in the US) when they can turn it on like a faucet and more or less for free. I suppose the related phenomenon would be people vacating movie theatres in favor of DVDs AND in favor of seeing their favorite starts on Broadway. A lot of Hollywood movie actors, for one reason or another, have been doing Broadway shows in recent years, whether to shore up sagging careers, bring a change in their daily routines, or to make more money.

In a way McLuhan is a lot closer to the structuralist point of view than you might acknowledge. The structuralists were in any case interested in McLuhan and more or less read him as a kind of formalist. Thus, they felt he supported their investigation of cinematic form, as opposed to dramatic form in narrative film.

SM: In one interview you said: “I’m interested in how do you actually perceive things that are at the edge of your visual horizon, the horizon of your consciousness? I think that is really what motivates religious or mystical thinking. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it thinking, because it’s at once that and something more than that. Not to view it in a hierarchical way, but it’s about an investigation into the possibility for meaning.” It’s interesting to me in terms of Deleuze’s concept of a non-thinking-body: he refers to the body in its sleep or in its drunkenness (I would add the body having sex and the body watching, for instance, film and so on and on).

KS: I like the idea of the unthinking body; I think that many filmmakers have an experience parallel to this one: when I am working on a film, especially at the editing stage—which is most of the work, most of the time for me, though I do actually shoot film from time to time—that I can no longer impose my will on it. I am forced to listen to it; it tells me how it wants to be edited. This kind of experience of the unthinking body is a kind of dialogue with the unconscious, though often not a verbal dialogue—we must never forget this is a metaphor. Even to say “it tells me” is a verbal metaphor: I don’t hear voices, but the images or sounds just seem to want to go a certain way. This is a somewhat idealistic metaphor, because then we think about whether editing is more like solving a puzzle, or recreating the insights of an analytic session. My work is NOT therapy for me or anyone else, though it might investigate issues related to psychoanalysis. After this dialogue, finally one does step back, to frame the experience, to put it in perspective, to make certain that the unconscious elements have not betrayed the conscious project to the extent of subverting it completely. The unconscious always subverts the conscious to some degree, but it’s that “dialogue” between the two which is of interest precisely because of its complexity and because it is a struggle for power, for mastery in some odd Hegelian sense, this was what I was trying to get at in Semi-private sub-Hegelian Panty fantasy (with sound).


SM: How do you explain the “consensual hallucination” in the subtitle for your Zapruder Footage?

KS: "Consensual hallucination" is a kind of way of saying that those who see this and especially Americans, and perhaps especially American of my age who were alive for the JFK assassination, see it as a kind of religious myth. A document which is at once transparent and utterly opaque. The basis of a kind of mystery religion (see Frazer's Hanged God). A beautiful young man (Dionysos, Christ, JFK) is immolated as a public spectacle. A culture hero whose demise is ultimately an absurdity, a crime and a mystery. This 8mm home movie was the basis of the Warren [Commission] Report, the official US Government inquiry into the assassination which most people see as a white wash and a fraud. Governments are the same everywhere, no?

I don't know if I said this before but an Iraqui guy brought up in Morocco who I met in Holland asked me if there wasn't some kind of anti-arab sentiment involved. I explained that it was a kind of celebration instead. And he said, "Oh, yes, it's the kind of music we play at weddings and funerals." And so this is a recollection of the life together of JFK and Jackie Kennedy and a kind of funeral celebration, north african style. Or if you like, you might recall Dylan Thomas's poem entitled "The refusal to mourn the death by fire of a child." Similar sentiment in many ways.

SM: Working on my own videos in The Final Cut Pro, I try to figure out the combination of decisions – and this combination is art itself, it also may be understood as my medium. And I can only guess what effect might happen, when someone experiences this piece. I envision the effect, of course, but I can never be sure as to what kind of “aura” this piece may have (or produce?). This is what structural film is about, I think. It is so direct and open: everything that “big screen" film hides, structural film exposes for a viewer’s appreciation.

KS: I studied with Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits. One of the ways by which I consciously sought to distinguish my own work from their was by choosing images that were at one public and highly charged. For the most part—with the interesting exception of the use of pornography—the structuralists were explicitly concerned with using everyday content, banal content, or even emptying the work of content. There were exceptions in the pop world and in the committed filmmakers, such as Al Raziutis and to to some extent LeGrice. Odd to think of them as engage, no? But along with Conner, they used images that were popular and deliberately charged at least in some of their work. The use of “public” images in my case at least was an attempt to historically ground the work. I wanted my work to examine history rather than simply the modalities of the passage of time. To this extent my work is not formalist, though I am not anti-form; it’s just not the holy grail for me. In terms of the choices of the era: big budget narratives, or avant-garde, I agree: they show what the big films hide. But even then there were other choices, if bad ones: the films of Mulvey and Wollen, for example: 3rd rate Godard and Godard is not a filmmaker I esteem very highly, though he did make a couple of good pictures. Mulvey and Wollen and their ilk made none worth watching, though I may have missed some by other people since the genre became so predictable I didn’t find it necessary to repeat the experience that often. It was Debord who was following the more interesting path, though his work was not seeable in the US and had only limited accessibility in France. I first learned of his work through his Oeuvres Cinématographiques complètes, a book presenting his films as scripts in a rather unique form. But I didn’t actually see the work until it was broadcast on Canal+after his death in the 1990s. I was also very interested by Warhol, whose work was also out of circulation by the late 1970s. I was interested in his mixture of materialism with an exploration of the spectacular: creating his own stars, but in the context of the art world, creating an odd sort of bathos: you had to be there at the time to be truly seduced by them, to understand their auratic presence.


* Keith Sanborn, a media artist and a theorist, has taught Video Production and Special Topics theory course "From Montage to Game Hacks: Strategies of Cultural Critique" in the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton. His long term interests is in media critique through his theoretical writings and as well through the application of critical strategies of cultural critique in his media work. He has continued to pursue both his artistic and theoretical interests over the past two years.

Links: Sanborn's film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArzS7EX9Uwg
Sanborn & Marcus on Guy Debord http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=10275&pagenum=0

[this interview was translated into Ukrainian and published in KINOKOLO #30, Summer 2006]