From: Michael Zryd (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Aug 06 2006 - 18:59:28 PDT
Here is what HF says about Lemon in Scott MacDonald's interview in _A
Critical Cinema_, vol 1 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), pp. 38-39:
HF: I'll tell you why it's dedicated to Bob Huot. There are two reasons.
One is that it's a film that points towards painting. The light first
reveals the form as a sculptural entity and then devours it, transforms
it into a graphic sign. Second, and at the time that film was made, Huot
had started to read _Ulysses_, and having or other warning about it, was
reading it as he would any other work of prose fiction. _Ulysses_ is
funny enough, but I have other interests in it, and at one point I was
talking to Bob about a precritical procedure that has been fruitful for
_Ulysses_ as it might not be for work of different kinds: a statistical
study. You can get grants to do such things because they keep
eighty-eight grad students working at dumb but marginally sustaining
jobs for a year. In this case, it was instructive. One thing discovered
about _Ulysses_ was that there is an inordinately large number of hapax
legomena, works that are only used in the book once. Thousands. "Lemon"
is a word that only occurs once ...
[...]
SM: The moving light was the only variable?
HF: Yes.
SM: And it was moved in a rather pulsing way?
HF: That was a problem. It would have been nice to make some kind of
clockwork mechanism, but I didn't have one. I put the light on a wire
tether, which was kept taut so it would stay at a constant distance, and
I filmed it at slightly half speed. I didn't have an electric motor. I
has the seventeen-and-one-half foot spring-wind Bolex to work with. The
light was moved manually, the camera wound between takes, and the light
moved back slightly. The manual movement and the lap dissolves that join
the takes together show. At the time, I would rather have had it be one
continuous take. Now, I don't mind so much. The image goes out of
register at the dissolves and then restabilizes, as though it had
dematerialized every so slightly. There are five such lap dissolves; I
remember squirming over the extra twenty bucks. Choosing the lemon, of
course, was very important. I spent half an hour feeling up all these
lemons, looking for the one that would be the most breastlike, most
splendidly citroid. Finally the produce manager came over and watched me
for awhile, wondering if I had a lemon fetish. I bought half a dozen to
cover myself.
-- Michael Zryd Associate Professor Department of Film, CFT 223 York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, CANADA tel: 416-736-5149 fax: 416-736-5710 email suppressed __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.