From: Bernard Roddy (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Feb 02 2010 - 09:05:20 PST
. . after reading the translation of a 2004 speech in Vienna at the X-Screen Symposium (Museum Moderner Kunst):
1. In your comments on your Upside Down Feature you suggest that the failure of recognition is a salutary effect and present your use of text in the film to illustrate. What relation do words have to writing when the latter is in film?
2. You speak of the importance of difference and of undermining familiar identities. How have changes in media technologies and socio-economic conditions affected the degree to which film can frustrate the certainties of neat subjectivities?
3. You recall conflicts between Co-Op practices and Screen theorists. How is an "academic" position with relation to theory different from one adopted by artists? [Here I have a position and recommend Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content (Stanford, 1994)].
4. You emphasize the importance of process over result in those Co-Op days. Does your interest in frustrating subject positions also threaten the sincerity with which you rely on ideology critique?
5. Can you continue working in film and be true to your politics today? Or does your thinking challenge you to abandon the priority you once gave to film (or even that given to the image)?
6. Can the social dependencies of production that you describe be valorized when technologies have made of each of us (younger than 60? or all inclusive?) a media event that 16 mm can no longer sustain outside of a certain sanctified, quasi-ecclesiastical context?
7. To what extent do the films you describe seeing again at the recent exhibition, films you saw years ago amongst friends, now close off precisely the avenues of exploration you identify as those motivating Co-Op production and discussion?
8. Do you feel compromised by the translation to print of a thought you explored in film?
9. Can you continue to defend the film practices you pursued now that we have seen such fundamental changes in the way gender and race are experiences (and theorized)? How does the encounter with difference you seem to value far in the films made more recently?
Bernie
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