The Girls Without the Camera in Their Heads: An Interview with Leslie Thornton

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Joe Milutis

JM: In Femmes Fatales (1991), Mary Ann Doane, contrasting your method of depicting the Orient to that of Roland Barthes, wrote that while Barthes traveled to Japan to experience the originary, "there's nothing originary in Adynata. . . . For Thornton, opacity is opacity--it has no deeper implications." I wonder if this statement still holds in your most recent films. For example, there is something about Eberhardt wanting to "touch the secret soul of Islam" that alludes to essences. Even in the way you have described to me the joy, and even the love you have for this found footage, there is an old-fashioned sense of the heart of things. I think of your recent films in terms of Eisenstein's idea of the ideogram. He had this desire to get to some sort of originary substance by editing across things that did not seem to belong together. Maybe what he desired was something new--a new language of film--but not entirely postmodern, not entirely fragmented and without referent.

LT: I don't really know how to speak about that yet. I'm going to have to finish this work before I can try to formulate it.

JM: That's the mystics' problem isn't it? They know these things but language is inappropriate.

LT: Yes, so it was appropriate for me to make a piece about a mystic, and one of the things that I hope is brought forth is a sense of that state of mind, a movement from one mental concept to another, from the concrete to the disengaged. I'm not religious, but I am interested in our capacity to experience these things, as human beings. But it is very important to me to touch on a different mentality than we share commonly. That's hard stuff.

JM: It seems to me that part of your anti-aesthetic is your use of cinema's propensity to structure time to talk about everything that is somehow beyond time. Usually one considers any anti-aesthetic postmodern but your anti-aesthetic is not precisely postmodern. It has more of a connection to mystical forms of early modernism. Early modernists used form only as a gateway of sorts, not as an end in itself, nor as a mirror of industrial processes. When I first saw Peggy and Fred in Hell, it seemed purely formal and about mechanical processes. But now I see that, along with the way you use sound, these repeated images are used to talk about the other side of the screen. You turn your attention to some reality of which the image is a very limited part.

LT: That is exactly what that piece is trying to do. The sound becomes primary, but in another turn, the sound is arbitrary, so that it is actually like there is nothing there. The first half is just footage of things moving forward and backward, the penguin and the water, the burning title. When the kids come in there is more of a linear development and they are at least moving across space, but you cannot really understand what is being said. You assume that the soundtrack indicates where something is really going on, that it holds the clue that is going to help you make meaning of what you are looking at, but that doesn't actually happen beyond the level of just creating suspense. For me, on the level of pleasure, that piece was about emptiness.