but you are an artist, and your mind don't work the way you want it tooooooooo

It's funny, every time I have a critical reading that interviews the filmmaker or discusses their intent or point of view or whatever, I always find myself reading in sympathy with them, as opposed to in sympathy of whatever view the author of the article is taking. Things like this sort of make me wish I'd taken some production courses and applied for MFA programs instead, but I've never been that kind of learner; I've always learned by exploring the abstract and then applying it in life, wherever it seems fitting. This is how I used to end up using my 20th Century American Foreign Policy notes to write papers for Literature and Film. Things like that. Besides, I like to think of theory and study kind of like the way I think of rules: you can follow the rules or break them, but you gotta know what they are, first.

Anyway, today I read an interview with this formalist avant garde filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, who made this film called Fuses between 1964 and 1967. It's now considered to be an "important" experimental film, but at the time, it was disregarded, to an extent, because it was an experimental film made by a female filmmaker and it dealt with sex on screen. She made it in a response to Stan Brakhage's brilliant Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which is an experimental film depicting the home birth of his first child. It's a fairly ungendered depiction of the birth, but as Brakhage did most of the filming, it still has that inescapable male lens. Schneemann was interested in showing a more equal partnership in sexual terms - "I really wanted to see what 'the fuck' is and locate that in terms of a lived sense of equity...we have to remind ourselves that throughout the sixties, only men maintained creative authority: women were muses, partners."

She continues, saying how as she was making it, no one stood by her except for her sexual/creative/intellectual partner Jim Tenney, who is in Fuses, and afterwards, virtually all feminist critics ignored it because it was a woman's film that showed a woman having sex. Primarily a performance artist and a painter, Schneemann was trying to liberate the female figure from the traditional, immobilizing framework of "the nude" in art. She had dealt in previous works with the questions, "Could I include myself as a formal aspect of my own materials? Could a nude woman artist be both image and image maker?" and she was tired of her work being qualified by her gender - "You're really good for a girl, but..." So she made a movie showing the equality and intimacy of her partnership with herself as image.

The interviewer, Kate Haug, a more contemporary experimental filmmaker and critic, asked Schneemann about her identity as an artist.

KH: On one hand, you have this desire to be an artist. On the other hand, you are producing work which you know is highly controversial. It seems you would feel like you are taking an incredible risk; you know you are in a very combative situation.

CS: It's not that I had a desire to be an artist. I'm in a very combative situation because I am an artist. Whatever an artist is or was, I was it. This wasn't a choice, and that's different. It means you have a certain character structure.

KH: How would you describe that character structure?

CS: You have to make images or you're going to die, basically. That is the most interesting, satisfying, compelling, necessary function--like love and sex and breathing. one hears people say "I don't know what great art is, but I know it when I see it." Somebody somewhere recently wrote a variation on this: "I can't tell what produces a great artist, but I know a real artist when I meet someone who has to create images or she'll expire."

By this definition, I think that someday, I would like to feel like I am an artist.