On Film No.4 (In Taking The Bottoms of 365 Saints of Our Time)

I wonder how men can get serious at all. 1 They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will. First of all having it outside your body is terribly dangerous. If I were a man I would have a fantastic castration complex to the point I wouldn’t be able to do a thing. Second, the inconsistency of it, like carrying a chance time alarm or something. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself. Humor is probably something the male of the species discovered through their own anatomy. But men are so serious. Why? Why violence?

Why hatred? Why war? If people want to make war, they should make a color war, and paint each others’ city up during the night in pinks and greens. Men have such an unusual talent for making a bore out of everything they touch. Art, painting, sculpture, like who wants a cast-iron woman, for instance. The film world is becoming terribly aristocratic, too. It’s professionalism all the way down the line. In any other field: painting, music, etc., people are starting to become iconoclastic. But in the film world—that’s where nobody touches it except the director. The director carries the old mystery of the artist. He is creating a universe, a mood, he is unique, etc., etc. This film proves that anybody can be a director.2 A film-maker in San Francisco wrote to me and asked if he could make the San Francisco version of No. 4. That’s OK with me. Somebody else wrote from New York, she wants to make a slow- motion version with her own behind. That’s OK, too. I’m hoping after seeing this film people will start to make their own home movies like crazy. In 50 years or so, which is like 10 centuries from now, people will look at the films of the 60’s. They will probably comment on Ingmar Bergman as the meaningfully meaningful filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard as the meaningfully meaningless, Antonioni as meaninglessly meaningful, etc., etc. Then they would come to the No. 4 film and see a sudden swarm of exposed bottoms, that these bottoms, in fact, belonged to people who represented the London scene. And I hope that they would see the 60’s was not only the age of achievement, but of laughter. This film, in fact, is like an aimless petition signed by people with their anuses. Next time we wish to make an appeal, we should send this film as the signature list. My ultimate goal in film-making is to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world. Of course, I cannot go around the whole world and take the shots myself. I need cooperation from something like the post offices of the world. If everybody would drop a snapshot of themselves and their families to the post office of their town, or allow themselves to be photographed by the nearest photographic studio, this would soon be accomplished.

Of course, this film would need constant adding of footage. Probably nobody would like to see this whole film at once, so you can keep it in a library or something, and when you want to see some particular town’s people’s smiling faces you can go and check that section of the film. We can also arrange it with a television network so that whenever you want to see faces of a particular location in the world, all you have to do is to press a but- ton and there it is. This way, if Johnson wants to see what sort of people he killed in Viet Nam that day, he only has to turn the channel. Before this you were just part of a figure in the newspapers, but after this you become a smiling face. And when you are born, you will know that if you wanted to, you will have in your life time to communicate with the whole world. That is more than most of us could ask for. Very soon, the age may come where we would not need photographs to communicate, like ESP, etc. It will happen soon, but that will be “After the Film Age.”

1967