The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview

Richard Serra, Railroad Bridge (still), 1976.

On the occasion of the upcoming screening Richard Serra: Tasks, Frames, Transmissions at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, January 29 (more information here), Film Notes republishes excerpts from “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview,” a conversation between Annette Michelson, Richard Serra, and Clara Weyergraf, first published in October in 1979. From Serra’s early encounters with the New York film scene to the discussion of his own works, the conversation touches upon what film can and cannot inherit from sculpture and offers context for Serra’s 1960s and 1970s moving image works, informed and shaped by his concerns with bodily action, measurement, and the politics of broadcast.1

Michelson: Let us begin with the narrative of your filmmaking. How and when did you come to filmmaking?

Serra: The first year that I was in New York, in 1967–68, I went to see the films that were being shown around St. Marks Place. I saw [Bruce] Conner's films, Ron Rice's films, and Jack Smith's films, and then I started to go to Anthology (Film Archives). Maybe that was a little later, but I think it was in the same year. One thing probably influenced me more than anything else to go get a camera and do something about it. I saw a film by Yvonne [Rainer] called Hand Movie. Do you know the film?

Michelson: I'm not sure I do.

Serra: There is a film that Yvonne made very early, of a finger exercise, where she puts one hand in front of the camera and manipulates her fingers, hand straight out. And then she did another film with a woman, all in white, measuring a line on a white wall. I can't remember what the third film was. It may have been a film about a chicken coop, but that may have been a year later.2 The same week, I saw Warhol's Chelsea Girls. At that point, I was building sculpture, using material for the sake of its manipulative possibilities. Seeing Chelsea Girls and Yvonne's hand film, I felt that making film was open to me. Up to that point, I'd felt a deference for film, and maybe I was a little bit frightened of it; I wouldn't have picked up a camera. That must have been in '67, and then we started to shoot film in '68.

. . .

Michelson: Let's go back to your looking at films at Jonas [Mekas]'s [Filmmaker's] Cinematheque, or wherever it was, in 1967. You saw Jack Smith and Bruce Conner and so on. What was it in those films . . .

Serra: What do you mean, "What was it?" Do you mean how did those films differ from commercial films?

Michelson: Yes, for you.

Serra: There was an aspect of unpretentious, indigenous American poetry that was difficult to deny, and it spoke so directly that I was moved by the people who were making it, and by the images that were brought forth. The spirit and joy of it were simply not to be questioned.

Michelson: It is my feeling, though, that your experience of those films was fairly singular in comparison with that of a number of other artists of your generation. I don't think that a great many other artists involved just then in pictorial and sculptural enterprise were particularly struck by those films.

Serra: I really wanted to have some grasp of the history of film, and when Anthology opened, there was a real possibility to understand at least one historical viewpoint. I probably saw everything they showed for the first couple of years. I used to go early and stay for both programs.

Michelson: Yes, I remember that I would see you there quite often, and I think from time to time we would talk about the Russian films in particular. I think that in the late '60s, or perhaps around 1970, however, you were directly involved with a number of people who were active in filmmaking. I'm not speaking so much of Conner and Warhol; I am thinking of Michael Snow, possibly [Hollis] Frampton. Did you know Frampton?

Serra: I knew Hollis, but through Michael Snow; I knew Michael very well. I knew him when he was working on Wavelength and when the rushes were coming back from Back and Forth; I saw the rushes before he put the film together. I knew him because he was in the neighborhood; we used to see each other on the street. He had an interest in my sculpture, and I became one of the in-the-neighborhood audience for his films. He was the only filmmaker I knew who was working in New York, and he was just emerging. When I went to Europe for the second trip, in 1969, I took Wavelength with me and showed it at various places. Michael thought that would be interesting for me to do, and so I showed it at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it stopped the house. They knocked over the projector. I showed it in Cologne and Düsseldorf. In a period of a year and a half, I showed Wavelength twelve times, not because I thought I was Michael Snow's promoter, but because I really wanted to see the film again and again, and because I thought it was an important film. If there was going to be an audience for contemporary work—at the time [Phil] Glass was playing concerts in Europe and I was putting up sculpture in Europe—then they might as well understand what was happening in film, and as far as I was concerned, Wavelength was the most interesting thing that was happening.

Michelson: Well, those of us who have been interested in, let's say, Glass's work, Snow's work, your work, Reich's work, often feel that the late '60s was a time of . . . partial coalescence. To someone like me, involved with the history of independent filmmaking in this country over the past fifteen years or so, it is evident that the relationship of pictorial and sculptural enterprise to film is extremely important; that is, film has been nourished by that enterprise. It is, for example, very difficult to understand earlier work such as Brakhage's and Deren's without some kind of reference to abstract expressionism. It is very difficult to understand the films of Snow, Frampton, etc., without some reference to the painting and sculpture of the mid- and late '60s. It was a time of considerable interaction.

Serra: I read Mekas's interview with Brakhage, and I think it was brought out there that Brakhage had a relation to the abstract expressionists.3 And someone like Snow or Frampton has a relationship to another kind of aesthetic that was developing within the larger framework of art. It is easy to deduce certain influences and to make assumptions about why people formulate a particular language at a particular time, but I think that kind of reasoning can only be taken so far.

Michelson: I want to ask you about your view of Snow's films for the following reason: I've been looking at this essay on your work by Buchloh, which I find not uninteresting.4 Now, the films of Snow are often sensed as sculptural; that is, they are presented in terms of pictorial and sculptural strategies. Snow himself speaks, for example, of Back and Forth as a kind of sculptural film. One might talk of his films as being sculpturally inflected, of the way in which Wavelength, for example, is about procession and depth. Did that aspect of Snow's films strike you when you were looking at them?

Serra: No. I simply thought that Snow was a complex and interesting artist with a high ability to entertain contradiction within a very limited strategy. As soon as the term sculptural film comes up, I get very confused about what I understand sculpture to be and what I understand film to be. When someone uses a slow dolly with a camera, or progressively moves into a foreshortened space, it still seems to me that you are dealing with an illusion on a flat plane which you can't enter into. The way it is understood denies the progressive movement of your body in time. It's from a fixed viewpoint. It takes into consideration the very flatness of the screen. I've always thought that the basic assumptions of film could never be sculptural in any way, and to beg the analogy between what is assumed to be sculptural in sculpture and what is assumed to be sculptural in film is not really to understand the potential of what sculpture is and always has been. I have always thought it was a bit journalese to discuss it in that way. That is not to say that you can't talk about languages that people share, languages in different material manifestations. But to say that an experience of sculpture can be similar to or influenced by the illusion in film—I've always thought that was nonsense.

Michelson: I'm interested and, I suppose, glad to hear you say that, because it seems to me that those claims are very vulnerable, to say the least.

Serra: That's not to say that I don't think people approach the notion of materiality similarly. I think that Landow, in the film which disintegrates, and in which there are hairs and whatever on the leader . . . I think that in that film and even the earlier film by Brakhage, Mothlight, one can speak of a strategy which could be compared to the materiality of some painting, the way in which material is handled as an end in itself. Because of the direct manipulation of the material, that is an analogy that I can accept more easily than the sculptural analogy.

Richard Serra, Frame (still), 1969.

Michelson: Well, the question then remains, and maybe it is even sharpened and intensified, as to the nature of the impulse to make film. Given that your sculptural pursuits were developing very rapidly, very intensively, that film for you represents a discrete and separate mode . . .

Serra: I know exactly how it happened. Someone said to me that he was going to make a film of the construction of House of Cards. At that time Glass and I were standing it up in my loft and we were worried about the possibility that it would collapse, and so there was a lot of dollying around and leaning plates and poles with linchpin accuracy. A great deal of concentration was needed just to assemble the pieces. Someone wanted to make a film of our doing that, but I thought that such a film couldn't be anything other than an illustration or depiction. I thought that if I was going to deal with some sort of filmic analogy—I was using lead to construct those pieces—that I could probably do that just by using my hand as a device. That, coupled with having seen Yvonne's films, and Warhol's great freedom to pick up the camera the way he did, with the detachment that he had, made it seem possible, made it seem like something I could really entertain. I hadn't shown any work publicly in New York at that time. I think I had just shown some pieces with [Richard] Bellamy and there was going to be a museum show at the Whitney called Anti-Illusion.5 So when I first presented work there, I did the House of Cards and the splash piece. At the same exhibition I presented the hand films, and I think Snow presented Wavelength or Back and Forth or both.

Michelson: Back and Forth had its premiere at the Whitney. I remember seeing it there.

Serra: At that time I was very interested in dance. I had just got to know Joan Jonas and I was seeing her every day. She had a particular relationship to film that differed from mine. We decided that we both wanted to continue, and Anthology provided a place for us both to grow together.

Michelson: Just one more question about the films you were looking at, and then we can start talking about your films. As I said, we would meet from time to time at Anthology, and the films that you talked to me about most, and were most enthusiastic about, were films which I think you knew I was working on at that time, the Soviet films. It seemed to me that you were discovering, or perhaps rediscovering, the films of the immediately postrevolutionary period, that is to say, 1924–1929, early Eisenstein and Vertov. Is that so?

Serra: That is so. I think that sometimes films connect with experiences you've had and you are able to make a leap into the filmmaker's imagination. As a kid growing up I'd worked steel mills, and I knew that Glass, who was a friend of mine, had also worked steel mills. There is a generation of American artists who had grown up that way. Andre had worked the railroad and Morris had worked steel mills, or railroads. So we came from a postwar, postdepression background, where kids grew up and worked in the industrial centers of the country. The first films I saw that connected with that working experience were Eisenstein's films. That hadn't happened before. I thought that for all of their disjunction and cutting, and all of the beauty of the black and white, they were also portraying a human condition that I had some knowledge of, although I wasn't totally aware; I just joined the union, paid my dues, and made my money like everyone else. But I thought, “Oh, someone has found a way to construct an illusion to influence our understanding of what those people do and what that condition is.” I thought it was fascinating.

Michelson: Have you since seen all of Vertov's films on industrial construction, the films made between 1924 and 1929: The Eleventh Year; One-Sixth of the World; Stride Forward, Soviet?

Serra: No, I haven't seen those.

Michelson: Those are the films which are most involved with the actual industrialization of the Soviet Union in the period following the revolution and should be extraordinary for someone like you. But obviously, when one sees Railroad Turnbridge, one also feels that it is made by someone who must have been very struck by that extremely important sequence in Eisenstein's October of the lifting of the bridge, in which the bridge is analyzed and described in detail.

Serra: That has been mentioned before. Either that or Léger's Ballet Mécanique. It always seemed to me that Léger was involved with quick-cut collage that was akin to his cubism, and that he could throw in anything from lipstick to wine bottles, intercut with someone swinging back and forth on a . . .

Michelson: It never occurred to me to think of Léger.

Serra: The film has been connected to that because of its “industrialness.” But in fact my film probably couldn’t have been made if it hadn’t been for Michael Snow. It has to do with the long take.

Michelson: Those of us who know Michael’s work well are aware of that, but I think that fewer people today are aware of the fact that you had seen and considered the Soviet films of the ’20s.

Serra: Also, when you make something, you know your reasons for making it. You know the direct sources of what you are doing, and you can only work out of where you find yourself. In the shooting of the film, I never thought about the Russians; I thought about the Russians in cutting the film, and I wanted to avoid that relationship, and for that reason we dropped many shots.

Michelson: You have just raised a very interesting question having to do with the relationship, in Railroad Turnbridge, between shooting and cutting, and between the long take and framing, a Snow strategy par excellence. This is a film which frames the landscape through a turnbridge revolving within it. For me, it is fascinating in that it seems to be very much involved with the basic strategies which were laid out in the early ’60s. But it seems as well to synthesize-quite remarkably I think-a great deal more in film culture than just the local concerns of American filmmakers in the 1960s.

Serra: I think that’s true. Not only does it use the device of the tunneling of the bridge to frame the landscape, but then it returns on itself and frames itself. In that, there is an illusion created that questions what is moving and what is holding still. Is the camera moving and the bridge holding still? or vice versa? That is contained within the framing structure of the material of the bridge itself, right down to its internal functioning element-the gear. We put the gear in the center so that everything that came forward would be understood as being propelled by that gear, and everything that came after it was also understood in relation to it. I think the logic of the film, the way it was constructed, probably owes a great deal to the filmmaking of the late ’60s and early ’70s. But the content of the film has to do with the transition, between 1905-6 and 1925, from welded iron construction to riveting; and as soon as they began riveting, they built extraordinary steel structures, epitomized by the bridges we have in this country. Those bridges were built during a ten or twelve year period, and they are the most obvious representatives that we have of indigenous, unpretentious American building. They are built for efficiency and support and for nothing else. You don’t have to understand what sculpture has been in this country to have a love affair with American bridges. You grow up being in complete wonder of them, especially in this city, with Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge. I grew up in California, and I’ve been on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge all my life. I think, if it comes down to little girls liking silk and little boys liking corduroy, that little boys like bridges. Later on a bridge becomes more than simply a steel artifact spanning two points; it begins to assume symbolic connotations. I think if you investigate the notion of a bridge, even if you are a sculptor and you are particularly interested in a structural analysis of the bridge, you are also investigating an important psychological icon. Railroad Turnbridge took a year to shoot; I went out to Portland six times. I didn’t go out and shoot a bridge because I thought it was an interesting industrial object, or an indigenous American relic. I think there was really a need to investigate what “bridgeness” meant to me. I found something else very curious at that time. Joel Shapiro started to carve little bridges out of balsa wood, maybe even a couple of years before. When he did that, I asked him where it was coming from and he said that it was coming from dream imagery. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do find that at certain points something in one’s experience prompts the need to materialize something. When I first saw that bridge over the Willamette River, I went out onto it and passed the bridge tender. I asked him if he would turn it around for me, and he did. He just gave me a ride on the bridge, and at that moment I thought, “Oh, I just have to look at this in another way. There has to be some other way to grasp this, since it is all happening too fast.” So I immediately went and got a camera, and the first shot I took became the first shot of the film. When the rushes came back two days later, I saw what had happened in the illusion of the first shot-I was shooting with a CP 16, which has a flicker, so that what you see through the lens is very close to a film image-I thought that that in itself was sufficient cause to continue.

Michelson: One central aspect of this film is the manner in which it amplifies the strategy of framing in a much earlier work of yours. You made a film in the early ’70s called Frame…

Serra: In 1969. It took me several years between Frame and Railroad Turnbridge to put my eye behind the camera, to understand that I could put the frame between my eye and what I was experiencing. At the time that I made Frame, I was curious about what the parameters were for the person who was looking through the camera as distinct from those of the subject who was being filmed, and how each of those viewpoints was contradictory (if the film was edited) to what the person viewing the film sees. Watching something happen as it is happening while being aware that it is going to end up as another structure defined by the frame of the camera seemed reason enough to use the frame as a device to determine the entire making of the film. I found the illusion of measurement to be very interesting for the contradictions it posed in relation to the illusion of film. At that time I was also making a sculpture called Base Plate Measure in which I was using measurement, and it didn’t seem to be very difficult to go from one measuring device in one material to another device in film. We used a small ruler in order to make it very clear that the film was about the increment of measurement.

. . .

Michelson: But in this film [Frame] you were implying a strategy of measurement to make a demonstration about the nature of film, about the fact that depth is not there.

Serra: Or the fact that if someone is shooting at an angle to the lens, what he sees if he moves his head beyond the lens is a trapezoid. The framing device itself is flattening the trapezoid out so that it is coincident with the frame of the picture, which is the frame you see. And so everything relates to that rectangle, not to the actual trapezoid (or parallelogram, or whatever space you are in), which is why I think there is no possibility for the frame to be thought of as sculptural. It denies the possibility of experiencing the actual physical space that is sculptural.

Richard Serra, Paul Revere (still), 1971.

Michelson: In 1971, I was invited by Phil Leider, who was just about to leave Artforum, to do a special film issue of that magazine. It provided the first opportunity to introduce a large audience to developments that seemed to me to be of prime importance in independent American filmmaking. My emphasis was on those people who were giving their lives to making films, not to the artists who, at that time, were beginning to turn to film. I was concerned with those who had put all their energy into it and were radically inflecting that medium. I mean of course Snow, Sharits, Frampton, and so on. But there were two other artists who seemed to me to be of fundamental importance, and whom I asked for texts for that issue. One was Smithson, and the other was you. The text you published was descriptive of Paul Revere. I'd like you to describe what that project meant for you at that time.

Serra: I had been living with Joan Jonas for several years and was involved with her work in performance. I had found the Paul Revere script in Birdwhistell; that's where it comes from.6 I had read Birdwhistell in relation to Joan's work—how one could analyze body movement and body language, what the body's signals are. We used certain devices—cards to be read, lights to be turned on and off—which were related to Joan's development of what one might call the performing cut; she used cinematic devices as transitions from one scene to another within her performance structure.

We made the film together. To me it represents a sketch of the possibilities of using theatrical devices within a specific language framework. I think the films and tapes that were more successful in that respect were those which, instead of imposing a script, originated out of a loosely defined scheme. For example, there is a videotape called Boomerang, done later with Nancy Holt, in which she is asked to respond to her own words which she hears through a feedback system. In a very detailed and clear way, she states what is happening to her as it is happening: her relation to herself as subject. Boomerang has proved more interesting in the long run than Paul Revere, which is more analogous to theater. I think the other tape which is more successful, where I did work directly from a script, but which doesn't have that analogy to theater, is the one called Television Delivers People. There we decided to use language together with muzak to say something definite about the different natures of video and TV, and why artists find themselves in a dilemma when dealing with broadcast television.

Michelson: I should perhaps explain that Television Delivers People is a text which unrolls, to the accompaniment of muzak, on the screen before the spectator.

Serra: Something becomes really clear in hindsight, as you look at Television Delivers People in relation to Steelmill: in neither film was I worried about the self-reflexive quality, the material as such.7 I decided that there was something worthwhile to say directly to people, and I just chose devices for presenting the material that I thought could reach a large audience. I thought that the easiest way to do that was the most direct way. And I think that in both the steel mill film, curiously, and this early tape there is an explicit, graphic quality. In the steel mill film it is more an iconic/graphic quality, while this tape consists of pure graphics. With some work, I have decided to use the medium to communicate explicitly. I have used that form when I've felt there was something politically valid to say.

. . .

Richard Serra, Television Delivers People (still), 1973.

Michelson: I was struck by the way in which you had revived, in a very different and interesting way, for the steel mill film the notion of a central message that unrolls before the spectator together with a sound track which is disjunct from the text. Here is the beginning of the text of Television Delivers People . . .

Serra: I like the text very much.

Michelson: “The product of television, commercial television, is the audience. Television delivers people to an advertiser. There is no such thing as mass media in the United States except for television. Mass media means that a medium can deliver masses of people. Commercial television delivers twenty million people a minute. In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold. It is the consumer who is consumed. You are the product of TV. You are delivered to the advertiser, who is the customer. He consumes you. The viewer is not responsible for programming. You are the end product. You are the end product delivered en masse to the advertiser. You are the product of TV.”

Serra: Very good! If I ever need audio, Annette, I'm getting you.

Michelson: I've worked for Snow, Rainer; Why not work for Serra? (Laughter.) How did you come to make this tape?

Serra: There had been a meeting in New York of people from NYU, Columbia, National Broadcasting, and they all presented papers. The papers were printed in various journals and I cut them up and put them together to form a script. Then I went with Carlota Schoolman to Channel 13 where we got a character generator. I figured how much space I would want between each sentence. I asked the people at Channel 13 what color would be most effective for a readout, and they said yellow and blue. We sat down in the morning with four cans of beer and made it.

When it first went on the air—it was put on briefly as a sign-off in Amarillo, Texas—the reaction to it prompted me to send it to the government for censorship verification. It was passed for television under an anti-advertisement provision. That means that if there are advertisements, there can be anti-advertisements: equal time. And this year it was shown in Chicago.

Michelson: What kinds of reactions did you get?

Serra: It was shown in Chicago on WTTW, a station similar to Channel 13 here, and it received newspaper reviews the next day, which made me very happy.

Michelson: So this was made in 1973.

Serra: In 1973 I was looking into video; I had gone to Japan and bought video equipment. I immediately began to understand that what people call video and what people call television are very different things, that television in this country had a stranglehold on anybody who wanted to make video. There was an idealistic notion that there would be home video transmitters and alternative stations, but the fact of the matter is that it's controlled by the government. If you want people to see work, you have to contend with those structures of control; and those structures of control are predicated on the capitalist status quo. I simply decided to make that explicit.

Michelson: I began by asking you about your early work, and Paul Revere in particular, because it seemed to me that the role of information communication through a very concise and conventionalized form of signalling was extremely important and extremely interesting. I therefore asked you about that film with the intention of establishing a relation between it and another videotape called Prisoner's Dilemma. When we began to talk about Paul Revere, you explained how it came out of certain concerns with performance, and with Joan Jonas's work in particular, and you went on to say that you felt that other tapes had been more interesting and more successful in that regard. But it strikes me that Prisoner's Dilemma is perhaps, together with Television Delivers People and the recent film on the steel mill, one of a triad of works which are, within the general spectrum of your work, most concerned with social issues. They seem to have a particular status within your work that has to do with document, that has to do with engagement with specific concrete social issues in a way which is less elaborately mediated by formal concerns than your other work.

Serra: That's absolutely true.