This week, Film Notes publishes Mike Kuchar’s “The Metaphysics of Moviemaking,” a text on cinema as a form of divination, focusing on accidents and chance encounters that push the filmmaker to create a work they only later understand. First published in George and Mike Kuchar’s Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997), the essay appears here in anticipation of the book’s forthcoming new edition from Inpatient Press, copublished with Varichon & Cie.
When you decide to make movies, you are entering the realm of conjurers, alchemists, psychics, and just plain voodoo! You fulfill the alchemist’s dream of turning lead into gold, transmuting the inanimate, mute compounds which make up the light-sensitive emulsion into moving radiance that speaks information, emulates feelings, and breathes with a soul. You also fulfill the alchemist’s dream of discovering the elixir of perpetual youth. The human image becomes ageless once it is imprisoned on each and every frame, twenty-four times a second. The original subject in three-dimensional space-time eventually withers away to die, but not its two-dimensional moving, talking image rolled up on a reel after being immersed in developing potions and threaded through the alchemist’s magic lantern — the movie projector.
Let me relate a short, but true, story to you. In 1984 I had picked up a batch of developed movie film from the lab containing the first sequence to a picture I was eventually to call Fable for a New Age. I wasted no time in editing and cutting the scenes of that sequence, being eager to see if what I designed through angles and actions spoke coherently. During this process, it is customary of me to throw away all the retakes and excessive footage that I feel I have no use for and which gather in heaps around my feet beneath the editing table. Keep in mind that most of my movies are not scripted before they are started. I have no idea what the endings of my films will be. I make them in order to find out. If I knew what the endings were to be, there would be no need for me to make them. It would be like following the well-traversed lines on a map to a destination already familiar. If I’m going to spend between four hundred and a thousand dollars on my own work, I want some surprises along the way — good or bad. I’m willing to accept the resolution of my efforts. I can only hope that the revelation at that journey’s end will be flattering in its outlook on life and its reflection on us. But whatever the outcome, we must face that mirror in the harsh light of the projector with our chins held high.
To get back to my story, I was in the midst of editing a sequence in Fable for a New Age, and I was stuffing the retakes and outtakes that had gathered about my feet into a large, plastic garbage bag to throw away. What a relief it was to get that mess out of my bedroom, which I was using as an editing room. During the reckless clean-up, I mindlessly (or more correctly, unconsciously) did something with a small brown paper bag.
After a month of cutting the random sequences I had shot for the movie (seen as visions in my mind’s eye), I felt I had expressed all that needed to be said with the compiled, edited episodes. It was now my job to arrange the psychological puzzle into something with coherent logic, as would a psychiatrist who has to decide which piece fits where and when, in order to give a proper diagnosis.
But of course, the real test came when that thirty minutes of analysis is threaded through the projector and the house lights turned down ... that’s when you know if your theories hold up or not, seeing it on the silver screen — large, bright, and loud. Well, it almost did, but not quite on this film.
Something was wrong, terribly wrong, toward the end of the movie. A piece was missing and without this bit of visual information the whole premise, all twelve hundred feet of it, failed to deliver a concrete meaning. A cut-away shot was needed, one that must contain a man examining an article of clothing, to be inserted during the film’s crucial monologue which was meant to bring the whole work to a fully realized conclusion.
The problem: I had thrown away all the retakes, including that shot of the man with the article of clothing, which was in the first sequence I had edited a month ago. And the real-life man was no longer available to re-shoot the scene.
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, nothing was thought out in advance on this picture; all ideas for the sequences would just come to me days later in response to what I had shot the week before. It was unscripted material with no preplanning that developed on a moment-to-moment basis and which gathered a momentum of its own. But wait a minute! Didn’t I do something with a paper bag that was brown in color while scooping up the piles of rejected film heaped under the editing table in my bedroom, during those early sessions there?
Instinctively, I walked over to the closet next to my bed, opened the door, and reached toward the back of a high shelf. On it was a brown paper bag with something stuffed inside — the exact shot I needed to complete the movie — the man examining the article of clothing! How did I know a month in advance that I would need this ten-second strip of film for the end of a movie that was not planned out with script or storyboard?
Somehow, I must have known right from the start of the project that the visual information of this shot would be the brick without which the whole structure of Fable for a New Age would topple. It seemed that every decision I had made while directing that film, which I assumed was guided solely by whim and impulse, was instead motivated by an invisible scheme already planned and waiting to be executed. The scheme existed before I created it, before I gave it tangible form in film, which I must have blindly done while in a trance state, having tapped into the right channel, as do mediums who conjure up the spirits. This I managed to do with a camera instead of a crystal ball. The cast of my movie were willing participants in the séance.
Filmmaking is not the nuts-and-bolts stuff that institutions and academies of learning and career management would like you to believe. During the course of their high-priced semesters in which all kinds of mechanical objects are displayed, blackboards are filled with numerical measurements next to stock prices and budget layouts, and the classroom is cluttered with lectures about density filters, dollies, F-stops, and light meters. I know a fellow who doesn’t use a light meter when shooting his films. He puts a pocket mirror up to his eye instead and adjusts the lens opening according to the size of the dilated pupil inside the iris of his eye. His 8mm movies are great!
I find it hard to remember how I managed to make most of my films, because I become stricken with a feverish spell, in some sort of trance state, which won’t let go until it runs its course, and the movie is completed. I am the channel through which it manifests itself into sound and form on film stock, because a cast is suddenly there willing to participate without pay. Also available is a modest amount of money for the meager supplies and equipment to construct the movie — all synchronized to my needs, as if I was meant to make those pictures. You can’t question such things. You just do them.
Maybe the configuration of stars and planets has something to do with it. Whatever the answer, I was given the green light to check out if destiny is just a word or a universal law that really exists when signs are followed. Yes, signs which indicate whether we are to proceed or discontinue. The signals are sometimes administered through agents you might, for lack of a better term, call guardian spirits or angelic sentries. These twilight soldiers are on alert in case you go astray and jeopardize the destined project.
I’m not kidding. Inarticulate, disinterested people with short attention spans and scattered minds or perfect strangers who happen to be in your proximity will suddenly speak up to question a hasty decision made while you were fatigued or disgusted. Their direct sober observation is delivered with such an impressive strength of authority that you respectfully stop dead in your tracks to backtrack on what you just did. And behold, they were right. You had become sloppy and they caught you.
This has happened more than a few times to me while in the midst of rushing to finish a film. I never fail to be impressed and awed by the strong wisdom of the benign warning of the error committed in haste. Saying what had to be said, the guardian angel leaves the body of the person who reverts back to their usual scattered, inarticulate, disinterested self, for they have served their purpose through which the gods have spoken. And if no human is around to host these sentries, then the Fates guide us into making mistakes.
The Fates operate when you’re confused or not paying attention while working. It is in this state through which they are able to assist by tricking us into pressing wrong buttons on equipment or using a different lens from what we intended to use. These mistakes turn out not to be errors at all, but are in fact better substitutes over our original decisions. The revelation in witnessing one of these “divine errors,” which are far superior to what had been originally planned for the film or video, is astonishing and comforting, because it reassures our faith in divine intervention.
We are in guiding hands, under watchful eyes. Trust in signs, and go with them when they indicate a green light. But heed those red lights when they start flashing. The red lights are telling you something, specifically to stop and go on to something else. (A different career, perhaps?)
Never go against Fate and persevere on a cursed project whose demons are driving you crazy. They don’t want you there; you’re in the wrong place. That’s why there is a plague of difficulties and catastrophes giving you headaches, ulcers, and a short temper on top of making you broke. When things come easy breezy and the sailing smooth while you’re having fun, too — you’re on the correct vehicle in the right place — a profession suited to your talents. The way is open and everything is lined up for you, waiting. You’re in sync with the cosmos and in tune with a gift. Follow that destiny and make friends while influencing people along the way.
Let me tell you of the time I decided to do a story about obsessions. I had allowed myself to become obsessed with someone and was finally recovering, so I thought I’d explore this sickening state of mind that had haunted me for months. I wrote the dialogue for this video project while in Europe touring with my films, and assembled a cast from acquaintances back in the United States. The people I used as actors had not met each other until the first day of taping the story in California.
The lead character of the story played the part of a woman who is obsessed with a boy, the leading male in the teleplay. During the taping of this glamorous drama, my leading lady developed an attraction for the young co-star I had chosen for her and eventually became obsessed with him. The boy was staying at my place, so she kept calling on the phone in an effort to arrange seeing him before he left for home on the East Coast.
I pretended not to be aware of what was going on, but I dreaded picking up the phone every time it rang. My actress was no longer playing the part I wrote for her. She was living it for real. What was going on here? Voodoo — that’s what.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I had the urge to celebrate my sexuality by performing sex with someone that my movie camera would record for an erotic picture poem. This was the late 1960s, so a bit risky to do, besides being difficult to arrange since the only people consenting to such antics would be brazen exhibitionists or rising porn stars, of which I knew none at the time.
While contemplating the 16mm film I wanted to make, I decided to see an erotic movie at a pornography theater in midtown Manhattan, something I seldom do. I was curious about what others were producing in the way of motion picture erotica. These films were soft core back in those days, and I watched the actors on the screen wade nude through a transparent plot of sexual antics.
It wasn’t a great movie, but it shared with me the need to get loose and let it all hang out. On the next day after seeing this movie and feeling a bit lonely and horny, I made eye contact with a person on a subway train out of Brooklyn. Once connected, our eyes did not disengage. We went home together (my home a three-room apartment in the Bronx) and indulged in sexual antics of our own. During the physical exchange, I realized the person looked familiar, but couldn’t place where I had seen that face and body before. I knew that person from someplace, somewhere.
After becoming physically well acquainted that afternoon, it was time to conduct a verbal exchange to make the union that much more whole and complete. During this casual but informative conversation discussing movies and jobs we had, the question of why I felt such a haunting familiarity with the stranger was answered. My naked partner was the star of the porno film I had seen the previous day. Yes, I was in the arms of the actor of that erotic film I had seen in midtown Manhattan!
I finally did shoot the hardcore picture poem in celebration of my sexuality. I had found a partner in this “rising porn star” in bed next to me. This exhibitionist I met on a train out of Brooklyn was to be cast opposite me in my own sexually explicit 1968 film, Chronicles.
Movies, it seems, are made from the same fabric that patterns our dreams and weaves desires to fruition. Why this drive to bring form from chaos — this need to put substance to spirit and a solidness to memory whether on canvas, in clay, across paper, or on an illuminated screen? What is the motivation of it all if it is not for money and fame, of which I have neither? Could the reason be found deep in the nebulas of spiraling galaxies where stars ignite and dust clouds collect into rotating moons? What are these acts of creation we do in paint or on film? Are they linked or related to Creation itself — the very force that gives motion, light, and form to the universe ... or am I just a guy warding off boredom with a hobby that substitutes for his loneliness?
