Behind the Vision

Chuck Workman talks Visionaries

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Oscar-winning filmmaker, Chuck Workman on his latest film, Visionaries premiering at Tribeca Film Festival, New York.Workman brings alive the vibrant history of the avant-garde cinema. Through interviews with filmmakers and critics including Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Su Friedrich, and Amy Taubin, he reveals how this artistic movement highlights subjective vision, sensory experience, and dreams over plot and storyline. Workman couples these conversations with a dazzling array of diverse extracts from experimental films that illuminate for the general audience a qualitatively different kind of movie-going experience.

What do you feel is the most important message of Visionaries?

The message, if there is one, is that experimental film has as great a claim to being a viable art form as painting or sculpture or music. Because we assume a “movie” is going to be a narrative, and because these narratives that we’re used to seeing aren’t particularly complex, we assume that avant-garde films make no sense. But as art, they make the greatest sense.

You’re no stranger to documentaries and short-films; Precious Images and Superstar are some of our favorites. How do you go about picking the “right” project?

I’m not sure how I pick projects but I think certain ideas are in the air, at least the air around me, and they find you in a way. You have to really want to pursue something to make a film about it. And sometimes I’m asked to so something, and it intrigues me, but I want to convert it to something more. For instance, I was asked to do a film about Allen Ginsburg, and I thought that the whole idea of the Beat counterculture was worth doing, and we made The Source, about Allen of course but also about the Beats as individuals and as part of a movement. But it’s not just the subject matter, as a general idea, that draw me in. It’s the way I might make a film about it (or try to make a film about it) that’s just as important, if not more important. I’m a working filmmaker looking for good subjects that I can make a particular kind of movie about, one that works for me and the way I see film, and the fact that the subjects are interesting is a bonus. While I’m not particularly interested so much in Hollywood films, for instance, they’re a great subject for me doing whatever I do. But I find I warm to subjects about art or counterculture figures. I like to make films about people who might have been overlooked who were always right to begin with, at least in my opinion. It doesn’t happen often in life, but when it does it will make a good movie.

Where do you hope to see avant-garde cinema in the future?

I’ve noticed even in the few years I’ve been working on this film that more and more intelligent audiences are interested in the avant-garde. It’s as if they’ve seen enough Hollywood films or even European art films, and are anxious to go further. I hope this tendency continues. People underestimate audiences and commercial filmmakers and studios play down to them. But audiences are pretty sharp generally, and open to this form, if they just know how to look at it.

You had the pleasure of interviewing legendary filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, was this your first time working with him? (brief description of your experience).

Kenneth Anger is a major figure in avant-garde cinema and would have been included somehow in the film anyway. But I happen to see him at a screening of some of his films, and saw how he interacted so well with his own material. So I explained this project to him, and of course Jonas Mekas meant a lot to him – and we were paying a little bit – so I asked him to come to a screening room and sit in front of a screen as his films ran and talk about them, or answer questions from me. He was very frank and open, and seemed to have fun. We shot it with two cameras, one on him and another on a wider shot of him with the films, plus I had the films themselves to cut to, so it was very manageable. I also brought in a few people to sit in the audience for him to react to.

Avant-garde cinema tends to capture the storyline with a unique vision, sound and experience. Is this something you felt like you had to create in the documentary? Something that evolved on its own? Or a little bit of both?

I didn’t try to make an avant-garde film myself. I wanted to look at the films I was featuring without overstylizing the way I did it. I found myself cutting slower than normal, and not trying to be too ironic as I might have been in my other films. Some of these films are easy to make fun of – I’ve done it myself. But you have to treat them properly, like modern painting or sculpture, which is also not hard for ignorant people to make fun of. Many times I had to hold back an easy cut or reference that I knew would get an audience reaction of some kind but might not be true to the material. I found I enjoyed this discipline. And the films deserve it. I’m not as reverent with Hollywood films, I’m afraid. But they can take it.