The Girls Without the Camera in Their Heads: An Interview with Leslie Thornton

In this sensorium of private perversion, what would normally be seen as "ethnographic" becomes just another form of home entertainment and indeed Thornton collapses these distinctions by intermittently inserting ethnographic films of dance and other ritualized movement into proto-music videos. In Another Worldy, we witness the outcome of vast jungles of nerves organized into movements that are simultaneously disciplined, mystical, hermetic, erotic and heretical. On the one hand, poetic charges of distant loci inhabit the mostly white American bodies of the film's performers. On the other hand, the realistic charge of the original source (the ethnographic documentation)--imbued with its own ritual, but made doubly inaccessible through the uncertainty principle--assails the eye. Across a substance common to both, we witness repetitions of political impulses, as if the world starts with the muscle, not with the map. Thornton's use of found footage in Another Worldy has affinities with work of Dara Birnbaum and the Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN), which utilizes frenetic combinations of deconstructed dance music, mechanical and violent repetitions and banal American culture to make whiteness start to seem more and more alien, toxic and psychotic. But while Birnbaum and EBN engage in defamiliarizing pop culture of the last 20 years through virtuoso editing, Thornton's archival process sometimes simply unearths the surprising and the lost. It is probably more than a coincidence that I first met Thornton before our scheduled interview in an antique store where she was engrossed in an almost visible reverie among the stereoscopic slides, Chinese checkers and cha-cha albums. What Thornton finds, she resurrects: her found footage forms part of an intimate archival process, a process that, in the case of her works on Islamic culture, exposes a reservoir of exquisite feeling locked up in our imagined relations to Islam--the unavoidable relations between poetry and geography--that have been long inaccessible by dint of som e fantastical embargo.

The following interview took place in Providence, Rhode Island on March 16, 1999 and was supplemented by phone conversations and e-mail correspondence in December. The interview is part of an ongoing conversation, intended as part of a monograph of the work of Thornton. The bulk of the interview was conducted after Old Worldy was released but before the premiere of Another Worldy at this year's New York Film Festival. I began by asking Thornton about the difference between the two films and what she meant when she said that Old Worldy had only one edit.

Leslie Thornton: Old Worldy, which is a collaboration with filmmakers Karen Cinorre and Anouk DeClercq, was the fruit of an accident one night. I had bought a reel of films for $15 at a junk store, and somebody suggested we put music on while we watched them. We were all completely enchanted by the footage and the resulting relationship between sound and image, but it was completely accidental. We transferred every-thing to video, didn't cut the image and didn't change any of the music. We just fooled around until we found an alignment that seemed especially dynamic. That was the one edit--putting 30 minutes of appropriated music to 30 minutes of uncut image.