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

JM: I am interested in reevaluating certain techniques that have become stylistic mainstays of the avant-garde. For instance, what is your stance toward found footage, and where do you place yourself in the history of its use? There is an unmistakable beauty, a spectacular charge to found footage that is translatable for a wide range of viewers. It seems to have something to do with memory and history. Can you assess your particular use of images and then describe how they might be integral to your project of reconceptualizing narrative?

LT: I'm not solely interested in the spectacle of the footage. Instead, I try to use the spectacle to arrive at some other position that is more about thought than pleasure. I think of my films as intellectual, but I want them to be seductive, as well.

I wonder when the phenomenon of found footage first came up historically. Luis Bunuel's Land Without Bread (1932) is my favorite film and I consider it a found footage film. I know he shot the footage, but I think he ended up using it for something other than what was originally intended. The ambiguity of intentions in that film can never be unraveled, so it is forever suggestive, and thus always somehow contemporary, open to the present. That's a chord I always hope to strike. Found footage is often used for its camp appeal, and this seems to be the most popular but only occasionally interesting reason to use it. I showed Another Worldy at a festival in Graz, Austria recently and a woman in the audience took great exception to the film, saying that it seemed "anti-camp." This was a very intriguing observation for me, and I immediately thought, "She's right." It is implicitly, let's say, "a-camp," while working with high camp-potential material. I realized that I have no affinity for camp as a form of approp riation. I'm suspicious of the nostalgia factor, the ironies, the elevation of mediocrity, except, maybe, when the agenda is pure fun. But I'm afraid I'm too serious about this stuff for it to be any fun; it's always approached on a more archeological axis. I do love the work of Jack Smith, though, and a lot of people would say his work is camp, but for me he is more a "maker of the abyss." The angst always overwhelms the camp.

I have treated all my footage as found material. I would shoot with the idea of putting the footage into my personal archive. I would think, "It isn't going into a place in a script, it's going into a body of material that's accumulating." This is particularly true in the making of the Peggy and Fred in Hell series (1985-present) but it has been the case with all of my films. I was trying to refine ways to direct viewers' attention away from the historical meaning of the footage and rearticulate it into a quasi-narrative present. I was trying to do something with the "address of history," blurring the lines between the historical image and the current image. It is important that the look of my own footage is often indistinguishable from the historical footage, which is easily achieved in black and white by using the same kinds of cameras.