STILL MORE INTERVIEWS WITH WILLIAM E. JONES
Frank Prattle with Zefrey Throwell on 88.9 FM, San Francisco.
William E. Jones is one of the true heroes of Los Angeles. His movies range from the provocative, to the mind bending, to the touching. He has a flair for the perfect quip at the precise moment, not only in his films, but in conversation as well. Probably best known for his film, Is It Really So Strange? which documents the large fan following that Morrissey has developed amongst Latino youth in Los Angeles, he is in town to promote his new movie, v. o., which is a mash-up of classic foreign films with gay porn. William and I chatted about almost every damn thing there is to talk about, from the place of computers in modern films, to how long it takes to do a proper pompadour, to movies in Paris, and of course, gay porn from the 80s. Click here to listen.
Natalie Zimmerman and William Jones, “out there where nothing is,” Camerawork, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2006) pp. 8-15.
Natalie Zimmerman and William Jones are filmmakers and photographers living and working in Los Angeles. Camerawork introduced them and commissioned a piece for publication. This conversation took place between the artists via e-mail in May 2006. Jones’s book Is it Really So Strange? was published in 2006 by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Zimmerman’s film Islands will be exhibited in Camerawork’s San Francisco gallery in January 2007.
William Jones: I have no car, and I have discovered that being a “pedestrian filmmaker” is a serious challenge in Los Angeles. It occurs to me that Islands could almost have been made without a car, since many of its exteriors are fairly accessible and most of the piece was shot in one room.
Natalie Zimmerman: Since the “locations” to which I traveled were purely psychological, a consistent, neutral physical space was crucial. The exteriors were ancillary.
Islands was conceived shortly after seeing the exhibition The Passions by Bill Viola at the Getty. The emotional content of the work seemed to have been emptied—leaving only artifice and the rote execution of acting exercises.
I started thinking about what happens when the narrative basis of gestural language is removed. I began wondering if it was possible to identify any de-contextualized emotional expression as authentic. This led me to consider two conflicting views of what it means to act well: Can a good actor be an effective mimic, or must a truly convincing actor draw on lived experience?
This goes right to the popular view of actors as shallow vessels in pursuit of the temporary meaning conferred by fame or (more positively) a satisfying role—and because I live in LA, the industrial center (without a center) of this pursuit, this notion of a people and a place both defined by dislocation (psychological in one instance and geographical in the other) began to emerge...
Jones: I was struck by two references to Hollywood, one in Islands and one in an earlier piece of yours: Therapeutic Space. A psychiatrist in the latter piece refers to the zip code in which he has his office, 10021, as the most desirable in America, after Hollywood. It is obvious that the closest he has ever gotten to 90028 is seeing it on television. Islands includes a shot of the loveable but much-maligned Hollywood sign, looming over the mythological “center” of the film industry—Culver City and Burbank actually have more movie studios—because a crumbling advertisement for the Hollywoodland real estate development was saved from demolition. These references suggest the vast gap between received wisdom about Los Angeles, especially its image in the mass media, and a real experience of living here.
Zimmerman: I think it’s clear from our vantage point that the mythic LA and the Los Angeles of lived experience are fairly incongruent—the NY psychiatrist’s comparison of his upper Park Avenue zip code to that of Hollywood, the other “most desirable zip code in America,” demonstrates this naïveté.
But regarding Los Angeles and Hollywood, I’m actually more interested in the constant erasure that takes place. So much of the city's history gets recycled into myth. The Hollywood sign is an example of this. This also seems to happen to those who are drawn here. There is this notion, popularized by the city's early boosters, that people could come here and find whatever they were looking for—sever ties with their past in favor of a reinvented or reconstructed self. This may be why I always have a sense of transience—every geographical point in LA is peripheral. The sense of emptiness that comes with a de-centered urban space can sometimes be quite palpable. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York, I found this to be psychologically debilitating—but I now find a creative freedom in it. You can still find things and places that are undefined, oftentimes left in a state of transition because of the city's “inefficiency” and geographical expansiveness—and the geological instability mirrors these social and cultural landscapes.
I was working with these ideas in Islands, and it is why I was interested in your film Finished and your investigation into the “true” identity of Alan Lambert. Perhaps your stated frustration at failing to find the "true" Alan/Alain was due to his own confusion and transitional state. His messianic dreams stand in stark contrast to his instrumentalized role in the porn industry. His life seems to serve as an extreme metaphor for the many "actor/dreamers" who hope to find redemption/fame/transformation in LA.
Jones: The supposed lack of history in Los Angeles does provide some with a sense of personal freedom. People still come to the edge of the continent to reinvent themselves. Geographical displacement leading to personal transformation is one of America’s most durable myths. In other ways, the boosters’ attempts to erase history—deeply and outrageously fraudulent—have had a strong impact on the people who must live in the spaces they have willed into existence. An urban landscape in flux creates waves of nostalgia. Even recent arrivals in Los Angeles find themselves asking what the area was like “before,” though when and if “before” took place rarely gets specified.
I am fascinated by changes in the landscape of Los Angeles, and I am not immune to nostalgia. I take many pictures of buildings, especially old ones put to new uses by their current owners. I seem to have the uncanny ability of finding buildings that are on the verge of being demolished or renovated. In fact, some of the still photographs in Is It Really So Strange? are of places that are no longer recognizable. These color cityscapes were originally part of a large photographic series called The Golden State. In 1999, I began scouting locations for a film of that title. Because a grant provided me with extra money for pre-production, I was able to shoot location photographs rather than relying on sketches and notes as I had done for previous projects. I enjoyed this mode of work and its results so much that eventually making the photographs became an end in itself, and I put the film project aside. During that period, I acquired an extensive knowledge of the geography of Southern California. Later, when I contacted people I wished to interview for Is It Really So Strange?, I discovered that I knew where most of them lived, because I had already photographed their neighborhoods. The coincidence led me to insert this previous body of work into a movie other than the one for which it was originally intended.
Inez Parra, who appears in Is It Really So Strange?, asks why so many tourists from the heartland flock to Hollywood. Whatever they are looking for, they seem to have come to the wrong place. Those aspects of Los Angeles that make the city most daunting to tourists – its sprawl, its diversity, and what one might call its unknowability—are what make it an especially rich environment for artists. With an intimidating tradition of documentary photography coming immediately to mind, a photographer in New York might think that every interesting street photograph has already been taken, but the list of available subjects in Los Angeles seems inexhaustible. It is only a matter of finding them and ridding one’s self of some preconceived notions. What we see of Los Angeles on television and in movies is surprisingly limited, has been digitally altered beyond recognition, or is actually Vancouver.
From what I gathered, the concept of alienation was a regular theme of Alan Lambert’s conversations with friends in Montreal. He no doubt felt personal alienation when he came to Los Angeles, a city where he had few connections. But Alan was also talking about more general forms of alienation. His performances were instances of alienated labor: he received a small payment with no further financial stake in movies that circulated long after his death. These videos were also consumed in an alienated way: spectators had no access to Alan, except as an image, and he certainly had no way of knowing them. A latter-day radical of profoundly idiosyncratic convictions, Alan could not reconcile how others saw him, as a pretty and rather passive porn star, with how he saw himself, as a potential revolutionary leader. While making Finished, I came to understand that Alan’s messianic fantasy functioned as a compensation for his surrender to an industry that made use of him in ways he could not control.
Zimmerman: I’m interested in these concepts of surrender and control you mention with regard to Alan/Alain in your film Finished. There is an irony in the story of his parallel lives, and death, being revealed through the eyes of a complete stranger. In a way, you’ve asserted the ultimate control. By profiling a relatively unknown actor after his death, your voice-over—both literally and figuratively—becomes the last word.
I’m curious as to how you feel about this. I constantly struggle with issues of control and propriety. I want my work to initiate dialogue and communication rather than answer questions or make assertions. I want to learn throughout the process—which means relinquishing a certain level of control. Sometimes this means my voice is suppressed in order to allow unforeseen things to erupt or emerge.
One of my particular difficulties with Islands was in trying to find a balance between my subjectivity and a certain fidelity to the actors’ stories or performances. I felt somewhat responsible, as they were given certain freedoms during the filming; they were left alone with the camera and given control of both duration and content. My directives were simple and I was not present during their performance. Ultimately, each actor was free to interpret them as he or she liked.
After watching many hours of these tapes I decided that the piece would be a single-channel video rather than a multi-channel installation. I felt strongly that I didn’t want the work to be over-determined or closed to interpretation. I wanted certain themes and questions to emerge, but without any definitive resolution. I wanted to allow the viewer to adopt the role of confidante.
Usually in my process, I try to set up parameters or situations conducive to revelatory moments for both my collaborators and myself. Perhaps this is the central tension in my work—I’m always asserting some form of control while my voyeuristic impulses threaten to compromise it. Sometimes the form fails because of this, but for me that risk is essential.
Jones: The question of control is a loaded one, especially when it comes to documentaries representing people’s lives. I maintain that a documentary filmmaker always exerts control over the material at some stage of the process, if not in the viewfinder, then in the editing room. It is his or her main job. Every reasonably informed spectator is aware of that. In an era of reality television’s extreme manipulations and a saturation of product placement, control over nonfiction images has been increasingly usurped by an array of producers, censors, advertisers, and lawyers. It is still possible for independent filmmakers to make personal statements that they own; indeed, this is one of their few real advantages over the mainstream.
My films employ a significant amount of first-person narration, and the main point of view they represent is mine. The limitations of my knowledge lead to problems and contradictions that in turn serve as devices propelling a narrative forward. In Finished, Alan Lambert becomes a character of my invention, as I realize that access to Alain, the real person who lived and died, has to a great extent been foreclosed. Spectators sometimes take exception to what they perceive as a heavy-handed approach to biography. I think their complaints arise from rather conventional expectations of documentary films, especially those that produce an “objectivity effect.”
To put it somewhat facetiously, I grew tired of making films about myself (or about someone who couldn’t talk back), so I opened up my process when I made Is It Really So Strange? I wanted to make a movie that included other voices and orchestrated them with my own understanding of the subject, in this case, the contemporary generation of Smiths and Morrissey fans. Is It Really So Strange? is more variegated than Finished in terms of its tone, but no less controlled. I draw a distinction between a filmmaker’s responsibility to control the form of a film and the abusive practice of taking away the voices of the people in it. For Is It Really So Strange? I resolved to delete from my voice-over any theme that was taken up at length in an interview, never to use a shot of someone speaking as a cutaway in the editing, and to give everyone in the movie at least two segments or speeches. I wanted to respect the intimate revelations my interviewees gave me. This approach has its risks, and some spectators have mistaken my sympathy for credulity. I deplore the mean-spirited approach of filmmakers who wish to do little more than prove themselves cleverer than their subjects, and if I err on the side of apparent naïveté, then so be it.
I haven’t worked with actors, as you did in Islands, so I can only guess that the actors you shot considered your “hands-off” approach a gift.
Zimmerman: Throughout filming and editing this piece, the most difficult issue for me was the question of structure. At the outset, I was determined to show each actor’s performance in its entirety. I gave them certain freedoms during filming and I thought that the best way to convey this freedom was by refusing to cut in at all. In theory, such a strict ethic was crucial to the integrity of the project. But as I started analyzing the material, I found this approach severely limiting. This forced me to confront the meaning and form of the piece as emergent quantities.
The initial framework I set up was straightforward. The actors were given two directives. The first was “to cry.” The second was “to talk about what you were crying about.” The actors were asked to turn off the camera upon completion of each segment—creating a break between performances and an actual break in the tape. Each actor was allowed to use as much time as he/she needed. These “auditions” took place in my home, while I waited outside. The actors were not given any information on their performance until moments before they were in front of the camera. Many of the actors were thankful for the freedom and others were overwhelmed, awkward, had difficulty starting and/or stopping. I think part of this happened because boundaries became blurred. Certainly I initiated this by inviting them into my home, and then leaving them alone to cry. Sometimes they would leave remaining sad. At other times they would linger in a state of awkward intimacy. Many of the actors expressed appreciation. I think it must have allowed some to reach a type of catharsis. This continuous cycle of auditions in my home created an emotionally and psychologically charged space. This made me feel a certain sense of responsibility, as it became clear in many instances that this space of constructed intimacy allowed them to become vulnerable in ways they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to in other acting situations.
So to return to your question, I chose to use this actor to represent the difficult nature of the exercise and to call attention to the structure I imposed—at one point in his performance I enter the frame and we have a number of verbal exchanges. Ultimately, I chose to use his performance but without revealing its more explicit details.
While editing there were two tendencies between which I tried to maintain a consistent tension. The first was a very Brechtian impulse. Providing critical distance while calling attention to structure and context. These are moments when I tried to pull back and emphasize the structure—Brecht refers to this in terms of acting as an “Alienation” or “A-effect.” I could see how the viewer could receive these as uncomfortable or oddly comical in a way. The other impulse was to allow the structure to recede a bit, foregrounding what is being revealed in order to allow for viewer empathy. However, this structure introduces complications. One is never sure if the actors are using the method approach well to assume the identity of a fictionalized character, revealing some real-lived experience, or blending the two approaches. I imagine in some instances the actors aren’t even certain.
I chose to use Los Angeles landscapes as cutaway sequences throughout to mirror the sentiments that emerged from the performances. I also wanted to provide context and space for viewer reflection. These tended to be distant and flat, but subtly undulating. In order to find these I was drawing on my own lived experience and relationship to this landscape, and certainly informing this, if not only unconsciously, was my return to compelling images I’ve collected in memory over the years: New Topographic photographers like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, as well as Uta Barth and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who use the camera to experiment with time and space—also the social, political, and psychological cinematic “landscapes” of Chantal Akerman in On the Border and Andrey Tarkovsky in Nostalghia.
There is so much to discuss that lies beyond the scope of our exchange, but I was intrigued at the path your work has taken from the intensely personal Massillon to the more anthropological Is It Really So Strange? It is fascinating for me to notice our work moving in opposite directions. My last completed project, Between States—a book of my writing and photographs that explore isolation and psychological dislocation—is possibly the most personal, subjective project I’ve ever done. I’m curious to know which direction you think your work will go from here.
Jones: Because I depended on so many interviews in Is It Really So Strange?, my goal was to have a final product that was as accessible as possible to the people I represented. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could make a documentary in a conventional style. Wresting a coherent movie from the seventy hours of raw footage was hard work, but I found the process fascinating and exhilarating. Now that I’ve had that experience, I don’t think I will be returning to a traditional form any time soon, even though audiences appreciate the movie in an immediate and (for me) very gratifying way.
My new body of work was inspired by my parallel career as an archivist in the gay adult video industry. In the course of viewing hundreds of hours of porn, I have developed a fascination with its marginalia: establishing shots revealing urban landscapes of the recent past, charmingly inept dialogue scenes, and close-ups of performers, many now dead. This material, while of no particular commercial use, can be seen as an invaluable document of a lost world of eroticism and sociability.
In the editing room, I employ a variation on what DJs call a “mash-up,” combining segments of sound with segments of picture, and making decisions based upon the length of the segments rather than their content. All Male Mash Up, the primary video in my most recent solo exhibition, draws from the nonsexual scenes of gay porn films made before 1985, the last year that 16mm film was used as a production format. The somewhat arbitrary juxtaposition of diverse “found” materials often yields surprisingly appropriate results, suggesting a new narrative space, and paying tribute to a former era of gay life and cinephilia.
My latest videos, v. o. and All Male Mash Up, would seem to be an abrupt change from Is It Really So Strange?, but they involve a return to subject matter I have been dealing with for years. My work does not depend very much on the notion of a “signature” visual style. Each project should dictate the style in which it is realized. What unifies the body of work has more to do with a range of concerns or a narrating voice or even a general sense of circumspection. Nevertheless, I think a major shift has taken place. I came of age in the 1980s. I have recently become interested in assimilating the past, and in reckoning with what has changed since I was a young adult. Is It Really So Strange? and the new pieces have this ambition in common. I have been making films for about twenty years, long enough to have a sense of historical transformations, and I am now more interested in what has changed about the world than in what has changed about me during that time.
Johnny Ray Huston, “A Q & A about v. o.: Talking Tearooms, Movies, Morrissey, and Melancholy with Filmmaker William E. Jones,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 13, 2007.
San Francisco Bay Guardian: After some years of sporadic output, 2006 seems like a watershed year for you, with the release of a handful of long and short works. Can you tell me a bit about the ebb and flow of your creativity, and why you’re producing more work at the moment?
William E. Jones: After I finished Is It Really So Strange?, I wanted to produce videos that were less complex from the point of view of production. The obvious choice was to appropriate material. I had a number of ideas for videos derived from gay porn footage, and I completed them all during two periods in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. I discovered how quickly one can make work when there is no need to shoot anything!
Guardian: v. o. uses lengthy sequences from gay porn classics such as the Peter Berlin vehicle Nights in Black Leather (including a sequence shot at S. F. Art Institute), and Fred Halsted’s L. A. Plays Itself. One thing noteworthy about these films is their exploration of urban space and how it connects to gay sexuality and identity. Another example source-wise would be the subway passages from the movie Subway in v. o. Can you tell me a bit about your interest in this area?
Jones: As the technology for making images has become more accessible, the range of public space available to filmmakers seems to have closed down. More of the world is owned – privatized, filled with advertising and other proprietary images, secured by the state – than ever before. What I find absolutely astonishing in old gay porn at its best is the freedom with which filmmakers negotiate urban space, as well as the trust and good will of the people they represent. Though they did not intend to make documentaries, the pioneering directors in the genre documented the forms of gay life in ways that become more fascinating with every passing year.
Guardian: I’ve read that you and Thom Andersen know one another, and especially having seen v. o., I’m curious whether you’ve discussed Fred Halsted’s L. A. Plays Itself, and to what degree you think you and Andersen might inspire or inform one another in terms of making your films.
Jones: The simple answer to that question is that I lent Thom Andersen my tape of L. A. Plays Itself so he could include scenes from it in Los Angeles Plays Itself. (Somewhat later, he allowed me to shoot his record player for sequences of Is It Really So Strange?)
L. A. Plays Itself suggested the possibility of sexually explicit, experimental gay filmmaking at an historical moment when this liberty was not only possible but necessary. I believe that the distinction between experimental film and porn had not yet become entrenched at that time, but since I wasn’t around then, I cannot be certain. The union or confusion of gay porn with “higher” art to serve ends more substantial than puerile shock value still gives many pause. (Thom’s use of L. A. Plays Itself in such a respectable context provoked more than one disapproving note.) This claim of aesthetic merit for gay porn films, as well as an interest in the “documentary effect” that I mentioned earlier, were the inspirations for the visual component of v. o.
Guardian: In relation to the soundtrack of v. o., could you tell me a bit about the cinematic sources and your relationship to them? I’ve read that many things came from your VHS collection. As someone who also has a strange library of tapes, I’m curious what you specifically chose to focus on, and what motivated you to use them as source material.
Jones: I have accumulated a large number of VHS bootlegs, and I am reluctant to part with these supposedly obsolete artifacts. I love the films in v. o., and the fact that they are almost impossible to see makes them all the more precious. The sources for v. o. fall into a number of different categories: films that had few screenings in this country and are unavailable in any consumer format (Doomed Love, The Holy Bunch); films available at one time on VHS, but not yet on DVD (Los Olvidados, Heatstroke); and films in some kind of legal limbo that prevents their distribution on DVD (Sleaze, the full version of L. A. Plays Itself). These gaps in the corpus of cinema are absolutely deplorable, and the complacent assertion that the market eventually makes everything worthwhile available is just a symptom of the fatuous provincialism of American film culture.
When I went into the studio with my source tapes, I had no idea if the “mash-ups” I had planned would work. Several did not; most often the sound of a segment was too different in tone from surrounding scenes, the picture was too “busy” to accommodate subtitles, or the dialogue was too fast or complex to be understood out of context. On the other hand, there were sequences that fit together so well that I wondered if the filmmakers had somehow had each other’s work in mind. For instance, a full seven minutes of Nights in Black Leather’s picture lined up perfectly with a chunk of The Death of Maria Mailbran’s soundtrack.
A certain morbid glamour hangs over v. o., a work that serves as an act of mourning for many departed men, a lost gay culture, and orphan films from the archive. I didn’t impose this mood on the material I used; it was already there. An apparently arbitrary intervention – lifting the non-sexual scenes and pairing them with dialogue in foreign languages – reveals how obsessive and dark these movies really were. Years before the AIDS crisis, porn films embodied tendencies contrary to the affirmation and sexual arousal that were their stated aims. They were the harbingers of a sensibility that speaks to these rather grim times.
Guardian: Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) seems more attuned to sensory pleasure rather than discursive threads – did it feel different in this regard while you were assembling it? Can you tell me a bit about your methods and inspirations in terms of what you’ve put in the film and what you’ve emphasized? I’m thinking specifically of the soundtrack and its use of “real” sound and what I would assume are snippets of electronic porn scores. Visually, I’m interested in the increase in repetition when the camera grazes over languid orgiastic shots that would be out of place in current doll-manipulation gay porn. Also the way you dance around the fringe of the final, highly fetishistic interaction.
Jones: Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) pleases me on every viewing, because it is the least personal of my works. I do not appear in the video, nor do I narrate it; the footage and the formal strategies are appropriated. From the source material, I chose short fragments that I thought would make interesting loops. The sound was used as found, and the repetitions function as visual and aural rhythms without any adjustments in the sync. I didn’t “cheat,” and neither did Peter Roehr. He used multiple 16mm prints of advertising films cut and spliced by hand, while I enjoyed the luxury of non-linear digital editing. In collaboration with the Wexner Center’s editor Paul Hill, I made a sort of musical composition from the material. Strict, mechanical repetition might seem dull beyond endurance, yet I found exhilarating possibilities in it. The strategy lends a hypnotic power to marginal fragments while emphasizing the concreteness of the cinematic image. The result is not campy or ironic, but rather reveals a beauty that one could almost call objective.
Guardian: Many of your films reframe or rework preexisting material from porn to explore aspects of sexuality, fantasy, and identity within society. I’m curious – if you were to direct a porn film, what would it be like, and would it in any way mirror some of the counter-conventional strategies you’ve used in your movies or that are present in movies by directors (Halsted, Christopher Rage, etc.) you’ve borrowed from? Would you work to complicate typical porn star worship, such as in Finished? Or are you turned off by the prospect of such a venture because of what it connotes in consumerist gay culture (such as gay culture exists) today?
Jones: Opportunities to direct gay porn have presented themselves, but I have not taken advantage of them. My main objection is that I do not want to exploit my friends. A tight shooting schedule with a small budget is an unappetizing combination. I make work on tiny budgets, but I usually take my time. Circumstances may change, so I cannot say I would never do it.
Guardian: Your Bay Area visit almost coincides with the GayVN awards, which are taking place at the Castro Theatre this year. Are you going to attend? I’m curious partly because the DVD reissue of at least one Peter Berlin movie is up for an award, so he might be there. Do you think anyone working within current gay porn is stepping outside of the rote mechanics that have come to define the movies?
Jones: The production of gay porn films for public exhibition began in the late 1960s as an artisanal, experimental, haphazard enterprise. Over the course of three decades, it became industrialized, a process that demanded efficiency and standardization. Clearly, some directors can make competent and even inspired work in the context of industrial production. It happens in the film industry, and there is no reason it cannot happen in the porn industry. I must admit, though, that I know very little about contemporary gay porn. I have seen nothing produced in the 21st Century. Perhaps one day, I will have a pleasant surprise.
Guardian: I first saw some of the police surveillance footage within Mansfield 1962 in a presentation at a Frameline fest (in 2000 or 2001) and was both amazed and at the same time not exactly surprised by its audacity. There’s so much at play within it: the unquestioning display of heterosexual legal power, and the way it conflates homophobia with actual, rather than typically imagined, visualizations of gay sex. Can you tell me about your interest in the source material? On another tangent, I can’t help but notice that one youth whose mug shot you emphasize wouldn’t be out of place in your Smiths’ doc Is It Really So Strange?. Were you playing off of that consciously?
Jones: The most emotionally intense sequence in my first film, Massillon, is a tearoom scene. It sets a tone and provides an introduction to the final third of the film, an analysis of laws proscribing sexual activity in the United States. At the time I made Massillon, I was not yet aware that another tearoom scene with catastrophic legal consequences had transpired just before I was born in a place an hour’s drive away from my hometown.
When I learned about the Mansfield, Ohio tearoom busts, I felt as though I had found, among other things, a confirmation of what I had written about in Massillon. I suspect that the case cast a pall on what there was of gay life in the region, and though no one talked about it while I was growing up, the witch-hunt must have had a profound effect on attitudes informing my upbringing. The case inspired me to do a substantial amount of research, which I have summarized on my website. In terms of my artistic practice, I chose not to make a Mansfield in the style of Massillon, but instead to reedit the material I found and present it silent, without commentary. It is powerful enough on its own.
The mug shot of the guy with the surly look and pomaded hair in Mansfield 1962 can indeed be seen as a sly reference to Is It Really So Strange? Had the subjects of my previous movie not schooled me in the fine points of greaser style, I would not have been quite so keen to use the Mansfield tearoom material. Both works represent murky, often misunderstood passions in an arena where words like “straight” and “gay” fail to signify. When the greaser guy first appears in Mansfield 1962, the camera tilts frantically up and down, as though the cameraman couldn’t get enough of him. Perhaps he just recognized him from church.
Guardian: As a Smiths fan, have you read all the books about Morrissey, seen all the movies, and taken in a lot or all of the Smiths- or Morrissey-inspired art that has emerged especially over the past five or ten years? If so, are there any projects aside from your own documentary that you’ve found revelatory? Has Morrissey seen Is It Really So Strange?
Jones: During the production of Is It Really So Strange?, I often encountered Smiths-related art or writing that overlapped with my own project in some way. I responded by striking any redundant material from my script with a sigh of relief, “That work has already been done.” I ended up in the situation I didn’t quite expect (but which was entirely satisfactory) of making a movie more about the fans than their idol. The barrage of publicity accompanying Morrissey’s comeback provoked in me a growing distaste for celebrity culture. I have no wish to return to those noisy precincts any time soon.
Andrew Male, who writes for Mojo and is a fan of Is It Really So Strange?, asked Morrissey in an interview whether he has seen the movie. His answer was, appropriately enough, ambiguous.
Guardian: Your website contains a section devoted to harsh, angry, and sometimes fully clueless reviews. Has criticism of your work, positive or negative, ever given you any insight or altered the way you’ve thought about what you’ve made and are making, or has it always seemed to exist, perhaps uselessly, in a realm apart form it. Likewise, have you gotten feedback or responses from any of the filmmakers you’ve borrowed from or people depicted within your movies?
Jones: Faced with current market trends toward anodyne product and relentless self-promotion, I decided to present my own ointment complete with flies. My body of work has received plenty of positive reviews, so I can include a bit of dissent. In fact, v. o. has met with a chorus of published praise. (Film critics respond favorably to a video that celebrates great films languishing in undeserved obscurity.) All of my other works have inspired minor controversies, and I thought it would be interesting to provide a sense of that. Bad reviews, seen from a proper distance, have their uses. They can reveal assumptions about what a film should be, according to an implied standard of taste. If one is going to offend people, it is best to know the target audience, or better yet, the target attitudes.
On the website, I also mention Guy Debord’s engagement with his reviews. By comparison, my own intentions are positively warm and fuzzy. I think that others, especially filmmakers and artists, can look at these bad reviews and take heart. In my case, the first reviews in a given publication or of a given work were often terrible. But over time, some critics came around, some hostile publications folded, my supporters managed to publish their writing (not an easy task these days), and the films found an audience. Tenacity has its rewards.
Guardian: What is inspiring you – and/or what are you enjoying – at the moment, musically and visually? Are there any current projects you’re working on?
Jones: In fits and starts I am working on a film based upon Robert Burton’s book The Anatomy of Melancholy. It is Burton’s attempt to collate every mention of melancholy, its causes and cures, in the extant literary corpus of his time. The first edition appeared in 1621, and Burton continued to revise and expand the book until his death in 1640. The Anatomy of Melancholy is the culmination of a sedentary, solitary life, as well as a compendium of classical learning and vividly imagined perversions. A connoisseur of vulgarity, Burton allegedly compiled lists of bargemen’s curses at Oxford. Historians now consider this story apocryphal, but it persists because it suggests a character to which modern readers can relate. The combination of refinement and degradation has obvious appeal.
The Anatomy of Melancholy is massive, 1,200 pages long, so I am adapting a mere 1% of the text. This leaves room for at least 99 other, entirely different films drawn from the same book. I find the prospect of one hundred adaptations of The Anatomy of Melancholy competing for our attention curiously attractive. Whether my Anatomy will one day become a movie depends, as always, upon money, and upon my own continuing interest. I devise many more projects than I have the energy or resources to realize.
Justin Ocean, “Mix 'n' Match Game,” Next Magazine, issue 14.18 (November 3, 2006) pp. 16-17.
Next: What’s the genesis of v. o.?
Jones: The project started with an intuition that the “golden age” of gay culture was not all life-affirming fucks in the service of liberation. There was something more obsessive going on as well, an attenuated, latter-day romanticism, if you will. I didn’t have to force the material to reveal this dark, almost morbid, tendency. I just put it a context where it could be recognized.
Next: So you watched a lot of porn for this?
Jones: I saw hundreds of hours of footage and went into the editing room having no idea if my project would work. I combined segments of sound with segments of picture based upon their length rather than their content. The somewhat arbitrary juxtaposition of diverse “found” materials often yielded surprisingly appropriate results as if the films had been made with these soundtracks in mind.
Next: Did you have the blessings of porn directors to re-appropriate their works into higher art?
Jones: Intellectual property is the new religion and just as fraudulent as the old one.
Next: Why choose foreign pieces to pull sound from?
Jones: v. o. isn’t only about the passing of an era of gay culture, it’s also about the passing of an era of cinephilia. The foreign films I use are from the collection of VHS bootlegs I have accumulated over 20 years. They’re not distributed in the United States, and I think that’s a scandal, because films like Doomed Love or The Death of Maria Malibran are masterpieces. Some benighted souls think every important movie is being released on DVD, but I’m here to tell you it’s not so.
Next: Many of the scenes have this documentary feel.
Jones: After a number of years, the only value pornography has is as a document.
Next: What’s your favorite gay porn film?
Jones: L. A. Plays Itself—it’s the darkest, filthiest gay porno I know, made before “dark” and “filthy” became tropes or marketing strategies. We may never get to see it with the fist-fucking scene restored, alas.
Next: Could you have made v. o. with today’s productions?
Jones: I see very little that interests me in gay porn produced after 1985, the last year 16mm was used.
Next: If you were making a lyrical meditation on love and passion, why shy away from the explicit sexual bits?
Jones: It’s funny, I see what I do as emphasizing the non-sexual scenes, whereas certain others see the process as cutting out the sex. I’ve gotten bored with images of appendages and orifices. As John Waters once said, “Hard-core porn looks like open heart surgery.” By contrast, the non-sexual scenes from porn get more and more fascinating with the passing years, as various things change: urban landscapes, society’s attitudes toward sexuality, even men’s bodies.
Next: To the uninitiated, experimental art can be a mindfuck—how are we supposed to look at this?
Jones: If I had a program for people’s interpretations or a specific goal at the outset, I wouldn’t have bothered making the work. I decided to appropriate exclusively material I love, so one way of looking at v. o. is as a tribute. I consider the end credits important in that I give no preference to art films over porn. It’s all cinema. I present the titles in chronological order, so you see that Nights In Black Leather and the film version of Society of the Spectacle are contemporaries.
Next: What’s the response been like?
Jones: Some older folks have told me that I captured something very important about the sensibilities of a bygone era. What younger people make of this material is still a matter of question. I hope it inspires them to get into some trouble.
Next: What state of mind should viewers get in before seeing it?
Jones: v. o. can be seen as an instruction manual for how to be an interesting person in rather dismal times.
Next: So you’re trying to make a political statement?
Jones: The film provides an image of a time when it was possible to make a feature-length gay porn film in the New York subway system. The indifference and inefficiency of law enforcement made living in the city really dangerous, but some people managed to get away with things that may well have been great art. Now everything is safer, but surveillance is so prevalent that people are hesitant to take too many chances. The whole cultural sphere has suffered accordingly.
Next: It’s election time here in New York—and gay marriage is on its way in New Jersey—what do you think of homo politics today?
Jones: When I was a kid I thought the only advantages of being gay were not having to get married and getting out of serving in the army. Obviously, times have changed.