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

Leslie Thornton's film Old Worldy (1997) and its "rearticuladon/sequel" Another Worldy (1999) open with "The Lucky Girls" dancing atop a New York City skyscraper to the music of an all-female band. Among the many other dancers whose performances Thornton appropriates, this troupe of young, professional female 1940s-era American dancers reappears throughout both versions of the film in seedy Algerian dives, Russian outposts and Parisian can-can establishments. A preternatural luck seems to take them everywhere in space and in time with infinite energy. Yet as their various world travels were most likely filmed on the same sound stage, they are like-wise emblems of a flimsy utopia. In this void, there is no sound, or rather, the original sound of the all-female band is replaced by a techno beat that uncannily seems to have belonged there all along, punctuating the regulated paroxysms of ultimate global unity--promised in the image but deferred through the never-resolving beat. We have been expecting this ultima te event since these reels played out in living rooms or military encampments when the old-world order was about to turn a corner and become whatever we think of as "new."

Old Worldy is one of the most hallucinatory of Thornton's works. As in her films on the nineteenth-century Russian traveler Isabelle Eberhardt (There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving [1988]; the more recent and compelling Haunted Swing [1998]; and the in-progress, feature-length The Great Invisible), hallucination is the explicit subtext. Thornton's obsession is with a woman who sought "to touch the secret soul of Islam"--an act that would require entering into the hallucinatory or intoxicated states of certain Islamic mystical brotherhoods. To reach this communal hallucinatory state, though, would require a total, and eventually fatal auto-hallucination, inducing a forgetfulness of her gender and race, and thus allowing her to enter a space denied to women and non-Arabs. In Old Worldy this hallucinatory state takes the form of what Thornton calls the "haunted gap" between sound and image. The unsettling erasure of synchronized sound coupled with her uncanny redubbing--the publicized "one edit" of the film--create s another haunted gap between past and present, which Thornton would like to displace from its locus between historical moments, and place on the outside of time.

Thornton's earlier work Adynata (1983) was a more explicit critique of the Orientalist impulse in which the beauty of exotic images and sounds hides the violence that produced them and brought them west. In her most recent films, these predictable patterns of critique and description give way to the unabashed Arabesque. Thornton has spent over a decade studying Arabic language and culture and there remains an intellectual relation to the material that does not give itself over to the pleasure principle of colonialism. Throughout Old Worldy and Another Worldy the viewer is allowed to reflect on deeper, more complex forms of colonialism that are difficult to comprehend. But Thornton's stance is not didactic and she readily admits the poetic and joyful powers inherent in images of Americans who, with the virtual license of exotic imagery, dance themselves into a frenzy. The films' images of a lily white Bahiana or the '40s novelty music impresario Spike Jones entertaining a bumbling Sultan may be symptoms of a deleterious misunderstanding, or they could be desperate--and maybe successful--attempts to cross borders, attempts to raise an everyday identity into an emblem of transport, dream and understanding through the inexplicable medium of the body.

With the ease of a talented DJ, Thornton engages in a form of culture jamming that is at once global and highly personal. The history of culture jamming and found footage manipulation has just recently begun to be assessed as a coherent, albeit multivalent tradition, and one of the purposes of this interview is to explore the secret impulses of a practitioner of this once underground tendency. In the world of experimental film, the works of Bruce Conner, Michael Wallin and Thornton (among others) have provided important reformulations of the modernist impulse to recontextualize information; but it is questionable whether this impulse leads directly from Marcel Duchamp's found objects and Dadaist collage since the usage of found footage seems an almost "natural" reaction to the media environment at hand. Found footage work, seen in this light, is not purely conceptual or art historical, but a message from the heart of the postmodern condition. But how is one to think of the artistic value or political meaning of this practice that has not only become widely popular (the appropriations of high school educational films and the like have become an art school cliche), but veritably corporate since postmodernism has given mainstream media license to become an appropriative machine? Sergei Eisenstein described his vision for the role of montage elements when he said, "[b]y combining... monstrous incongruities we newly collect the disintegrated event into one whole, but in our aspect." Perhaps one should keep Eisenstein in mind when visualizing Thornton's restructuring of the impossible event of global unity through the use of found footage. Thornton's monstrously incongruent images of Zen priests and Indian musicals, Kathakali and the lindy hop, expose her own intimate perversion of world order.

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.

After that I had to process it intellectually and try to under-stand more consciously what was so powerful in this assemblage. Initially what struck me most was this sense of a void across time because for me, putting that 1940s footage to a techno beat didn't just create a distance, it also showed some common ground of pop culture. It was about two pop cultural moments that shouldn't be next to each other: one in the form of sound and one in the form of image. I felt that there was this haunted gap between the two and it was about a passage of time. However, at the same time, I don't want to say that the techno music represents our present and everything else some ineffable past. On one level it is all part of a slowly moving organism of culture, rolling around, picking up and dropping references across ever-evolving presents. The techno may be more familiar than the earlier representations, but that is only a momentary effect. In 50 years it will all be ethereal.

While I liked the elemental quality of Old Worldy, there were many undercurrents in the footage that I found myself intrigued by. Nearly all of the seven dance numbers were cheap allusions to different ethnographic origins, from Russian to Middle Eastern. Those that weren't exotic were militaristic. I was thinking about how popular entertainment is derived from forgotten pasts, from ritual, religion and war, from various symbolic, practical and worldly forms of movement. With reworking, Old Worldy evolved into something more nuanced and critically oriented than I originally imagined it being. There was a point when I had to give it another name--it was becoming another work altogether. I spent more than a year looking at ethnographic dance material, some "scientifically" serious, some "educational," some what I call "Around the World in Eighty Days"-type travelogs and some newsreels. Another Worldy operates as an implicit, cross-cultural critique of dance forms and their origins. I wanted to hold on to the e ntertainment value and uncanny qualities of Old Worldy while bringing forth a more implicit critique.

Joe Milutis: When I watch Old Worldy I am reminded of Antonin Artaud speaking of "the animated hieroglyphs" of Balinese dancers and there is even a point in the film where you see the type of dancing he was inspired by. It seems to me that you are reading these dances on the level of the animated hieroglyph, that these images communicate with each other in an other-worldly Esperanto. Yet, ethnographic or cultural studies have developed certain protocols of reading the image and gathering material, protocols that have seemingly little place in the kind of work you are doing. On the one hand, a film like Adynata--in a more traditionally political way--explores the idea of the inscrutable, hieroglyphic Orient organizing circuits of fantasy and desire--that is, the whole idea of the indecipherable, Oriental beauty is linked with general cultural violence toward women. On the other hand, however, there is something about these more recent films utilizing Islamic imagery (as in Old Worldy) engaging more or less dir ectly with the issues of Islamic mysticism (There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving and Haunted Swing) that might not be easily reducible to theories of Orientalism and might be amenable to an aesthetic of drift or an unconventional feminist stance. Can you talk about your attraction to Islam in these films and your relation to Islam and what drew you to Eberhardt and her experiences in Algeria?

LT: First, let me say that there is a slight prevalence of Middle Eastern dance in Another Worldy as there are a number of Arabic-style dances lined up next to each other. This reflects an area of interest and awareness that I have developed over many years, primarily through ongoing work around the story of Eberhardt. What drew me to Islam and what drew me to Eberhardt are quite different things that conveniently come together in her biography. I read a short, rather florid account of Eberhardt as a Victorian-era woman traveler, and was struck by the ways in which she didn't quite fit the mold. There were some other famous women travelers who cross-dressed, who passed, who penetrated their chosen destinies, but she seemed more raw, less self-contained, possibly more subject to her drives and even more independent, more absolute. I wouldn't call her a feminist, except by default because for her it wasn't a conscious stance. She was young when she started traveling and she was running away from a damaging fami ly situation and an overheated political and social environment in Geneva, where she was raised. I was attracted to her as something of an exception among exceptions. I suppose I could relate to her a bit more as someone who was full of contradictions and uncertainties, a soul searcher. And she didn't bring her servants and silver tea set along. My interest in her story was deepened by a curiosity about her chosen religion, a global religion that seemed almost invisible in American culture, and about which I knew nothing. In its most literal sense, "the unseen cloud" was a whole cultural arena that hadn't intersected in any apparent way with mainstream American culture, except through images of terrorism in the early 1980s. I was amazed by the absence of "Arab" in American culture, by our collective ignorance.

To make these works I had to study (and I continue to study) Arabic culture, language and religion. I was trying to meet artists, writers and intellectuals in these countries and talk about ideas: "Where am I coming from, where are you coming from?" This seemed productive, and of mutual interest. For a while I had a very hard time dealing with sensitivities about cultural interfaces and who can speak for whom. My feeling all along, from the time I worked on Adynata, was that cultural interaction is a constant historical process, one that is about change, and is very complex and happening faster than ever now. I am deeply bothered by the kind of self-censorship that has been going on in the arts, especially in the U.S. I have made a point of not being afraid to say something "wrong." I felt that it was important to dive into this morass and try to make work that is not fixed to any certain political agenda. There are people who do not like what I do because it seems frivolous or indulgent or politically reckl ess. I'd rather take a chance to misunderstand, and press some buttons. I do not want to concern myself with the film's present-tense address, but rather to see how things resonate over a longer period of time. I see a lot of academic multi-cultural discourse as condescending.

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.

JM: Can you give an example of how this works in practice?

LT: If you take away a voice-over that explains that you're looking at a Westinghouse factory in 1901 (as in a scene in the Peggy and Fred in Hell series), then the image is cast adrift and we see an incredible, other-worldly view of a vast space filled with huge machine parts and small well-dressed men rushing around with hammers and clipboards. It is shot from an unimaginable angle high above, a moving crane shot that seems to go on forever. The footage invokes the fantastic imagery of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). It is actually in-house documentation for Westinghouse of a turbine plant, but when subsumed into the science-fictionalized context of Peggy and Fred in Hell, it reads as a commentary on men and machines. At the same time it is recognized as an early instance of film being used for historical documentation. The necessity to see things simultaneously in more than one way--that's what I'm trying to achieve.

When I started making Another Worldy I found this unbelievable footage at the Performing Arts Library in New York City by Burton Holmes who photographed around the world at the turn of the century and just after and was one of the first people to do ethnographic films. This certain footage features dancers who are more perfectly mechanical in their movements than in the more contemporary films, including the ones I used. They are very young and very beautiful and fragile-looking, dancing in an old temple courtyard. The footage is very distressed, it's really falling apart, it's like lace. The emulsion is thin and the exposure moves up and down, which makes it ethereal. There is something very peculiar about it, which is that the dancers have no relationship to the camera. They are so involved in the form of the dances. Perhaps they didn't yet know what the camera did. We are not used to seeing any kind of performance--if there's a camera around--that doesn't somehow acknowledge or address the camera. So ther e is a feeling of something missing. Those girls don't have the camera in their head. That's what I think I'm seeing.

JM: Can you talk about your choice in Another Worldy to have the original voice-over remain for the one dance sequence in the Sahara while the rest of the film is redubbed with a techno beat?

LT: I did that partly for the formal reason of wanting to have a film within a film. There are a lot of films framing each other in that piece. That particular dance sequence was documentary, although it was performed for the camera. I knew that it was a sexual dance that goes on for hours and when one woman finally tires out, another woman replaces her. The men also come and go. It's a kind of cathartic public sexual event in Bedouin life. I think the dance itself is incredible, and I love the way one woman's dress starts to fall down, her breast is exposed and the moment is somewhat positioned by the voice-over. So I guess I'm using that voice of authority not just to condemn it, but to question it, partly because it seems to provide some information, and partly because I know that there is a lot of information it doesn't provide, but that's not something you necessarily get from the film.

JM: In Femmes Fatales (1991), Mary Ann Doane, contrasting your method of depicting the Orient to that of Roland Barthes, wrote that while Barthes traveled to Japan to experience the originary, "there's nothing originary in Adynata. . . . For Thornton, opacity is opacity--it has no deeper implications." I wonder if this statement still holds in your most recent films. For example, there is something about Eberhardt wanting to "touch the secret soul of Islam" that alludes to essences. Even in the way you have described to me the joy, and even the love you have for this found footage, there is an old-fashioned sense of the heart of things. I think of your recent films in terms of Eisenstein's idea of the ideogram. He had this desire to get to some sort of originary substance by editing across things that did not seem to belong together. Maybe what he desired was something new--a new language of film--but not entirely postmodern, not entirely fragmented and without referent.

LT: I don't really know how to speak about that yet. I'm going to have to finish this work before I can try to formulate it.

JM: That's the mystics' problem isn't it? They know these things but language is inappropriate.

LT: Yes, so it was appropriate for me to make a piece about a mystic, and one of the things that I hope is brought forth is a sense of that state of mind, a movement from one mental concept to another, from the concrete to the disengaged. I'm not religious, but I am interested in our capacity to experience these things, as human beings. But it is very important to me to touch on a different mentality than we share commonly. That's hard stuff.

JM: It seems to me that part of your anti-aesthetic is your use of cinema's propensity to structure time to talk about everything that is somehow beyond time. Usually one considers any anti-aesthetic postmodern but your anti-aesthetic is not precisely postmodern. It has more of a connection to mystical forms of early modernism. Early modernists used form only as a gateway of sorts, not as an end in itself, nor as a mirror of industrial processes. When I first saw Peggy and Fred in Hell, it seemed purely formal and about mechanical processes. But now I see that, along with the way you use sound, these repeated images are used to talk about the other side of the screen. You turn your attention to some reality of which the image is a very limited part.

LT: That is exactly what that piece is trying to do. The sound becomes primary, but in another turn, the sound is arbitrary, so that it is actually like there is nothing there. The first half is just footage of things moving forward and backward, the penguin and the water, the burning title. When the kids come in there is more of a linear development and they are at least moving across space, but you cannot really understand what is being said. You assume that the soundtrack indicates where something is really going on, that it holds the clue that is going to help you make meaning of what you are looking at, but that doesn't actually happen beyond the level of just creating suspense. For me, on the level of pleasure, that piece was about emptiness.

JM: The title of your second Eberhardt film, Haunted Swing, still remains a mystery to me.

LT: "Haunted swing" was a phrase I found in a book about early camera tricks. But it isn't a camera trick. It is an amusement park ride in which you sit on a stationary swing and then the room moves around you. You experience vertigo, that misrecognition of movement, like when riding a train.

JM: And how do you see this ride fitting into the ideas of the film?

LT: Only in the sense that the media sets things up so that we are stationary and everything moves around us; but actually it feels like everything is not moving. Nothing is moving. So, to puncture the not-moving, I would say, that film ... well all the films probably ... produce that sense of the uncanny. I guess I really am on this treasure hunt. Not just to find things, but to construct moments that are ineffable.

JOE MILUTIS is a writer, media artist and Ph.D. candidate in the Modern Studies program at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. He is finishing his dissertation titled Administering the Ether, and The Aesthetic of the Absolute--a media, literary and techno-scientific tour of the concept of the ether, from 1740 to the present.