As director, what kind of relationship did you build with these artists?

Canyon became a major part of my life. One of the first things I did was call Chick Strand. She said: the place is yours, do what you want with it, anything you can do to keep it alive is great. Bruce Baillie gave me the same encouragement. It wasn't really a collaboration. Mostly we talked on the phone about the origins and the spirit of Canyon: an organization of filmmakers looking after themselves, a kind of union of experimental filmmakers.

Slowly I won over the filmmakers, because we were paying them. Bruce Conner had his films with someone else and wasn't sure I knew what I was doing, so he gave us just two films. Whenever a filmmaker asked for royalties, we sent a check. Bruce would ask, and the next day he had it. No waiting a month. Little by little I won his confidence. The same happened with Kenneth Anger. He came to visit the office, we hit it off almost immediately, and once I had his confidence we became the sole distributor of his work.

I trained the staff to take care of the prints, and to remember that the filmmakers came first, the renters second, and we came third. Slowly we began to pay ourselves better. I stayed for thirty-two years, most of Canyon's history.

You mentioned Bruce Conner. What was your relationship with him, and how did Battle Stations come about?

Bruce and I became business friends, I guess you could say. He knew he could trust me and confide in me. His films came to account for 15 to 20 percent of Canyon's business. He was our biggest renter, and much to his chagrin, he was helping the organization survive.

One year the Cinematheque moved to the Naval Shipyard, a toxic waste site, and offered $500 grants for site-specific films about the new location. I got one and told Bruce. He was convinced there was radioactivity, because paint had been stripped from old submarines and was still lying around. So I picked him up in my old Mercedes, he brought his Geiger counter, and we drove to the shipyard. We walked around testing for radioactivity while I filmed him, and we found none, which calmed his fears. He was actually happy with the film. As he saw it, it was just Bruce walking around doing nothing.

What kind of friend was he?

A difficult one. We had many screaming matches. He would call me at home at any hour to complain about things I had no control over. He didn't like people making money from artists' work: the artist should get most of the money. So if you were making money from his, he made you really work for it. He wanted to be told every time we cut a damaged frame out of one of his prints. That's impossible. In a ten-second film every frame matters, but in a longer film nobody will notice one missing frame.

What role did Bruce Conner play in the scene of those years?

He was big in the Seventies, and he became part of the punk scene too: America Is Waiting and Mongoloid became something like punk rock hits. And he was with us when we rebelled against the Cinematheque, which kept ignoring local filmmakers. He joined us the night we took over one of their screenings to show our own films. That's how the No Nothing Cinema started, and later he would come down there and play the organ while we cooked sausages on a barbecue. We were lucky we didn't get trichinosis.

In 2024 you started making the diary films. How did that begin?

I had finished a major work, Aeon, and on my editing desk there were all these tiny films I had never released, because I didn't think they had enough substance. The first diary was a two-minute piece shot at my teacher Robert Fulton's estate in Connecticut. It was a flashback into a different time, seen with the eyes of 2024. Fulton has passed away, his children are grown, everything has changed, but the memory is very vivid: the way he presented his work, him as a pilot. I thought: this has value for me, I don't care if nobody else likes it.

Then I started looking for other 16mm and 8mm footage. There were two rolls I shot at the No Nothing Cinema, the space my friend Dean Snider helped found. That footage has historical value, if nothing else. It was part of the scene.

Some go back to my student years. Buffalo 1969 is an anti-war demonstration I shot on Regular 8 when I was in college there. I was very politically active. I knew there was going to be a demonstration, so I went down with my camera.

For me the diaries are like a writer's journal, or the lines a poet writes that don't fit into a particular poem. The lines are still valid. So I take those lines and turn them into diary films.

So you often filmed without having a film in mind?

Yes, just for the hell of it. At one point I carried my camera almost all the time, filming things I found interesting, or not interesting. A lot of it didn't fit anywhere.

Flashbacks is one example. For several years I had collected the beginnings of the rolls, the part that gets struck by sunlight as you load the camera. One day I stuck them all together and realized most of them were my wife. I had to stop. It was too emotional, I was too attached to the footage. After she passed away, it took years of distance before I could make the film, which is mostly dedicated to her.

Looking at that material with fresh eyes, even though it was shot decades ago, I found great relief in letting these fragments become entities with a life of their own. And people seem to enjoy the informality with which the diaries are made. I have now digitized everything I have on 16mm and Regular 8, so there are more diaries buried in that archive.

Why do you still work on celluloid?

I have shot digital, and I'm not happy with much of it. The first reason is contrast: even in post-production, digital can't give me the darkness I get on film. Around 1984 I switched to black and white, using a high-contrast stock that Kodak said was only meant for optical soundtracks and wouldn't work in a camera. A friend gave me a few rolls. To see how black I could get it, I filmed the darkest thing I could find: people tarring roofs, with the sunlight sparkling on the tar. The contrast blew me away, and I have shot on that 10 ASA stock for decades.

The second reason is that in digital you don't really have frames, you have seconds. To my knowledge you can't shoot a single frame at a time, or maybe nowadays you can. Filmmakers talk in feet, not in hours: "I have 1,800 feet." The third is that you can't superimpose in the camera. In digital I have to do superimpositions in post-production, with a software program. For me the magic happens in the camera, where the light hits the film and brings out the images in a way I never expected. I prefer not having expectations and being surprised by how the film comes out. With digital you're just recording data, not imagery.

That said, I have used my iPhone in my latest work, because traveling with a Bolex, going through airport X-rays and being stopped because they think the camera is a gun is just too much.

Why do you think so many young artists are going back to film today?

That was the big discussion at my recent show. They grew up in a digital age, but they want something tactile, something that involves their body: winding the camera, hearing the frames go by, learning how the sun hits the film. With digital everything is automatic, and the camera compensates for the light. They want to see the frames, not data on a screen.

It's also about the way you watch film. With a projector there's a shutter going by, and you're put into a hypnotic trance. On a computer you're not. A real cinematic experience is very rare today, and nobody is making projectors anymore. And then there's the material itself. With digital, I spend half my time looking for files I thought I'd lost. With analog, I have the film. I can't delete it. I may put it somewhere I can't find it, but it exists. The frame is a fact. With digital there is no physical frame, so you only have a concept of a fact. When the new technology came along, we were too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Is it the market that pushes us to keep changing technology?

Yes, it's self-perpetuating obsolescence. And what's the goal? To get as perfect as the celluloid frame, and the technology will never get there. Along the way, very subtle things are taken away from us, like the space between the frames, and we don't even notice. It's like a TV commercial with no space between the sentences. Where's the breath? We no longer have space to reflect, no space for our eyes, our minds and our ears to breathe. Digital makes things accessible, and that has great value. But on the internet we're surrounded by nonstop noise. There's no filter, and we need filters.