ZB:  I have two films available with the Reframe Collection. Shadow Land, or Light From the Other Side and Charming Augustine.  They’re both narratives that are based on true stories.  They both explore the birth of cinema. 

KB: Since I’m familiar with your work, I’m aware that on some level, these films are made to really be seen in a public context. So there’s a bit of a shift in thinking for you in putting them up on Reframe, although they can stand alone as well.

ZB:  That’s true. I think a lot, not only about the story, but also about how the cinematic apparatus is integral to the meaning of the work.  So when I was making these films, I thought a lot about a world just before film began.  How does one make a film before film existed?  It’s something that most people who make costume dramas don’t consider.  They just put people in period clothes. 

I wanted people to think about what cinema might have been like had it been invented twenty years earlier.   I chose to shoot in black-and-white, 16 millimeter 3D with a vertical aspect ratio.  So the films look quite strange. I wanted people to see cinema as though they had never seen it before. The projector has to be in the room with the audience. I use a silver screen. The audience becomes like scientists crowded around the experimental apparatus, all wearing their 3D glasses.
 
Unfortunately this is something that you just can’t port over to DVD.  So this kind of strange, magical – a little funky, early cinema, pre-cinema -- this other way that cinema could have been born is collapsed into a single channel video for distribution. 

Actually I didn’t distribute these films right away.  I thought a lot about how much would be lost.  I mean you still get the story and the performances and the sound is even better without the noise of the projector, but something about this magical early apparatus is lost. 

People often ask me:  Why 3D?  And I remind people that the 19th century was a very stereoscopic century.  3D photography was born in the 1840s and it became an enormously popular way of looking at photographs, both scientific photographs and popular views.  The photographic image was disseminated largely in this format. So cinema could have been 3D.  And strangely enough, I’ve read that 3D cinema was one of the last enterprises in which the Lumière brothers worked. It’s just a twist of fate that cinema wasn’t born stereoscopically but if it had been, it might have looked something like my films. 

Charming Augustine is based on a case history of a woman who suffered from hysteria. From 1875 to 1880 she was in a famous asylum in Paris called the Salpêtrière. Her hysterics were photographed extensively for medical reasons.  Doctors wanted to document these hysterical attacks in as detailed a way as possible,  which meant taking as many photographs as quickly as possible.  So there was a technological drive to take photographs faster that led to motion studies such as the work of Marey and Albert Londe who documented hysterics in the 1890’s.

KB:  Almost like animation, if you think about it.

ZB:  Yes.  So there was a desire for cinema.  I felt very strongly that if cinema had existed, had they just have been able to take pictures faster still, they might well have made a film of Augustine’s attacks.  If you look at the documentation, you’ll see the doctors wrote very detailed transcripts of what this woman -- known as Augustine -- said in states of delirium.  If you look at Augustine’s case history published in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière you will see both transcripts and photographs taken in quick succession.  It seemed to me this documentation wanted to be a film.  It reads almost like a storyboard, a film on paper.  So part of my enterprise was to attempt to make a film that the doctors attempted to realize 130 years earlier.

I was interested in this collaboration between patient and doctor in the birth of cinema.  Augustine’s performances are, to our eyes, highly theatrical.  She was clearly performing for the camera.  She was the center of attention -- the star of the asylum.  And she played her role tremendously.  So I was interested in her performances as a way to think about the beginnings of melodrama, the beginnings of what we think of as narrative cinema, for example, in the work of D.W. Griffith.  Whereas history books usually just look simply at the apparatus, I’m interested in the desire for cinema. And this collaboration between doctor and patient was complicated in terms of relations of power and control, but I think it was nonetheless a collaboration.  

KB:  What about Shadow Land?

ZB: Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side is also about the pre-history of cinema, but a little bit differently.  It’s based on a book that was written in 1897 by a woman in England named Elizabeth D’Espérance who was a materializing medium.  People who had attended her séances believed she could materialize full body apparitions.  And these apparitions, judging from the photographs in her book, looked not unlike early Edison films, where you have a floating figure against a black background.  Again, they’re highly cinematic.  I see these manifestations as another kind of desire for cinema.  I think of her work in relation to both thought projection and conjuring. You have to remember that popular cinema came into being in 1895, just before she wrote her book. 

And again, because these apparitions appeared to float in the same room as the spectators, I thought stereoscopic cinema would be an appropriate way to draw the images out of the screen and, at least in a virtual way, to bring them towards the audience. 3D is akin to a conjuring trick; you know it’s fake but you see it anyway. It plays on the suspension of belief. I’m more interested in what people believed they saw than whether it was scientifically provable or not.  I believe people honestly thought they saw these apparitions or projections.  It wasn’t just that everybody deliberately wrote down false accounts; rather one imagines that they also suspended disbelief.

KB:  Had you distributed these films before putting them in the Reframe Collection?

ZB:  Yes. I showed these films at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in 2007.  And they arm-twisted me into selling them as DVDs.  They’re my friends, and to my mind they have the most beautiful of all museum gift stores.  It’s small, but exquisite.  And I was so flattered by the idea that I could be part of this, along with maybe seven other filmmakers who I admire, that I couldn’t say no. But I do have one caveat, because I didn’t want this DVD version to actually stop people from seeing the more interesting performance projection version.  So I say very clearly on my DVD that this is for preview or home viewing.  So if you want to have a public presentation, you have to call me up and invite me with my cinematic apparatus to come and give you a show.

KB:  Do you think in the future with technological advances there would be a way for home viewing with a 3D experience?

ZB:  That’s a good question.  It would be really cool if there was.  Again, there are compromises.  I could do something in 3D with that red-green anaglyph, but it makes the image murky and brownish, and my work has such a crystalline black-and-white look that I don’t want to lose that. 

KB:  I understand.

ZB:  You can do 3D with video, but then you need expensive add-ons. It’s not something that you can just send away in a disc.

KB:  Let’s talk about some of your other work and the themes you’re investigating in more spatialized situations, such as your installation work.

ZB:  I think a lot about the apparatus in relation to the story I’m going to tell.  So for every new story, I want to rethink cinema.  This is something I began to do in the mid-90s, oddly enough synchronously with the birth of digital technology.  I felt the digital revolution might free us from the last 100 years of the conventional cinematic single-channel viewing experience.  It seemed like you could do a lot more interesting and different things digitally.  I wanted to relate this back to the different kinds of moving images that existed before the Lumière brothers, whether they were phantasmagorias or zoetropes.  There were a lot of different kinds of moving apparatuses in the 19th century. As I mentioned I was interested in the idea of spirit photographs and séances, where phantoms seemed to appear in the same space as the viewer.  Formally I was inspired by the idea of a séance as an intimate setting that dissolves the boundaries between the viewer and the image. Digital projection and the ability to synchronize multiple projectors, frame accurately, allowed me create apparitions very close to the ones described a hundred years ago.  

For example, my second gallery installation --The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C. -- was a recreation of a series of séances with the French medium Eva C in the nineteen teens.  But this time, unlike in Shadow Land, which is still just a film, I tried to create the space of a séance itself, a room with life-size 3D projected figures that the viewer can walk into, dissolving the boundaries between the real and the virtual.  I worked with four synchronized projectors and stereoscopic imagery in such a way that the real room seemed to extend seamlessly into the virtual room.  This work really requires an actual room, not a cinema.  A gallery made sense; otherwise my whole apartment would be taken up for weeks.  I think of a gallery as kind of home away from home where people can come and visit my performers.

KB:  And this way the work can be seen for a longer period, like a month, instead of just one screening.

ZB:  Exactly.

KB:  But then it doesn’t have the same capability of reaching a much larger audience, like a DVD does.

ZB:  That’s true. That’s the trade-off.  It’s not for home viewing. But it did travel.  Eva C. went to five different cities, so it wasn’t just a one-off event. 

KB: What about some of your other digital works, like the earlier CD-ROM work, such as Beyond and the collaboration you did with the Wooster Group, Where Where There There Where?

ZB: I created these two interactive works in the mid-90s.  And because you could send them away in an envelope, they traveled all over the globe to every continent.  For a short period, it was remarkable.  Beyond and Where Where There There Where were specifically designed for an a audience of one, interacting with them alone, at home on one’s computer. They were virtual worlds made up of many, many, many movies that you could wander through.

KB: Well, the platform for viewing is the computer so it’s a very intimate one-on-one viewing situation.

ZB:  Yes, and I’m constantly talking and whispering to the viewer.  I started Beyond in 1995 as a web serial, and every week I would post an episode in which I would travel into the past and meet these kind of phantoms from the past.

The little movies started as a weekly web serial.  It took me an hour to upload each 3 megabyte tiny, tiny episode.  They were made with a black and white webcam. I was doing these little performances in my house with the webcam with multiple film projectors re-photographing early film and home movies.  I was talking, I was playing live music.  So there were these performances in miniature that ended up 160 x 120 pixels – now the size of a postage stamp and shrinking all the time, as our screens get larger.   I had no idea whether anybody would watch my on-line cinema.  But I thought it would be kind of interesting as a discipline to make a film a week.  And much to my amazement, people started to download them.  I knew this because they emailed me and a lot of interest generated really quickly.  I ended up with so many episodes that I had to build this virtual world – the CD-ROM – to put them in.

KB: And it won an Apple award.

ZB:  Yes, Beyond won an Apple award.  It got a lot of grants and I got to travel all over the place, which was really nice.  

KB: However, with much of digital media that was produced ten years ago, there’s a bit of a problem, isn’t there?

ZB:  Yes, it’s completely obsolete.

KB:  Which is one thing that everyone needs to think about with this work.  It should be migrated to another operating system so that people can still see it, right???ZB:  It would be really great, but unfortunately with an interactive work, unlike a tape, the media still exists, but all of the “glue” in terms of the programming doesn’t work anymore.  Someone has to rewrite all the code. I spent a year learning programming and teaching myself how to do it and really struggled with it.  I do not wish to do that all over again ten years later.   I’ve been trying to get someone to do it for me, and I would pay them, but it’s really hard to find anyone who has those skills and who is interested. 

KB:  This seems to be an issue in the field at large.  Several years ago, the Guggenheim established something they called the Variable Media Initiative, a way of sharing strategies for art/media preservation. They recognized the need to explore some of these issues as they relate to art works because technology is changing so quickly. So if you could migrate Beyond, it would seem that Reframe would be a good place for the interactive work, as well.

ZB: Reframe told me they’re not interested in interactive work, I think for the reasons that you’ve cited, because it’s too complicated. They only want to work with media that is what they call “future proof.” To me there’s nothing that’s future-proof. Even DVDs.  Eventually the media I gave Reframe will look really crummy and finally stop playing because DVD’s are obsolete.  Ultimately everyone is going to have Blue-Ray, HD, and beyond. DVD’s are already looking kind of sorry, like VHS. Not long ago I tossed all my VHS tapes.  And that’s something to think about.

KB:  In terms of preservation.

ZB:  In terms of preservation.  That’s why film is still the best preservation medium.  And ultimately one day, a few years from now, if I want to continue to distribute Shadow Land, or whatever, I will go back to 16 millimeter, and have a much higher resolution transfer, which I’m sure will be more affordable.  If I had done 2K scans instead of just a straight video transfer, it would look much better, and it would be HD-ready.  But that costs thousands of dollars, and Reframe doesn’t have the budget for that.  Starting with film is not a bad way to start because film holds a lot of information, and it’s not going to crumble and fall apart if you store it well. 

KB:  Can you talk about your father and his background and his connection to your work?

ZB:  Sadly my father passed away a couple of years ago. I miss him very much.  My father was a very interesting man.  He would never use the word “eccentric” but his intellectual concerns were unconventional. He was a professor of psychology at Edinburgh University and his teaching had a lot to do with philosophy and the history of psychology.  I always thought that he was the most brilliant person I knew, and I could never reach those heights so as a child it was a little intimidating. He was interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain, in the nature of consciousness.  His own research and writing was primarily in parapsychology. He studied the paranormal from a scientific point of view.  At one point he was the president of the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research, which was the first and most prestigious of those institutions set up to study psychic phenomena scientifically. It was founded in the 1880s; Henri Bergson and other important scientists and philosophers were members a hundred years ago. 

I never planned to follow in my father’s footsteps.  You know, when you’re young, you want to do something completely different from your parents. Though we would discuss his ideas a lot, just because that’s what he talked about. Could machines have consciousness?  We would take long walks and talk about these things.  And strangely enough, in my late 30s, I realized that, independently, I had started to gravitate to the same questions and discovered I was reading the books that he had on his shelves. And so we talked a lot more and he would often recommend things to me. So we had an interesting coming together.  More recently some friends of the family said, “Well, your father must have been very proud of you because you have so many interests in common.”  And I said, “You know, I think it was more like he felt, well what else would you be interested in?” 

KB:  It’s somewhat uncanny and interesting to know that about your background.  I imagine that he certainly saw some of your work.

ZB:  Beyond was dedicated to him.  He thought the movies were too small.  I think he thought my approach was quite odd because he came from a much more scientific point of view.  But he introduced me to so many of the writers and thinkers that I studied, like F.W. Myers and Pierre Janet.

KB:  Well, as different as the disciplines are, there’s some kind of parallel between art and science.

ZB:  I think I see that more than scientists do.  But he loved the idea that I would study and research a case of psychic phenomena like that of Eva C. and use it as a subject matter for a story. And I actually have one really big regret. He gave me a great subject for a film but I was too young to take him up on it; I didn’t get it. And I’ve kicked myself ever since.  When I was in my 20s, he kept telling me I should meet this woman who he would come to visit in New York -- a very old lady who lived on Central Park West who was writing her autobiography.  As a child she had known a very famous medium named Margery who lived in the Boston area. She caused enormous controversy in her day.  But I was thinking, why would I be interested in that?  I was around 25 and thought it was really old-fashioned. I look back now and I think, wow, I could have met that old lady with all those stories.


KB:  How long have you lived in the U.S.?

ZB:  Since 1980.  Close to all my adult life, really.  I came here when I was 22 with one suitcase and one manual typewriter.  I didn’t know anyone when I enrolled in graduate school at Columbia.

KB:  Was it in film?

ZB:  Yes, in film production.

KB: Did you think you would want to stay here?

ZB: I was thinking I did not want to stay in Edinburgh where I grew up.  I was sure about that.  I wanted to explore the world.  And I was as interested in coming to New York as I was in going to school.  I knew I wanted to make films; I didn’t really know what kind of films.  New York just seemed a really interesting place. 

KB:  When I think of Columbia, I don’t necessarily think of it being strong in terms of experimental film.

ZB:  I didn’t necessarily know whether I was going to make experimental work.  It was kind of weird because I was much more artsy than everybody else; most of the students wanted to go to Hollywood and write comedies. And I think it messed me up in a lot of ways because I thought I was supposed to make features.  So throughout my 20s I was confused.  Although Columbia’s a great university and I had fantastic teachers. I studied comparative literature and saw incredible films.  I got a great education but it was confusing because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. A few years later, I started to hang out with an experimental film crowd.  But I was a misfit there too because I am not a child of the American avant-garde.  I still wanted to do a lot of things that I learned at Columbia, which was to tell stories.  I was inspired to move from painting to film specifically because I wanted to tell stories.  I write scripts, work with actors, storyboard shots, things that in a way are quite conventional and not part of experimental film.  When I was young there was no genre or road map for my interests in narrative, history, and theory. Video art in the late 70s, early 80s, was tied into minimalism and structural cinema.  Now there are artists of my generation and younger who are interested in media and media history and ideas and stories in a way that is not Sundance, is not the American avant-garde. But I think it was a field that didn’t really exist until the last ten or fifteen years.  And that’s why it took me an incredibly long time to figure out what I really wanted to do.

KB:  But that’s a process.  Now you’ve discovered that you’re as interested in doing installation work.  So it’s an evolving thing.

ZB:  Well, there was no ready-made genre for me.  Put it that way. 

KB:  And there still isn’t.

ZB:  And there still isn’t. Which is a good thing.  But I think there are artists that deal with issues of history, memory -- like William Kentridge or Mike Kelly or Paul Chan – that are somehow in the same world, in a world that I’m interested in, who will make work that could be single channel film or a gallery installation. Work that cuts across a whole range of media, that includes, for example, drawing and sculpture as well as film and video. I think the idea of an artist being media-specific is increasingly old-fashioned –- you’re a painter or a filmmaker or a this or a that.

KB:  I agree.  There’s so much potential for doing multiple investigations cross-platform with the ideas that you’re working with. And sometimes a film is the way to do it and sometimes a multiple channel piece or an interactive piece or a gallery installation is the answer.  It’s more about the ideas and what form suits it best.  What areas do you want to investigate?

ZB:  It goes back to when I was in art school. Before I came to New York, I studied in art school in Scotland.  And they only had the conventional subjects, like painting, sculpture, and design.  But by my final  year – and this was in 1979 – I was making film and taking photographs.  And the head of the school kept calling me into his office and telling me he was going to fail me because the Scottish education department was paying me to paint.  And I was not applying brush to canvas.  And they would threaten me. I was really stubborn.  I was 21 and I read Art Forum. And I already thought that was an entirely antiquated idea.  You can’t force an artist to use a media they don’t want to. So fortunately I got into grad school in New York, and then they felt really embarrassed.  So I’ve been really fighting this media- specific idea for a very long time.  But by an odd twist of fate, I’ve been increasingly incorporating, drawing, painting and objects into my media work.

(Images courtesy of Zoe Beloff.)