Then of course I didn't want to divorce myself from what is called artistic, because that's a shelter in
which you live under very exciting environment and it removes you from the duty of the daily labor
and gives you a special good company because I kind of liked this intellectual artistic brand compared
to film which is really highly industrial, specially in America. When I came here and looked around I
still didn't believe in American avant-garde because that European one was profound, the film avantgarde
and when I saw what Americans did I found it a little bit incidental. Some of them were
intellectually gifted to bring their new structuralist principle into it, or minimalist at that time, but still it
wasn't something that texturally I could fully belong to. It took me years before I could really, at that
time five years is huge amount of time, because it was moving so fast, eventually after that I begin to
understand what American avant-garde is, their interest in materiality, in the surface of the film, the
scratches something, the definition of material which is in our terms Marxist and then distance of them
from Hollywood which is illusionary idealist or realist and then you have to going back to Greece to
Aristotelians and Platonians divisions so it all became more or less the radical part of the American art
which had its own ethical concept. Also the way it was presented at that time, like the definition,
Mekas was, the film is beautiful just because it was not made in Hollywood, you see, now the ethics
and aesthetics would collide and then in a way ethics would win.
So this is charged period, I am talking about the 60s and early 70s, thru 70s till the middle of the 80s
but still it was certain aesthetics paradigm and I am coming from that interest from my childhood
postwar, I very much was in favor of transcending this idealist principle of making images because
after all the American Hollywood and Russian propaganda, large films, their feature films like
comedies, what are the big movies about...tadadadyda...about Kolchoz and they used to make ..i'll tell
you later about it because it was the same. The Russians at that time, the propaganda large films,
operatic, they were not interested in scratches on film, they were not interested that this is the emulsion
surface, they were not interested that film goes thru, they just wanted to bring the pure and clear
ideology. And it was called Kubánští kozáci, this is absolutely fantastic because when I see them again,
I am taken because it's really powerful and it shows you happiness, but it's complete fabrication. That's
exactly what European emigrants brought to Hollywood, it's the fabrication and we had the discussion
on it with Gene Youngblood.
