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Buried treasure. Who hasn't dreamed of finding that faded map to a sunken wreck, full of gold and silver and priceless artifacts? It could be anywhere, it could be found by anyone... well, anyone who happens to be a character in the right movie. But actually it's not just in the movies, it's in the movie makers! Keith Sanborn, whose piece "For the Birds" was included in this year's Whitney Biennial, is a New York filmmaker and theorist who has spent his life searching the murky depths of contemporary culture for buried treasure. I caught up with him on one of his trips west last summer to ask him about the hunt.

There's a scorpion that needs to get across a river. The frog can carry him but is afraid to be stung. So the scorpion promises that he won't sting the frog, because if he did they would both drown and what would be the point in that? That makes sense, so the frog agrees, the scorpion gets on his back, and the frog starts swimming across the river. Halfway across the scorpion stings him. As they're both going down the frog gasps out, 'what did you do that for, now we're both going to die!' And the scorpion replies, 'I cannot help it, it's my character.'

PN: You use a lot of found footage, and clips from existing films, in your work. In "Imaginary Laughter," you included a clip of Orson Welles telling the story of the frog and the scorpion. There's that famous Brecht warning about projecting our emotional state into the cinema, having it live our life for us, because then we come out with this really cathartic yet reactionary experience. With the Welles clip, were you saying that that experience is inherent in the nature of the medium?

Or were you were backing away from making that strong of a statement by the way you letterboxed the film and made the picture on the screen only this big (makes small area with hands)?

KS: Well that is definitely a Verfremdungseffekt.

What's that?

Brecht made it up, it's his term for what we translate into English as the "alienation effect." By putting it [the moving image] in a little box inside a much bigger box on the screen, you are constantly aware that it is a film about filmmaking; it's sort of a meta-filmic reference. But the other thing about the Welles' story is the punch line: "I cannot help it, it's my character." To me "Imaginary Laughter" is intended as a kind of essay in male hysteria.

So in the clips you chose, men are filming all these women screaming and laughing because they can't do it themselves?

Possibly...

So it's an abreaction?

That would be a nice way to put it. If you notice, in one scene there's a long set up with King Kong, and the cameraman's telling the actress (the scene is set up as a screen test) the different things she should feel, and the emotion of fear: "...you want to scream but you can't," he says to her. "And maybe if you didn't see [the monster] you could scream..... Scream, scream, scream for your life!" Then of course I cut away from it, to reveal the woman from Metropolis sitting on her throne. Which is one way of saying what the screaming woman is really seeing, is a horrifying archetypal image of femaleness created by a male world.

But the real screamers in the film are the men. You have the guy who creates Frankenstein, you have the guy who sees the Mummy, you have the laughter of the Invisible Man, and there's always this point were laughter shades into hysteria.

What about in the beginning of the film where the woman says, "You're under my control now;" is that a point about film and the filmic experience, as well as about gender politics?

It is also meant to be a statement about the male, especially the white male, perception of the Other. That woman is the Other par excellence, not only is she literally a space alien in human form, but she is Japanese. That is the older version of Otherness, the fetishization of the exotic, and also the fear of the exotic. We are afraid that the Other will control us. And she says, "You-have-nothing-to-fear-from-us-we-are-going-to-control-you-now". It's wonderful the way she says that!

Also there is a homophobic primal scene where I cut together a clip from Kenneth Anger's "Fireworks" (which opens into the gents room, a place of many a sexual tryst), with Astro-Boy poking this other fellow in the buttocks with a little tube. So at the beginning of the film there's a parade in opposition to the rational white male at the top of the pyramid: oriental women or space aliens, a gay primal scene, and King Kong, who represents this unleashed beast, the unconscious, the fear of what is animal.

The fear of emotions.

Absolutely, the fear of emotions. The emotions need to be strapped in with metal bars! (laugh)

In fact it's almost a bondage thing; not only is he crucified on a cross, he's also in bondage there. Coming right after that little bathroom scene, I thought it had a nice spin to it.

So, to segue back to that original question, he's the one who's sort of in control of the scene, but he also has this uncontrolled, murderous impulse, which is that "I cannot help it, it is my character" moral from the fable. He pretends to be rational and he uses these rational devices, these machines, but ultimately he's power hungry and destructive, which is what the story is really about. In the context of the film he is really talking about himself in a way, which of course the main character does not recognize.

And as far as the Brechtian element, I would like to think that film can have a didactic function; but it's also a very tricky navigation.

Yes, you don't want to catapult people back into the role of, here I am sitting at my desk or in the classroom, where the film is in the position of authority and I'm in the position of sponge.

Exactly, that's 'bad' didacticism, we're definitely past that stage. Brecht is of interest but he has his limitations; he's a modernist, he's a product of that era. Our enemies are at the moment more subtle, less visible, and it takes a little more effort to expose them or to bring the contradictions to the surface.

Did you want to make movies when you were a kid? What was your path towards becoming an artist?

I used to go to cheap movies in theatres every Saturday when I was a kid. I still remember the scene from "Jason and the Argonauts" when Jason is having a sword fight with the skeletons. I am a product of the TV generation, but as someone committed to a life of the mind since about the age of 16, I found most movies I ever saw to be extremely lacking, even the so-called European Art Movies I saw in high school in Kansas. They were more interesting than the culture of "Son of Flubber" and tail fins, but still somehow lacking. Too literary. Too contrived.

Since I've never been able to draw, I was "inevitably" drawn towards photography, but intimidated by the technology. And this, in spite of being pretty strong in the sciences growing up.

I really started connecting with art as a teenager reading Ezra Pound and Jean Paul Sartre. My first real intuition that I might be able to become a visual artist was when I first saw Zorn's "Lemma" and "Wavelength." I'd been pondering Art Forum's abstruse nightschool phenomenological paens to minimalism in sculpture and painting and had begun to imagine something like what film minimalism might look like. Then of course, it turns out people were already doing it. Warhol's "Empire," which I saw many years later, seemed the perfect version of these values. Frampton's and Snow's work were the first films I actually saw which gave me that anch'io sono cineast experience.

Your film "Mirror" made me think of Bernini and St. Teresa of Avila, and I assume from the coda of text at the end that that was how I was supposed to be thinking. I was really interested in the way you showed the light reflected off the mirror; I don't know what you did, but it looked sort of blown out like an old daguerrotype. So it seemed to me that although you were referencing art history in terms of Bernini, and theological history, and that whole ecstasy-art-transcendental continuum, you were also referencing the personal history of video, which goes back to the photograph, by making the film look like a daguerrotype that happened to be moving.

That is a wonderfully elegant reading. I love that effect myself; it was kind of a happy accident. It happened because the footage I was sampling is really old. There's a quick fade-in, and there's something that happens there because of the material that makes it blow out. It was basically an accident that I exploited; I have to admit.

The ineffable?

(laughs) Yeah, exploiting the ineffable!

Could be a career...

Yeah, could be doing that for awhile...

The blowout effect does give you that sense of looking through a peephole.

I thought it was incredibly erotic. I have been watching a lot of old sexploitation films recently, and I found "Mirror" much more affecting than watching people just strip down and jiggle things around. It looks like she is in the state of ecstasy and when someone is in the state, it communicates so powerfully, even via the completely alienated medium of a flat projection on a screen of somebody I don't know pretending to do something.

It's that astonishing performance that Maria Falconetti gives in Carl Dreyer's "Joan of Arc." I found out that Dreyer had taken this one long close-up and cut it into various pieces, so I found them all and stitched them back together. I didn't realize until I did it that that it was all obviously from the same take. It was an amazing discovery about the editing.

What's happening in "Joan of Arc" in that scene?

Basically it's her burning at the stake, and this is her head. It's the end of the movie; this is the beatific vision.

And in "Mirror," when it flickers to color there for a moment?

Well, that's "The Wizard of Oz!" That's what she sees when she sees God or as she expires; that's her final moment. It's possibly the ultimate state of her consciousness, or a vision of the beyond. I think of it as having many different possibilities for readings: on one level, it's like the Virgin Mary, and then on another level, well, it happens to be Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz." Or it could be a memory, this is herself as a girl, or it can also be even frankly erotic.

Well, at climax everything is intensified but you can't really hang onto it, that's kind of the nature of it.

Yes, it's also about that sense of unrepresentability of feminine eroticism. Especially to me, as a male spectator, as somebody who occupies the other half of the great gender divide. Not that there aren't comparabilities but there's certainly not symmetry. The film is structured in such a way to more nearly emulate the graph of the female orgasmic experience - if there even is an archetypal woman, because of course there are many different feminine sexualities.

This is as opposed to the usual beginning, middle and end narrative structure of films, which, if you look at it on paper, its often diagrammed as what is called Freitag's Triangle. It looks very much like what Masters & Johnson do with graphs of the male sexual arousal and orgasm.

But "Mirror" has a different structure, perhaps mandala-like. In that sense it is meant to more nearly resemble, from what I understand to be the case, a sort of feminine model of sexual arousal. But if you think about it really, Joan's head is under her skirts. So what that beatific vision might be is... well, let's just say it's widely open to interpretation. It's not explicitly a vision of feminine genitalia or little white panties or something like that. There are these two things, interpretations, that are set into motion and that are rubbing up against one another as it were. And there's something that happens there. It is a relatively simple film.

You attribute several of your pieces not to yourself, but to Jayne Austen. What's your relationship to her?

I've adopted Jane Austen as one of my alter egos, and that has a lot to do with how work is received. I'm interested in playing with that. I'm anti-essentialist for everything basically, so attributing a piece to me is a sort of essentialism which imprisons people in their gender, and that's a fake construction of authority. I mean that in two senses: both social authority, and also in the sense of creating authorship. So the Jane attribution can subvert this kind of construction.

I think Jane Austen is a brilliant psychologist as a writer, but for many years she was the female author who was read, period (in English literature, my undergraduate major). She was the token woman in the canon. So she also became a kind of icon of feminine authorship for me. She was the exception that proved the rule. Even as good as she was, it didn't matter, because she was exploited as the token. Maya Deren held a similar position in film for some time: the official token woman.

My work is about cultural gender styles, rather than about feminine being. That's one reason why Jane Austen plays a part.

But you use Jayne with a "Y"?

Like Jayne Mansfield!

Let's talk about "Semi-private sub-Hegelian Panty Fantasy (with sound)." I found it very funny, but I'm not sure I got it. Although I'm not sure I was supposed to get it either, so that was OK. But how's this: "objectification of women is part of the commodifying impulse of capitalism killing the progressive spirit as represented by Lenin and his corpse" (laughs).

It is definitely about gender politics. There's a famous Lacanianism which was a 70s film theory polemic: "he does not have the phallus, he *is* the phallus." And in a way that's what Lenin is, he is the phallus.

He's even bald!

It doesn't exactly resolve in a way, but it's about gender styles and perception. It also has a kind of mirrored structure, a bracket to the whole thing with the house exploding at the beginning and then imploding at the end. This is a stereotypical Freudian image of the self: a woman thinking about herself is done in terms of the house. Everybody is supposed to do this more or less, but women are supposed to think of themselves as houses more often. I was juxtaposing this with the historical precedent of Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet," with the tower or smokestack falling and then re-erecting.

The scene of the woman on the bed with the transparent lace thing seems very unresolved.

That actually comes from Doris Wishman. What happens is there's this guy with a doll. He pulls the panties off the doll and it makes the woman's panties fall off. You keep seeing the panties dropping off, and she finds the panties on the floor, and she's sort of puzzled by how they got there. It doesn't really resolve; she's as puzzled by it as everyone else is.

There's this play between who's thinking what about whom, and when. It's also about woman as fetish-object and as a surface onto which projections are made.

So that's where the "nothing as something," the Hegel quote, comes in? Because a film projection screen could be seen as a blank, when in fact it's not a blank, it's a screen. It's not nothing as nothing, it's nothing as something.

In a way the essence of the piece, which the irresolvability and the mirrored structure of it are intended to address, is that it's a sleight of hand; it's making something from nothing. I've done basically three pieces in that formal mode.

What are the other two?

There's a film I did which is called "Something Is Seen But One Doesn't Know What" which is a weird montage; "Imaginary Laughter" is the other one. These two works also both include double-takes; in the Hegel piece there's no double-take but there is a lot of doubling in it.

Speaking of doubling brings me to your "Zapruder" piece. I found it fascinating for a number of reasons. One was I had just done a series of paintings based on electron microscope scans of viruses [exhibited at ATA in March 2001]. These scans are currently the most accurate way of taking pictures of extremely small things. Apparently viruses have a very geometrical structure, all lines and points and hard edges, but in the electron microscope pictures they look fuzzy and indistinct, and they morph out from the slide like some kind of swamp thing. So I thought, isn't that interesting that our most accurate form of imaging makes these geometric, hard-edged things look completely fuzzy and amorphous. There's a similar paradox operating in "Zapruder": the slower this movie goes, the less one sees!

For some reason I had a memory of that footage being black and white. So my first reaction was surprise that it was in color. But my second reaction was, the more we try to read into this the less we get out of it; it completely obfuscates itself. Then as the piece goes on you're blocking out areas with black squares, and superimposing various run-throughs of the footage, back and forth, and upside-down, and sideways, and it seemed to me that these are the overlapping layers of meaning that we put on Kennedy's assassination. It's not only Kennedy that has become an icon. The assassination event itself is now an icon. And it seems to me that maybe we don't want the mystery solved, because it serves a philosophical role in our cultural life.

A mystery religion requires a mystery.

You know it's interesting, even the Shroud of Turin has been examined directly, but the original of the Zapruder film has almost never been examined directly. Everyone is working from copies of it. Of course you don't want to damage it, but there are a number of issues, like there's this extra splice in there that nobody really talks about. There are actually two splices, one of them is more or less credited to a Life magazine technician who was making stills, but the other one, well, I've never seen it mentioned. Both splices are around the area of the sign. You wonder, 'OK, where did the footage go?'

There are copies of some of those frames in a book called "26 Seconds in Dallas". If you ever find it you should buy it, but it's really hard to find. It's a close reading of the Zapruder footage by this guy who was a philosophy professor at Haverford at the time. I can't remember his name, but anyway, subsequent to that, he became a private detective in San Francisco, and he has a book out about that too! He says that most crimes have a kind of pattern where the details hang together and start to narrow. They start to solidify and they start to form a pattern. But, he says, the Kennedy assassination does not. The longer people go on about it the more diffuse it gets.

When you were talking about the viruses, I couldn't help but think of the Heisenberg indeterminancy principle, that the frame of reference affects your vision of a thing, which is part of what this is piece about.

Yeah, you can only approach it asymptotically. Pretty good metaphor for a lot of situations.

Life, love, anything!

I'm concerned with what in philosophy they call the problem of other minds. On the one hand, you need some engagement with the world in order to produce knowledge. On the other hand, in order to gain insight, that may come out of interaction with other people, or it may come out of a more reflective sphere. You have to go back and forth, and in a way that's what my work is about, where the personal meets the public.

You work with a lot of very familiar images, but your take on them is unconventional.

I hope so. The Zapruder footage is a good example, it's work that we've all seen, or think we've seen, and yet, we've never really looked at it; not carefully, not frame by frame...It's the things we take for granted that I'm interested in; poking those...

Like poking the underlying assumptions and saying, 'what are we actually believing here, and is it something we actually agree with?'

And because you think you know it you fail to question it.

When you say you know something it precipitates this whole cascade of assumptions, beliefs and actions, and then you're trapped in that.

I want to look at the beliefs that circulate around an object or situation and examine, 'why do I think what I think?' It's often hard to gain a perspective on things, especially in this country where we're really bombarded with shit. I think one of the reasons I've been able to work at all is that I don't watch TV much. It's what I refer to as the saturation-bombing of consciousness.

It keeps you too busy to do any distancing or processing of the information. All you can do is absorb, and let it go out. But it's all surfaces, there's no time to reflect.

It's more than just the nature of the medium; it's the culture, the culture of the medium.

In a lot of the work of the filmmakers that I like, yours included, they pick up older forms of film, older forms of video, older forms of representation, and either mix them in or create the whole piece out of those things. It's not just about 'what's new,' per se, it's about 'how we are living our lives' and 'how we should' and 'how things might be better.'

I completely agree with that. One of the things about where we are historically is that in the history of economics, the history of consciousness, and the history of politics, the 'what's new' aspect doesn't really matter. You use whatever medium feels like it's the right one for you, and forget this kind of modernist purist approach to the medium.

How did you get into shooting video?

Actually, I haven't shot much video, though I have shot a lot of 16mm film. Most of my work that's been released up to now has been made using pre-existing images, so a better way of saying it might be how I got into editing video and that would be, the appearance of non-linear digital editing for the masses around the time I made my first released video piece in 1996. I love the random access quality of film editing; though I did a bit of it, I never really liked editing videotape. I started making films around 1976. I was living in Houston, Texas. There was a public access media project called SWAMP at the Rice Media Center. We shot super-8 and edited on super-8 flat beds. Eventually I shot a project there in 16mm and worked almost exclusively in 16mm until 1996. That's when I seriously added video into the mix. I had been working on a film from 1989 or so--I am still at work on it--called the Gift. I really couldn't finish it and I had to do something in order not to go nuts. I've continued shooting 16mm for the project and hope to finish it before I die.

I wanted to ask you about the gnostic elements in your work. I noticed several pieces include references to "The Wizard of Oz," in that the color film segments seem to be representing something like transcendence, something that's not attached to the basic things of this earth: Dorothy, the farm, making a living, eating the food, arguing with people. But you seem to be questioning whether these basic, real things really comprise reality. Maybe the 'real' reality is Oz, which you can only get to when you're released from the mundane, from this trap of this basic, material world. That's a very gnostic impulse.

Those films, "Mirror," "Zapruder," and "For the Birds," are all part of this series that I call the "Theory of religion: theory of ecstasy." It's not like I said, 'oh, ok, let's make a film about this;' I started making these films and it sort of came out. It's stuff that I have been interested in for awhile, but I had no idea I was going to make these three particular tapes ahead of time. They were all made within three months of each other: one in October (of 2000), one in November and then the other one in January. And there are still probably at least one or two more in the series that need to be made. The title, "Theory of Religion," is lifted from Bataille; he has this book called "Theory of Religion" and I embroidered on that a little.

To answer your question, yes, they are definitely about gnosis, they are about knowing and they are about unknowing. What is at the horizon of our consciousness. You can't see it because you're bounded by it.

The Kantian notion of how perception is conditioned?

Yeah, in a way. I'm interested in how do you actually perceive things that are at the edge of your visual horizon, the horizon of your consciousness? I think that is really what motivates religious or mystical thinking. Actually, I wouldn't even call it thinking, because it's at once that and something more than that. Not to view it in a hierarchical way, but it's about an investigation into the possibility for meaning. What is at the limit of our horizon, how do we approach that beyond which we cannot see?

Yes, we want to pursue that in some way, we're aware in some way, so we want to address it somehow. But it doesn't fit into our categories.

You can think of it as the unconscious, you can think of it as the godhead, you can think of it as whatever you want to, but what it really is, is whatever you can't talk about.

It seems like that's a worthwhile topic for time-based media to address, because it's so complex. In video, and film, there're so many elements of the arts within those things, so why just tell a story?

I'm not against stories, but I'm definitely against closure.

Well, to be a modern essentialist for a moment, telling stories is not really exploiting the medium's potential.

There are other possibilities. I've been working in media for awhile; I haven't really been making videos for that long, I've been working in film much longer.

I thought it was a complete documentary. My father was a birder, and in order to get the birds that you want, you have to go out at 3:00 in the morning, go to the place where they are, and listen. You'd only actually see a few of them, most of them you would hear. By 3:30 more of them would be out, and then more and more, and by 8:00 they're all out, and they're all singing at once, this whole cacophony, and you think, 'well, it's kind of bright, and it's kind of warm, and maybe it's time for breakfast!' So that piece brought me back to an aspect of my childhood. Are you a birder yourself by any chance?

I grew up in this funny place in Kansas where we had amazing birds. And I didn't just hear them; I saw them. We had great blue herons up in the trees. They are very alien, very weird looking. We had a house in a very suburban area, but it had a little land around it, and it was wooded, and when it rained it was surrounded by water like a moat. It was a really magical place and bird sounds were very much a part of that, so I just always liked bird sounds. They occupy a place next to radio static except they're of course intelligent. And behind radio static there is a sort of shape and form, but it's more ambiguous.

Birds are a step up from insects, but insects...! I recorded these cicadas that maybe I'll do an audio piece out of eventually. The cicadas create this amazing pattern of sounds; they're all doing basically the same thing except they are slightly out of phase and that creates all these little weird sound events. They respond and interact, and they change and shift. Before that I basically thought of insects as having the intelligence of a nail; you know, like they are practically inanimate, but after this I realized it was shocking how much collective intelligence they have. And birds are much more than that. That's what the book is about, "The Conference of the Birds," that's mentioned in the piece.

I'm not familiar with that.

It's a twelfth century Sufi text that's really, really amazing. It's usually called "The Conference of the Birds," although I am told the better translation is more like "Dialog of the Birds," or "Language of the Birds" even. It's a classic of Persian literature, about a mystical journey of this group of birds. There's one called the hoopoe, which is the psychopomp in the story; it's going to lead them from the world into the presence of the Simurgh . The Simurgh is kind of a stand-in for God I guess you could say, so in a way it's an allegory of enlightenment. The Simurgh is all things to all people or to all observers. The name actually means: "thirty birds." And there are thirty birds in the group, so in a sense it's a reflection of their collective intelligence. In philosophical or theological terms, itŐs a kind of paradoxical presentation of the notion of "the one and the many."

The god of triangles would be a triangle.

I think that would be a reasonable inference.

Towards the end of "For the Birds" there's chaos where they're all singing at once, and then it cuts out and there's just the one singing alone, right before the credits.

Right, that's the hoopoe.

How do you see your work being framed or presented?

The cultural framing is perhaps the most difficult issue of all. I'd like to think my work could be shown anywhere. I hate the cultural snobbery which underestimates the "mass audience" and supplies a diet of pablum mixed with horseshit spiked with large doses of sugar and green dye number 75. On the other hand, those weaned on garbage tend to prefer garbage.

I've shown my work on TV, in film festivals, at museums, at ATA. I wouldn't say any one place is better than any other, though for purely personal irrational reasons, I happen to love the old PFA theatre and the vibe at ATA better than anywhere else in the universe. I generally like what videotape has done in terms of making obscure work more accessible and DVD promises to up the ante, now that it's just at the point of becoming accessible to film and video makers to produce. I like the idea that in your living room, you can see more or less whatever you want whenever you want, within the limitations of the accidents of history. But there's also a lot to be said for the social ritual of gathering in a particular place with a smallish group of people to experience the wonders of projected light and amplified sound. There's a huge difference between the intimate experience of media at home and the intimacy created among a larger group of people through the mediations of visual culture. Both have a place; both are necessary. I'd hate to see either replaced by the other.

As for being present when the work is shown, that can be fun or not, depending on the audience. On the other hand, I don't mind if people wrestle with my work without me being there. My visual vocabulary draws from familiar images and somewhat unfamiliar approaches to them. So there should be, for the time being at least, a tension between the two. If the work survives me, future audiences will have to wrestle with it by themselves anyway. I just hope some of the tension, some of the challenge, survives.

(Peggy Nelson is a Bay Area painter and writer for Otherzine.)