BR –– What does it mean to be a
farmer of images? LK –– I may read a lot of theory, but I have learned to internalize it. In the installation version of Twelve Moons, in the mid-70s, I was bombarding the spectator with quotations: Kathy Acker and Peter Gordon were reading Jameson, Derrida, Walter Benjamin, texts on culture, on Marxism – while the spectators were watching the moon. So I thought “No more” – and I got this idea of internalizing. It has to do with adopting a discipline, trying to understand its conceptual approach, and then forgetting about it as if you were a Zen archer. You go through the training, you forget it, you picture the target in your mind, you go for it and you hit it. You can throw the arrow with you eyes closed. This is connected to a more esoteric approach to knowledge – to meditation as well. You internalize ideas and concepts through an ethical process, and you let them navigate. Let’s take Borges’s Emma Zunz, which is the inspiration for my film Splits, 1978. I am entering the text as if it were an imaginary narrative space; I am opening doors and closing others; I am working from an internalized idea of what I want to do.
too. If the background of the image is darker, it becomes more suggestive – something Dreyer understood well. BR –– When you talk about being “a
farmer of images” you are referring to the fact that the theory is there, but it’s covered. Or it could be the seed in the ground, and the flower comes up and you don’t see the seed… LK –– The work is the vestige of a whole process. What is important is not the work, but the trajectory to get to the work, the ideas that went through my head, the things I read, the days of reflection. Suddenly, the work manifests itself in a way it does not reveal the path that leads you to this conclusion. The work is a purification. That’s the beauty that you are experiencing through the process. It’s something that’s encapsulated into a synthesis, that does not really reveal the ramifications that led to it. BR –– What interest me are the
ramifications… How do you go from photographing the Puná beads there to your first moving image? LK –– I took a limited number of beads to work with. I think it was the number 7. BR –– A sacred number.
BR –– We can draw a parallel with
Rembrandt’s method. Once his paintings were analyzed through X-rays, you could see that he had painted every little flower on every piece of ceramic put on the wall, and then covered them with dark paint. It bears similarity to your use of theory. You have “painted” everything delicately, and covered it. What is not visible to the naked eye gives the picture a sense of depth, of mystery. LK –– This is a beautiful comparison, which works for film composition
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LK –– Yes, I was working with the numbers 21, 3, and 7. Finally, I selected 49. Seven across and seven in rows. And so 7 X 7 is 49; there were 7 combinations of linguistic arrangements of the beads; they were half-buried in the sand, as if they had just been discovered. Some were flipped in a certain way, concealing parts of the markings. I was looking for an esoteric system – a structure with an organizational power – a golden rule. As a reader, you’re faced with an arbitrary system. Language is