

I was a fan of the Andy Warhol idea, not so much of his films but I liked the cheekiness of Empire, the film of the Empire State Building, I liked the nothingness of it. One thing I’d learned was that the best thing was to hold one shot. And then these other lights just start to trickle around, and it’s like Disney, it’s like animation! There she is tending a grave and you just see a point of red light appear in between her legs and it just drifts very slowly like a little fart, or a little spirit or something, in the graves. So the beautiful thing that happened was from the previous night’s filming.

She was just tending a grave so, I mean, I didn’t need to judge it. A fat old French peasant who had stockings halfway down her legs and was revealing a lot of her knickers, turning away, so it was a bit funny or a bit gross maybe. That was the opening shot, then I cut to an old lady, facing away from me, tending the graves. I turned my head and zoomed in on it, so it opened just with a cross, bingo, then as I zoomed back out, you could see the horizon was tilted at a crazy angle. My favourite was a sequence of a leaning cross in a cemetery. The next day, when it was daylight, I would go and shoot and I had this film that was a combination of these little points of light that were on a ‘black velvet’ background and daylight. I used to do it in my car so it was car headlights and neon signs, the green of a go sign, the red of a stop, the amber

It would be like on black velvet, red, very red. But they’re very washed out, so I developed this technique where I ran it through once at night and only photographed points of light, like very bright reds, and that would be all that would be on the first pass of the film. If you take a film and run it through a camera once, then you rewind it and run it through again, you get two images, superimposed. I liked to reverse music and I found that you could send a film through the camera backwards. Once it became Super-8 on a cartridge you couldn’t do anything with it, you couldn’t control it. Kodak 8 mm was the one, because it came on a reel.
