I can’t remember when the project gained a title, but I can remember reading that tigers react to lavender (the plant) in exactly the way house-cats respond to catnip: roll in it ecstatically, drunkenly care for nothing else while they have it, eyes crossing and mouths open and harmless. This all had resemblances to college wise-ass pranks, but the aesthetics of it were more interesting than that. Their headquarters were imagined to be in Sandusky, Ohio (only because I found that name, Sandusky, strangely evocative) and their activities included blowing up trash-cans (destroying the discarded) and peacefully counter-marching political marches. What they decide to do is to shift focus from mass mayhem to small random actes gratuits such as the Dadaists were fond of. The story we conceived – I think I did most of the conceiving, but we talked out every aspect together – had a peculiar premise for the time (that is, its time had passed, or hadn’t yet arrived again.) A number of young anarchists, members of the International Anarchist Conspiracy of worldwide bomb-throwers and assassins, have grown weary of the old premises, and the failure of anarchism to make progress in bringing down the World State. That these limitations meant that we would likely not make a film at all did not inhibit our imaginations. When and if (big if) it were ever finished, it would have to stand as a silent film, or have dialogue dubbed. We then went about imagining a complicated and heavily populated film story, despite the fact that the Bolex had no capacity to record sound. This meant that all of our shots were about the same length. You actually wound it up with a lever attached to the side, and then it would run till it ran down – a minute or two, as I remember. That was a drawback, but the most difficult thing about it was that it was spring-driven. It had (at least this one had) a single fixed-focus lens. The Bolex camera that the photography department had – and which Lance Bird and I hogged for the remaining year and more of college – was a sleek little machine, about the size of a thick paperback. Continuing the story of the making of a student film in Indiana in 1964, begun in the previous post:
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