The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2)

The Director and His Actor Look...
The Director and His Actor Look...

1968, USA, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min.

The length and straightforward self-reflexivity of the title locate the film outside the commercial cinema, but the specification of the traditional industry situation of the director working with His Actor reveals a direct connection with industry procedures unusual for avant-garde film-makers in the late 1960s.

Scott McDonald

A film in 5 sections; each of them is a single roll of 16mm film long. We see a bare room with a young man sitting behind a tape recorder. Another man, played by Fisher himself, busily enters; he tests the recording machine and eventually goes into a back room, which, when illuminated, turns out to be a projection booth. Each section of the film elaborates the situation of the director and his actor working on an unfinished film which gradually becomes the film we are watching, but which is not the film they were working on. Throughout we hear the comments of the two men as they watch the rushes of their film. Watching rushes is part of the necessary procedures of the film making process, which must remain invisible in the finished film. In this work, however, procedure itself is the subject.