AXW – Can you tell us about the source material of your title, SHOULD I STAND AMID YOUR BREAKERS OR SHOULD I LIE WITH DEATH MY BRIDE, what does that have to do with the film?
The title is a line from “Song to the Siren” by Tim Buckley (more specifically, from the version he performed live on The Monkees, one of my favorite shows growing up). In contrast to most of my work, which develops from research, especially into landscape, this film and the images in it were generated in a straightforward way from the words of the title itself.
AXW – please tell us about your creative process, how did you arrive at choosing to make your images this way.
The film was created in collaboration with Kim Christman, who appears as and created the costume for the “bride,” and Mike Dakan who manned the super-8 camera so I could perform. We shot in a couple of locations near Santa Cruz, California that I used for an earlier film, “Murder Capital.” I wanted a flicker film structure in order to create a sense of spatial simultaneity while retaining the integrity of each frame. Sound-wise the intention was to gather field recordings of trees and water from my current home in the Netherlands, but (much to my delight) the ancient tape recorder I borrowed for the job recorded landscapes of noise instead.
