Confrontational interview films thrived on subjects who resisted and insulted the camera

Evidence

Following Change of Heart, Noren employed a sound-on-film Auricon to shoot several confrontational cinéma vérité interviews, each a single half-hour reel, showing these at Ken Jacobs’s Millennium Film Workshop. The methodology was not unlike Warhol’s first talkies. Noren’s subjects included an aspiring actress, a middle-aged German co-worker who was once a member of the Nazi Party, and Harry Smith, who, according to the description Noren gave the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, “refuses to be filmed, cowers inside his body, makes nasty remarks, calls me a fag, suffers temporary amnesia, long period of embarrassed silence as he tries to think of something to say. Tries to turn off the camera, etc. The NYC Culture Gestapo arrive and bust his ass for being tedious.” (All of these films were subsequently destroyed by the filmmaker.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1408

Categorization

• CANDY: Harry Smith’s self-description of refusing to be filmed — cowering, making nasty remarks, calling the filmmaker a fag — is a genuinely funny, tweetable anecdote about avant-garde attitude.
• FICTION: The filmmaker who destroys all his own films after making them is a striking character gesture — good seed for a story about an artist who erases their own archive.
• XREF: connects to: Interview subjects can pitch themselves when interviews promise publicity — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 627