Out of the past: James Irwin interviewed by Scott Stark (1986)
Capturing a moment in my life and in indie/avant-garde film
The following interview took place in my apartment on Fell Street in the Hayes Valley section of San Francisco during the spring of 1986. It was published in volume two of the film journal Cinematograph later that year. It was part of a special collection of interviews with practicing independent filmmakers on both the west and east coasts. The interviews provide not only a snapshot of the lives of the artists, but taken together they also capture a moment in the history of American independent and avant-garde film as an art practice.
"The intention was to focus not so much on analysis of the filmmakers’ individual works," wrote the filmmaker Scott Stark in the introduction to the San Francisco section, "but rather on how the filmmakers themselves were continuing to work and survive in 1986. Central questions included how they locate themselves within the avant-garde tradition, how they manage to support and promote their work given the current financial climate, and how the work functions in relation to American culture at large."
The interviews in San Francisco were with Nina Fonoroff, Toney Merritt, David Gerstein, Peter Herwitz, Lynn Kirby, Dominic Angerame, Gail Camhi, Michael Rudnick, and myself. The interviewers were David Gerstein, Scott Stark, and Konrad Steiner.
Another set of interviews by Stephanie Beroes were held in New York, with Alan Berliner, Jeff Preiss, Holly Fisher, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Roger Deutsch, Lewis Klahr, and Sharon Greytak.
My interview was conducted by Scott Stark. I first met Scott in 1980 when we were in graduate school together at the San Francisco Art Institute. We co-founded Cinematograph, which was the official journal of the San Francisco Cinematheque, and I co-authored the proposal that got us the seed money to launch it. He served for years on the board of directors of the Cinematheque. Scott is an accomplished filmmaker, and unlike me he continues to be an exhibiting artist and is active in many ways in the independent media scene.
In the introduction to my interview, Scott wrote, "James Irwin has been making and writing about film for 12 years. He is currently completing two books of film theory and criticism, is active as a film curator, and is on the board of directors of Canyon Cinema."
For context, I was 30 years old at the time of this interview. By this point I had received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and multiple film festivals, and was publishing as a film and arts critic. I was about to have a terrific run of professional success, which I talk about in an appendix at the end of the interview. For a different perspective on this period, from decades later, see the 2019 interview with me by Jenna Reilly.
A few things to note:
The discussions around engaging with the commercial establishment vs taking control of your own distribution, and wider acceptance vs focusing on a core audience with shared values, is very much like the discussion happening in the publishing world today involving traditional publishing vs indie and self-publishing, needing an agent or not, following trends or not. Just need to change a few terms and details.
The conversation about video might be a little confusing for young people, so remember it was all tape back then. The equipment was bulky and expensive, and the quality was not very good. Digital video had been invented but it would be another decade before it started to gain momentum.
Regarding distribution, it would be another decade until the internet became commercially viable, then years more before broadband access would permit common consumption of videos online.
VCRs were becoming increasingly popular, most being offered at that time in the $200 to $600 range, but there were still considerable costs in creating, packaging, and distributing the cassettes. Of course, a film transfer to tape for viewing on a VCR was far from ideal.
I hadn’t yet founded my own San Francisco consultancy, and was fifteen years away from working at the major business services firms, but already you can hear me talking about concepts like entrepreneurship and market cross-overs, although not with that sort of vocabulary.
The interview
STARK: You had a scholarship to the New York University film school and were on your way to commercial success. Why did you fight the film industry career path? It seems you would have been rewarded for going ahead with it.
IRWIN: Because I started thinking about what was possible with the medium. It was obvious that a lot of people hadn't even thought it through that far and weren't interested in taking it any farther at all. It was almost as if people sensed that if you took it too seriously and thought too much about what you were doing it would...
STARK: You would lose your audience.
IRWIN: You would lose your audience, and also in a sense poison your ability to play the game.
STARK: How do you feel about promoting yourself now? You seem more interested in getting yourself out there.
IRWIN: Well, I'm very ambivalent about it. There's a fine line between a kind of mercenary careerism and aggressive professionalism. And in experimental film it's a little more difficult than it is, say, in writing or in painting. Because what some people would consider just normal professionalism, other people see as careerism, because of the way that you have to interact with the power structures in film and the way a lot of people have a very strong antagonism towards those hierarchies. It can get confusing. So I have to tread lightly sometimes about coming on too strong or being too pushy. Also, I don't really feel comfortable doing that much anyway.
STARK: But you do it? Are you promoting yourself now?
IRWIN: I try to promote myself primarily by getting the work out as much as possible. Films that I think would be successful in festivals, I send to festivals. I send them around to people. I don't make cold calls and be pushy at all. But what I will do is try to strike up relationships with people, programmers, critics, other filmmakers, because I'm genuinely interested in them. And that actually turns out well because over years, with patience, people know your work and know your ideas. What I'm doing requires patience, but it's a more legitimate kind of promotion because it's not really promotion at all. It's just engaging with the real world instead of hype.
STARK: It seems like you're getting involved in a lot of different ways, rather than simply trying to promote yourself as a filmmaker. You are giving and receiving at the same time.
IRWIN: Yeah, I think so. It's building good karma. And there's been periods in my life in which I've screwed that up, and I've done aggressive and stupid things. I think that I've learned my lesson from that, and the value of helping other people and making everyone's circumstances a lot better because we're all having such difficulties now. It's very clear to me and I think everybody should be helping each other as much as possible.
STARK: What do you see as the situation now for showcasing this kind of work? Do you think it's more difficult now than it was, say, ten years ago to get stuff shown? That there are fewer places to show your kind of work?
IRWIN: I can't speak about ten years ago, I don't really know. I think my perception of ten years ago is limited and distorted. I think when I first moved to San Francisco I expected to find a scene that didn't exist and I was surprised. I don't know whether I was naive or whether it actually existed once but then things changed.
STARK: What was the scene you expected to find here?
IRWIN: I expected it to be a lot more vital, and I expected the American avant-garde in general around the country to be a lot better off. Like a lot of people I anticipated that video distribution, cable television, etc., would offer avenues, and they haven't. Maybe we're missing entrepreneurs, or maybe there are certain factors that will always mean there's going to be problems. Who knows?
Living with obscurity
STARK: What about the question of obscurity? I'm wondering whether you think it's a necessary thing, whether it's a choice or whether it happens to you.
IRWIN: I don't think there's any point in obscurity at all. Though I suspect that some people like it. You can tell some people prefer it, whether because of their own personality, or whether because, and this might sound cynical, but I think some people like being big fishes in small ponds. But I think far and away most people have no desire to be obscure, but don't know quite how to embrace wider audiences without compromising themselves, or without causing more problems.
STARK: But your work is always going to be -- I shouldn't say always -- but at this point your work has a pretty limited audience.
IRWIN: It does, but I think that you've seen enough of my work to know that more and more it's starting to play these interesting games in which it tries to retain a certain amount of artistic integrity, and at the same time reach out to the audience and grab them by the collar.
STARK: Do you think that compromises the work?
IRWIN: Not at all. I think it enhances it. And what excites me about what I'm doing now is that I feel I have solved several problems, my ambivalence about the audience being one of them. And these films have been successful in festivals, and with audiences of all walks of life. And they raise serious issues, they're not gag films. People think about what these films are saying. But they're not un-entertaining films. They tend to be funny and a little bit volatile.
STARK: So you think your "average person off the street" can at least get at some of the concepts the more attuned audience might pick up on?
IRWIN: Absolutely. I write them so that the average intelligent person who has some sensitivity to art or cinema would appreciate them. Of course, not everybody can do that. I'm fortunate in that I'm combining certain aspects of my work to this end, and I can do so because there are things I've been dealing with for a while. I'm not sure someone like Ernie Gehr would be able to do that.
STARK: Nor should he.
IRWIN: Nor should he. Exactly.
STARK: Do you have any interest in more obscure ideas that don't have any kind of mass appeal or engagement for a more general audience? Are you still interested in that at all?
IRWIN: Well, it's not my personality, really, and I haven't done very much work like that. I've always been sensitive to the audience, and I'm a little bit perplexed at how things are received sometimes. No, I don't consciously try to do one thing or another. I just take the evidence as it comes. I see the way certain things work, and I play with that. But I don't really think very much about alienating audiences, or making work which I know is going to be too arcane for the average person. Probably a lot of what I do is more arcane than I think it is, but I don't want to make it any more so on purpose.
STARK: I'm thinking in terms of dealing with audience, in terms of turning off the audience. It's another strategy that people have used.
IRWIN: It is. But I think the important point is that, as you know, I like working with chance a lot, I like working with givens within a chance structure, and it isn't just the materials that are givens, it's the circumstance.
STARK: In terms of showing the work?
IRWIN: Yes. Who the audiences are, what are the barriers to showing to a wider audience, what kinds of showcases are out there, etc. Those are givens as well. They are an element of chance. So short of giving up being a film artist and getting into a whole other walk of life, I like dealing with these givens. So to me they are very much a part of it, as much as what film stock to use.
STARK: Would you be interested in some other form of showing your work, like broadcast television?
IRWIN: I'd love it.
STARK: Video distribution?
IRWIN: Absolutely. Although I'm not sure my work would transfer to video too well, because it needs the bigger screen to have the impact because of the persistence of vision aspect of the words. But, yeah, I think it would be great for everybody.
STARK: Could you envision your work being shown in somebody's living room, while they're sipping a beer and they are flicking the channel and suddenly, ‘The Big Red Auk’ is on the screen...
IRWIN: I think it would be wonderful. I'd love to have a few films on the David Letterman show. It would be a lot of fun. Wouldn't you?
STARK: Well, maybe, but...
Working in video
STARK: How about working directly with video? My view is that if you transfer film to video, it becomes something other than film. If it's just a record of a piece of film, then it's almost like filming a performance or a dance. It's a second generation, but it's not the real thing. You can also transfer it because you like the way it looks, and the video becomes the final product.
IRWIN: I'd prefer to work directly with video, for those reasons. At this time I haven't, because I haven't been able to afford it. With the set-up in my studio and the way I work, it's much less expensive for me to work in film than in video. The access to video for me would be prohibitively expensive. If I had a chance to make video inexpensively, I would jump.
STARK: You're also involved with writing on the surface of the film, and painting, chemicals, etc. That would be hard to do in video.
IRWIN: There are other ways of producing imagery on video. Of course I would need access to post-production equipment, which, again, is really expensive. But I also enjoy working with actors. And I enjoy performance aspects. I don't think it would be difficult to shift over to more of an emphasis on that.
STARK: That's a very different direction.
IRWIN: But it's still using words, and it's still addressing the audience directly.
STARK: And it's dealing more with time, rather than the tactile quality of film, which most of the writing films have dealt with.
IRWIN: Right. But I think a lot of what makes my writing films unique is the way they address the audience even more than the techniques used, because the techniques are very old.
STARK: How would you see "addressing the audience" in video beyond the very traditional way of acting or talking to the camera?
IRWIN: I don't know, it's hard to imagine, because commercial television has done that in so many ways, from commercials to talk shows, it's such a self-reflexive medium. I would have to deal with that problem. They've kind of done it all.
STARK: Do you feel your work is an outgrowth of your financial situation? That you are riding on the edge of what you can produce based on your finances?
IRWIN: Well, yes, but I think that in a lot of ways the lack of finances has helped my work. I've kind of encouraged that. I've used it as a strength because it's caused me to come up with different techniques, and to rethink the way I make films. Throwing money at a problem is out of the question for me, so I've got to come up with a different kind of perspective. Because of that, I'm doing the best work I've ever done.
STARK: Would you know what to do if someone gave you a $20,000 grant? [More than $56k in 2023 dollars – JRI]
IRWIN: I wouldn't spend it all on a $20,000 film.
STARK: For a lot of people that's pretty intimidating, because they are so used to working within financial constraints.
IRWIN: Yes. But one thing about me that may be different than some people is that I don't do a less expensive version of something else. If you gave me $20,000 I'd use it to live on and continue making the kind of funky, iconoclastic and rough-edged stuff that I do now in film and video, because I really enjoy working that way. And I probably wouldn't spend a lot of money and go into expensive editing rooms or rent a lot of equipment, because that's not the part I enjoy.
STARK: Where do you see your work progressing?
IRWIN: I see my work becoming a lot more inter-media. I've been trying to have the time and the space to create some objects that would both complement my film work, and stand alone, perhaps to be used in a large-scale installation... But that means I'm probably becoming less of a filmmaker and more of an artist who doesn't have normal boundaries.
STARK: You're not bound to any particular medium.
IRWIN: No, although I've been concentrating on film up to now. But I would like to be less bound by that.
STARK: You seem to be more interested in "active" or non-static art.
IRWIN: Right. I like duration, and I like the performance components of film, even when there's no actors involved. I like that sense of control during the passage of time. There's nothing else quite like it.
STARK: One last general question -- why do you do it? What are the rewards, given that there's a limited amount of financial support and even societal support? You can't make a living out of it.
IRWIN: No. There are a lot of one o'clock in the mornings where I think, oh my god, what on Earth am I doing? But I know inside that I've committed myself intellectually. We were talking last week about how you burn psychological bridges. You read a book. You read – as I did – Cabanne’s interviews with Duchamp, and nothing is ever the same. There's no way you can go back and try to be a second assistant director on Airport 88 knowing what you know. That's how alcoholics are made. I know that this is the thing that interests me. I'm sure some biologists are fascinated with a particular kind of slug in Peru, and it doesn't bother them that it's not the most fashionable or profitable thing. They are as excited by that as anyone could be.
STARK: So there's something there to explore.
IRWIN: I don't think it's even been approached what film can do. There is a real sense of being able to produce something that is in its own way profound, or can communicate ideas and concepts that make a difference to you and potentially make a difference to somebody else. It's an exciting feeling to be working on a film and to know that no one has previously been quite where you are. That's an astonishing feeling, especially in the arts today, after so many things have already seemingly been done. Experimental filmmakers are continuing to do things that are original and unique.
STARK: How did you interpret what Vincent [Grenier] was saying the other night at his show, about newness?
IRWIN: I thought his talk was very unfortunate, in that he should be concentrating on how his work relates to what is happening now, and what could be happening in the future, rather than reacting to the past or reacting to a critic who is mired in the past. A lot of filmmakers are doing that. They're talking about what life was like 20 years ago, or how things are dying. But I much prefer to talk with painters or writers who are concerned with all the aspects of post-modernism as it relates to now or next year.
STARK: But do you see a difference between breaking new territory, and taking the tools that were formed and discovered in the '60s and '70s and using them in new ways?
IRWIN: Oh, yeah, well, that always happens. Brian Eno once said that it's not what new thing you do, but it's how you use the old things.
STARK: That was one thing that was important those films in the '60s, that they were breaking new ground all the time, trying things that had never been done before.
IRWIN: I think that was typical of that generation, that reductivism of minimalism and conceptual art. But it was important to do that, and I'm not in any way belittling that. In many ways I miss it. I think there's a lot of things that haven't been explored. But now we're kind of walking through the rubble, picking and choosing the things that are important.
STARK: Is there newness in that?
IRWIN: Of course...
What happened next: a timeline
At the time of this interview I am 30 years old. A few years out of grad school. Things were about to pop for me, then fall apart shortly after.
Within weeks of this interview I receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, quickly followed by another award from the American Film Institute and the Western States Foundation.
Within months of this interview I co-found a marketing communications firm with one of the best art curators and special event producers in the city. We soon land our first two major corporate clients, both for lucrative annual contracts. I start making serious money, not from art but from business. I’m driving a white Toyota Celica GT convertible with tan leather interior and manual transmission (boy I loved that car).
I also begin receiving national critical exposure as one of several media artists scattered around North America using text as image as a dominant formal strategy. People start writing about me in the same articles as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Michael Snow, and others.
Within a year of this interview I embark on a series of one-person film and performance exhibitions that will take me to (among other places) Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, and back to San Francisco, with newspaper reviews and profiles in every location (including a nice review in the Los Angeles Times).
Within two years I am an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University and a year later at University of California at Berkeley, as well as speaking on arts panels at events around the Bay Area.
Within three years I am putting together a significant exhibition of rarely seen, almost legendary West Coast art of the late 1950s and early 1960s for a museum in Hawaii. I’m anxious as publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux considers buying my first novel. I'm living near the Lincoln Park Golf Club in the northwestern-most section of the city, in a house that is worth two million dollars in today’s money. And I unexpectedly find myself inducted into the Hall of Fame of my high school. (I didn't even know my high school had such a thing.) The world, as they say, was my oyster.
Within three and a half years after this interview I discover, in bits and pieces, to my horror and astonishment, some extremely bad things that will have a swift and severe impact on my personal and professional life.
Less than four years after this interview the marketing company is dissolved, the Hawaii museum exhibition abandoned, and the criticism and fiction books pulled from the submission process. This brings an abrupt and premature end to my career as a media artist, curator, and writer. I leave San Francisco in order to literally restart my life, 3000 miles away. I am only 34 years old, and it is all over. Forever.
Scott Stark, as it happens, helps me escape, and is the last person I see before I leave the city.