They’re not films without sound; they’re silent films. Which means the silence has to be palpable.” 

Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat-Cutting Machines
Notre-Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden-Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Saint-Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street

BLVR: And it has a shape to it that changes as the film goes along too.

ND: Yeah, you’re really working with the shape. I guess it’s more like dance that way. Like tension and release—that kind of thing.

BLVR: Do you think at all about the sound in the room while the film is screening?

ND: They only know music as an adornment to language.

BLVR: Or as an adornment to life—something that’s just there in the background and taken for granted.

ND: There’s that, but what I mean is, they don’t know about music itself being the emotional landscape of a human being. They don’t know that. And so it limits their filmmaking tremendously. Because if your film or your music comes out of itself, each moment develops into the next moment. It’s very different if you’re directing it from outside the piece. It never deepens if the film isn’t going forward out of its own newness.

BLVR: That’s a lot of the work of making something, though.

ND: Someone might say, What’s the difference between openness and discretion? How can you be open and discreet? Well, the openness involves being open to what you experience. In other words, you have an idea, you’re gonna take a chance and put it down—then the important thing is to be open to your reaction to it. And that’s where discretion comes in, by being open to your reaction. That means you don’t let Mr. Lazy convince you that everything in your film is working perfectly. For instance, maybe you’re working on a film and every time it comes to a certain shot, you realize you’re spaced-out. Every time. And finally you go, Why am I always spaced out during this shot? Or: Why is my mind telling me it’s good? Which, of course, means it’s bad.

BLVR: So you listen to yourself in those moments and that’s where the discretion comes.

ND: Yeah, and finally Mr. Lazy goes, Oh! It’s because the shot before is two seconds too long, and because it’s too long, you’re done by the time you come to the cut. Things like that. But the main thing is to be open to your own reaction. Especially [as I’m] getting older, I realize it doesn’t involve memory. It just involves recollecting your experience when you first saw the shot. What did I actually feel when that happened? And I find I can remember that because it’s sort of a body–muscle memory kind of thing. You can remember when that shot came on, and no matter what your brain rationalized, it wasn’t right, even though you wanted it to be, because you’re ready to move on.

BLVR: It’s a very nourishing feeling to be in touch with yourself in that way.

ND: Yeah, it’s fun and then it becomes a real practice, the art-making. It’s the practice of being self-observant. You don’t have to be observant of the thing you’re making: that happens automatically. The honest part of your mind delivers the answers a couple of seconds before the narrator does. At least that’s my experience. A lot of times, I’m doing things and I know the answer but Mr. Mind has to go and think about it first and then state to me the answer. But as I’m doing that, I’m going to myself, Wait a minute. I already know the answer. I already know it. You’re busy saying this to yourself but you already know it. You already had the experience.

ND: Well, through your lifetime, everything changes. There was a long period of time, maybe twenty years, when I was making these polyvalent pieces, where every shot moved forward for its own reason and reverberated with other shots you’d seen in the film. Then at a certain point, I got tired of the problem-solving of that. I’d start a film and go, Oh, I don’t want these things. I know these problems. So then I asked myself, What would be new for me? What would be real for me? And then, ironically, I went to an earlier stage, back to when I was about nineteen or twenty. Moving forward was like coming back. It started during The Arboretum Cycle with a lot of articulation happening just through the film getting brighter and darker. Now I’m in this phase where I’ve made about twenty films like that and I drive people mad [laughs], getting brighter and darker. But it was a way of treating the Bolex more like an instrument than as a recording device. So I’ll be out shooting and looking at something and the breeze comes and I open the lens so the frame starts to fill with light and then I darken it down. It’s very similar to playing a musical instrument, I think, and you can start to play yourself as an instrument, in a sense.

https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-nathaniel-dorsky/

One of Bourke-White's clients was Otis Steel Company. Her success was due to her skills with both people and her technique. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains in Portrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her shoot for many reasons. Firstly, steel making was a defense industry, so they wanted to be sure national security was not endangered. Second, she was a woman, and in those days, people wondered if a woman and her delicate cameras could stand up to the intense heat, hazard, and generally dirty and gritty conditions inside a steel mill. When she finally got permission, technical problems began. Black-and-white film in that era was sensitive to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel (In the words of her collaborator, the ambient red-orange light had no "actinic value"), so she could see the beauty, but the photographs were coming out all black.

My singing stopped when I saw the films. I could scarcely recognize anything on them. Nothing but a half-dollar-sized disk marking the spot where the molten metal had churned up in the ladle. The glory had withered.

I couldn't understand it. "We're woefully underexposed," said Mr. Bemis. "Very woefully underexposed. That red light from the molten metal looks as though it's illuminating the whole place. But it's all heat and no light. No actinic value."

She solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare, which produces white light, and having assistants hold the flares to light her scenes. Her abilities resulted in some of the best steel-factory photographs of that era, which earned her national attention.

“Experimental films are a little bit like weeds—seeds that got caught between the cracks in the sidewalk.”