Leslie Thornton - Quotes

…of necessity, I become an instrument…
Thornton, Leslie.

My feeling was that you noticed things about these different species because the abstract image was there.
Thornton, Leslie.

I started paying attention to how different species used movement in their lives, or stillness. And one thing I hadn't thought about was that there are several reasons for animals to be still.
Thornton, Leslie.

Most recently I've made a series of impressionistic shorts ... I'm making these short impressionistic pieces, let's say something that comes out of a trip like going to China and having a culture shock. In my catastrophically oriented way, my first trip to China, I came back with a lot of, what I call, reverse culture shock, where I felt my that friends didn't know what was really going on. It's another paradigm shift ... So I made a piece called "Novel City" that's really just a meditation looking out of a hotel window at some buildings that are slightly strange. And there's just an alienation factor that's operating in the piece.
Thornton, Leslie.

Most recently I've been doing a series (I'm going back to my roots), and I'm doing a series called "Binocular" which involves shooting animals and setting up a dual vision where you have, simultaneously, the representational image of the animal and then a highly abstracted video of the same footage, so you look at representational and abstract and the two affect each other very much. This is the first piece I've done, really ever, that's strictly designed as an installation.
Thornton, Leslie.

(WC:) I guess one of your most well knowns 'Peggy and Fred in Hell' which was an ongoing piece .. But I'd like to just talk about. (LT:) Well, there have been many finals, so it's still not really final. It's really a life long project. It has a narrative arc to it now, so I show it as complete but I still have an archive of material that I recorded with Peggy and Fred that I will dig into at some point.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I started the project in 1984 intending to make a feature film. I don't like the term 'experimental narrative' but that's how it would have been categorized. It is a post-apocalyptic scenario with two children who've been raised by television. There are no other people around so the only people they see are the people on television. And television is remaining, it's remained in operation post-apocalypse because it's data for an artificial intelligence entity that's actually observing Peggy and Fred in hell. But you don't know any of that watching Peggy and Fred in hell. You have a sense that somebody is watching but I don't actually reveal the A.I. entity until the very last episode.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

Both my father and my grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. My father was one of the Chief Engineers and my grandfather was the Electrical Engineer who designed the Oak Ridge Electricity plant where the Uranium was purified.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I grew up in, I did grow up in the Cold War and there was a lot of family pride about this situation of having two people work on the Bomb. And as I got older, that became more of a trouble mythology in the family. So, I had to reconcile feelings for family with history.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I think at a pretty young age I was aware of a shift in scale that was occuring between human kind and technology. And that's really what got me going on the "Peggy and Fred in Hell" Project. The Bomb was the ultimate terrorist act, still the ultimate terrorist act, and it was the thing that exceeded our control, up until then, technology was pretty much something that was at the service of mankind. So there was a paradigm shift with bomb and now we've had another paradigm shift with today's version of terrorism.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I wanted to make a piece that was really about apprehension and another kind of apprehension as well; that of information. During the 80's when I started working on the project this term was in circulation 'the information explosion' which we weren't in yet... and now we're here."
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

As I said to the audience, we are now in the hell that Peggy and Fred was about as a future event when I started making it in the 80's. So that hell would be information overload. And I think we don't know yet what that's doing to us, but it's definitely doing something. It's changing our minds. I'd say it's changing our minds. I've lived long enough to see these changes.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

As a media artist you know that we're changing because you make something that's seen as very difficult, let's say in the 80's or 90's, and now is a piece of cake. So something that seemed dense and obscure, or too layered or fast, fits right in with what we're able to process information-wise today. So I know based on our works that our minds have changed for better or worse, I don't know ... I mean, I suppose for better and worse.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

The piece is not about surveillance. What occurs to me about surveillance is there's an immediate take on surveillance as sinister. And actually, I guess it's sinister but the way I look at it is that it's primarily data overload, it doesn't become functional as surveillance until something happens, generally speaking. Like the times square incident....just the tiniest unit of surveillance is functional, most of it is just noise.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

What I was concerned about is information overload, it's stressful. There's a sense of incompletion in constant daily life. The computer is like a little friend, I'd feel lonely without it, but I think that's strange ... so there's always a little bit of humanity there, and then a lot of stuff that you can't do or that's overwhelming. That's the hell. That's what we saw coming on the horizon, that's just a part of it.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

Talking about art as something that happens some place along that continuum may be often closer to the risky territory of noise, and I do ascribe to that theory. I'd say "Peggy and Fred in Hell" is, when it's working, teetering, very much teetering on that brink of noise and in a way it's about what we used to think of as cultural detritous, as excess, but now we don't think of it as excess that we should be able to process it somehow...
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I'd like to feel that I stay in the present, but this is the first present that I'm having a hard time accommodating.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I had a pretty strong grounding the aesthetics of experimental cinema.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I worked in grid structures and just broke the grid with gesture with painting gesture. The paintings were getting increasingly austere. I felt that the logical end to the direction that I was following was nothing. That to be pure in this pursuit, I'd have to stop painting.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

The end result might be read as portrait-like but the units that make up this piece, which are short-shots of gestures within a domestic environment had a very dispassionate view of this material. I had an interest in linguistics and that was the other main influence in my early work. I was revealing something of a personae but in this very fragmented way, following a score.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I have a really troubled relation to narrative, and I love it. And think it's the enormously complex form. I think I was an idiot, maybe an idiot savant (according to one friend) but an idiot when it comes to storytelling, and as my work progressed, something that was very important to me was to maintain my idiocy, or to put it in another terms, to remain a primitive.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I understood that the form needed to move towards to make full use of the riches, of media, film at that time, but media in general, was narrative but I didn't want to do it by the book so I had to find it myself, and I did. But it took many, many, many, years and many years avoiding all of the texts that tell you how to, and I also teach so that was especially challenging teaching my students how to work with narrative without offering to them the usual sources that they would get at a film school, but I have to say they ended up making very interesting work, so if my struggle helped, I am glad.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

I don't in any way dislike mainstream films. I like to read more than watch films, but I feel I am working in a very different arena, that I'm much more of a formalist and I think that my work is more writerly than cinematic. I think I'm closer to painting and writing than to typical cinema and there's no conflict there, it's just another world.
Thornton, Leslie and Will Corwin (Interviewer). "The Interview Show: Leslie Thornton." in: Art on Air. (Audio). November 12, 2010.

…illogical things, mispronunciations, peculiar combinations of sound and image that are somehow startling, excessive beauty. Working with duration that seems inappropriate. The viewer has to deal with it; it stimulates the mind to cope with boredom, for instance. Generally, in culture, these discomforts, stimulations, are blocked out; they are not speakable, packagable, or they are disruptive. The closest to transcendence that we get in pop culture might be violence, the lust for violence….
Thornton, Leslie and Thomas Zummer (Reviewer). "Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol 23, November/December 2002.

The way language works has been a life-long preoccupation, starting in childhood when I was painfully shy and had trouble speaking. The kind of extreme self-focus of shyness, the kind of analysis and appraisal that is nearly constant, and in a way objectifies language, even for a child. Language is something outside.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

Speech was like an object, an enemy, a barrier. It was externalized. Language was overwhelming, inadequate to describe or convey many things – I had a basic sense of this in childhood.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

And, as the stand-in spectator, I have to judge by the intensity of my own responses. It’s a thinking and feeling moment, where the thinking and the feeling – we don’t have a word for it – when they can’t be separated. That’s the moment I’m always looking for. It’s not something that comes back to rational formations or very focused arguments or ideas. It’s about a spreading out, spreading and coagulations, chemical reactions in the work that can produce surprising moments and thoughts for the viewer.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

The crowd that bothers me is the visual artists, the art people who don’t get into this kind of work and say they watch films for entertainment only.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

I had been talking out of the blue; it was some kind of crazy pitch at first that quickly turned into an intensely generative discussion. It turned out that somebody was taking notes. A few months later, I received ten written pages about my work, like a film treatment based on what I said that day, including some wonderful misinterpretations. [Laughs...] It was a great gift and reminder. I took this as serendipitous, being presented with the interesting challenge of making a film under pressure, based at least in part on “plagiarizing” certain misinterpretations of things I had said. So I made The Haunted Swing (1998).
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

I feel like I’ve found the narrative structure for The Great Invisible and it’s so simple and it’s exactly related to the way I’ve shot the film all of these years. But I couldn’t quite see it because I was always cutting versions for fund-raising purposes, which I thought had to be straight and not too scary. It’s polluting. It’s a polluting and debilitating process to deal with fund-raising in film. After that conversation, and having my ideals thrown back in my face, on paper, somebody else hearing it – it was a great jab. The structure of the project is falling into place.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

Experimental film has a quirky history. I have a theory about it: what people don’t seem to realize is that this work actually has to be promoted.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

As a teacher I encounter younger people who feel very attracted to working in an alternative way, a risk-taking way, and who’ve done some highly original work, but then they don’t follow it through. They end up being paid to make websites and become bored and cynical. It’s a mess. These younger people are looking at the older people and saying, “I don’t want to live like that…I don’t want that much uncertainty." We have to surpass the history of experimental film and video art.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

What’s more important in the work is a kind of thinking or thought process and not a final product. For that reason, I feel an affinity with the Wooster Group who do something similar in presenting works which are continually evolving. A work-in-progress can be shown in a formal viewing situation; there’s a vulnerability, but that can be part of the charge for the viewer and the maker. I guess the main thing is not to see value only in finished and exchangeable objects.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

I like objects but I hope that any work I produce has enough life in it to change over time.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).

I think it’s fine to learn the rules, and to make things by the rules but I don’t think anybody can learn them and then unlearn them! Maybe Tarkovsky. But I don’t think he ever learned them well.
Thornton, Leslie and Borger, Irene (Interviewer). "An Interview with Leslie Thornton." in: Senses of Cinema. Vol. 22, 2002. (English).