Still from Nevada, 1974
Super 8mm film transferred to 16mm film
2 Mins 53 Secs (Loop)

“From 1971 to 1974 when I was teaching myself to be a filmmaker I started by making super 8 films for reasons of simplicity and affordability. I used to carry my camera around with me and shoot at first mostly spontaneously and later my method became increasingly more thoughtful and planned. Most of my films involved relatively long takes or in camera editing. The little editing that I did was done with tape splices on the kitchen table. The film “Nevada” (1974) was a result of a single afternoon of shooting with my friend, dancer/choreographer Douglas Dunn who was a former Cunningham dancer and who worked with Yvonne Rainer and the Grand Union. I brought my camera, tripod and a single light to his loft on lower Broadway with the idea that we would shoot something. Neither of us had any preconceived notion of what it would be. As it turned out he had found a scrap of wood on the street the day before, and we decided that it would make a good prop to start with. It was shaped like the state of Nevada. So as I set up, he tried various ways of manipulating the plywood. His work at that time used elements of improvisation and was often task or object oriented. We worked for a while -- he tried to determine an order for his actions and I tried different ways of framing and moving with the camera making suggestions about what worked and what didn’t. We each did a bit of adjustment to the other and came to a conclusion. These were the days before video so we didn’t see the result for about a week or so.”
Charles Atlas, New York, September 2009