Extracts from “Just Like A Shadow…” An Interview with Jerome Sans

“I always felt that my function was to relate to the readers some of my enthusiasm about the films that I liked. When I see a film and I like it, I want to share my enthusiasm for it with others. There is so little in this modern commercial world that is really and truly exciting, I mean, something that reaches deep into your soul, that it’s very important for me that those little fragments of beauty, of Paradise, are brought to the attention of friends and strangers equally. That’s why I began writing for the Village Voice.”

“It all comes down to something like this: Here I am, a shy thin boy whom everybody in my village, when I was eight or seven, they all thought, ah, poor boy, he’s about to die. So, years later I come to New York, and here I am, a farmer boy, and I do not want anything but write my poetry and make my films. But Fate had other plans for me. All these people kept coming my way, George Maciunas, and Salvador Dali, and Jackie Kennedy, and Yoko Ono, and John Lennon, and everybody else, and I didn’t need them and didn’t know them and was not looking for them. As I said, I just wanted to write my poetry. But we were all brought together. Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger. No, I was not looking for Salvador Dali: he was a legend; I would have never dared to bother him. But he became curious about me and came to visit me unannounced, with Ultra Violet, to my 414 Park Avenue South loft, and we became friends. Andy Warhol sat on the floor of my loft for months, watching movies, before I found out who he was. The point I am trying to make here is that it all happened by itself. I had neither time nor desire to meet any of these people, I was always too busy, as I still am, not even having time to eat, and my stomach has shrunk from not eating; living just on Italian sausage and goat cheese and garlic and wine, so that now I can barely eat anything. Anyway, once a psychic woman looked at me and told me that my incarnation lineage has gone through Giordano Bruno, some feisty Spanish lieutenant, and George Washington. When she told me that once I had been George Washington, it explained to me everything: why I was in America and why all these people circled, gathered around me and why it all happened by itself, very easily…”

“Somehow we were all together, one family. And there was a great intensity in the air. Poetry readings, jazz places, cafes, where we would gather attracted me because of the energy, intensity. We were one intense, ecstatic family. Maybe not in body, but in spirit. This doesn’t mean at all that we all agreed with one another. Some of us didn’t speak with one another for months, even years. Still, we were together.”

“In reality, all my film work is one long film which is still continuing. I don’t really make films: I only keep filming. I am a filmer not a filmmaker. And I am not a film “director” because I direct nothing. I just keep filming.”

“I am not too sure if cinema is really important to me. My obsession with filming has nothing to do with what I think about cinema. I just have to film. I have no choice. If I don’t film I get sick. It’s madness. I am being pulled into it by an irresistible force. That’s about all I can say about it.”

“In a diary form of cinema, technical imperfections are part of the content and part of the form. They reveal aspects of inner and outer reality that could not be caught through technical “perfection”. Technical perfection, in truth, does not exist. Any perfection, any technique has to be measured by the content it attempts to capture. An overexposure, a clumsy movement can be more “perfect”, as far as the content goes, than any “steady” or “properly exposed” footage. So it’s all relative. Like Einstein’s curve of time and space.”

“You see, I do nor really believe in creation. I have always insisted that what I do, I do from necessity. When I film something, I don’t film it because I want to create something. I do it because I want to capture the essence there in front of me. When I film, I try to go directly to the essence, to what I feel is the essence, and this has absolutely nothing to do with “creation”. I just film it. That’s all. As far as spontaneity goes, I am not sure if there is any other “creation” other than a spontaneous one, or improvised, be it me, or Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, D.W. Griffith or Adam Mickievicz, or Renoir. Cinema verite? That was a term used to describe a certain style, a certain way of filming “real life, films usually concerned with certain themes that society was interested in. Cinema verite grew out of the excitement caused by the coming into existence of light portable cameras with sound. So we had Jean Rouch and Richard Leacock and many others. They made films of either social or anthropological interest, some great films. But I am somewhere else. My films are totally of no interest to society. They are totally useless to society.