SLSL Artist Looking Back on Own Work

[davemarc]

Last night at the Film Forum, the filmmaker Robert Altman sat in on a
screening of a beautiful print of his fascinating 1972 movie "Images" and
offered very brief comments afterwards.

Thirty years after the film had been made (and about twenty years after he
had last seen it), he shrugged off one question by saying that now he could
cut out 20 minutes of the movie.  Then he seemed to invoke his younger self
when he hastily added, "I was really enfatuated with what I was doing.  I
wouldn't cut any of it."  (At the time I took him to mean "Actually, I
wouldn't cut any of it now."  I point this out because I think the context
can be misunderstood from the text alone.)

A similar ambivalence may apply to the Slow Learner intro.  It's not at all
unlikely for a person to look at work done years earlier and feel much
less enfatuated with it, much more likely to find "faults" that he or she
would not wish to repeat.

d.