In the Blink of an Eye

Interview: Talking with Julian Schnabel.

by Sam Adams

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When Julian Schnabel tells you do to something, he means it. The first time we meet, he's trying to illustrate a point about the extraordinary opening of his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an uninterrupted 15-minute sequence shot from the point of view of a paralyzed but fully conscious man. "If you take off your glasses and look around the room," he begins, and I listen, unaware that the "you" in question is me. "No," he says. "Take off your glasses and look around the room." When we pick up the conversation a few months later, I know to do as I'm told.

Metaphors, it seems, don't interest Schnabel much. What interests him is experience. "As a painter, I'm not making a representation of something," he says. "If I take a tablecloth and dip in paint and throw it at the canvas, it makes a printed image. I'm not drawing that to make some image. I am working in an anthropomorphic way. I am responding to my scale as a person."

Rather than a generic triumph-of-the-spirit tearjerker, Diving Bell is preoccupied with the physical details of its subject, French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who blinked out a memoir with his left eyelid after the rest of his body was paralyzed by a stroke. Schnabel was drawn to the subject after watching his father die in similar fashion. "I wanted to know what my father was seeing when he was dying," he says, "and not just what I saw watching him."

To that end, Schnabel used a swing and tilt lens that looks like a camera in an old Western. Since the lens is not held parallel to the film, it can move independently of the camera, creating a liquid, ever-shifting focal plane that evokes the experimental films of Stan Brakhage or Paul Sharits. Schnabel had never seen their films, but the focus on the physical qualities of sight brought him independently to the same place.

"It's an interesting thing about this film," he says. "It just seems so fundamental. It's not about making the movie. It's trying to understand life. It's using film as a utilitarian tool, not really to entertain people or to sell tickets. It's something that's useful to understand why we're here."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)