I would like briefly to provide part of the context in which Raw Images From the Optical Cross can be best understood as a work of experimental cinema. Experimental cinema, despite its lack of broad public visibility, continues to be an area of vital growth and energy in American art. My personal excitement about experimental film arises from the way contemporary filmmakers join imagistic experimentation with narration in a specifically postmodern manner. This joining is two-fold.

First, it is addressed in a change of attitude towards the cinematic image, specifically cinematic abstraction. Filmic abstraction has long been totalized by formalist criticism inherited from the visual arts: the idea, in short, that abstraction can only be concerned with the nature of the medium itself and the specific or purportedly unique qualities of any given medium. Postmodern cinematic experimentations, on the other hand, are not concerned with some notion of a medium's inherent "nature"; rather, they frequently utilize abstract images as signifiers with external reference as determined by the specific context in which they occur; these contemporary experimental films always place abstraction within a specific narrative or context so that meaning, knowledge, emotion, function, etc., are created by the friction between cinematic elements. The challenge for the film viewer, then, becomes the seeking out of a relation between these elements and their signifying potential.

The second area of interest within postmodernism deals with the types of narration that are used. The activism surrounding identity politics of the past thirty years has given new viability and authority to personal narratives. In the type of film-work being discussed here, many filmmakers, Nussbaum included, combine both canonized history and personal narrative in a way that both adds detail to the accepted history that has been lost, and highlights personal experience over grand historical narrative. The effect is often that we witness first-hand the many limitations of history. In the case of Nussbaum's film, we are confronted with the difficulty of memory -- not only of remembering specific people and events, but also the difficulty of the image of memory. Raw Images from the Optical Cross heightens the horror of the Holocaust by interweaving history and personal narration into a complex of images that have compelling references but which we rarely manage to see completely because of their complexity and because they are continually fading and dissolving away into other images, becoming more obscure.

I spoke with Karl Nussbaum at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival where his film was being screened.

Douglas Hunter (DH): Could you give us some of the background on Raw Images from the Optical Cross? Although it's not an overtly narrative film, did you have a specific story that you wanted to tell, or what was the seed of the film?

Karl Nussbaum (KN): First off, the style of the film is what I call narrative collage. This is a combination of narrative arc and experimental styles. Mostly collage, because I like both sides, but I find a lot of boring things in narrative and as well in experimental film, so I wanted to take the parts I love and stick them together. I definitely think the movie has a story. I've learned that you don't have to have a big story or a long story; it just has to arc, just has to go somewhere and have some beginning and end. That's the part you can grab from narrative that can make experimental work a lot more interesting.

The background of the film is that I was shooting a lot of hi-8 stuff in Europe, documentary stuff, as I traveled looking at Holocaust memorials, medical museums, anything strange I found. I had no idea how it was going to work but I knew it would go into a movie. When I looked at the footage, it was not sharp and it was never really colorful. I was so disappointed with the way it looked that I started shooting stills just to keep myself making beautiful images. I bought this 55mm macro lens so I could shoot really sharp and pay a lot of attention to colors. I practiced shooting and as I was shooting these slides and developing this double-exposure technique, I realized I had so many slides that I could make a movie. That's how the movie started coming along. It was just these images. I had thousands of images and decided to form them into a movie through doing live slide shows with super-8 loops. It was a live performance where I had four projectors and a dissolve unit and we would play music and I would do it to the music, and it turned itself into a film.

To get the narrative, I went to the script of a feature I have been writing for the last four years, drawing the smallest elements from it across the entire narrative. Out of 100 pages I took little bits of it and just told the same story, but it is completely reduced. It is about a page and a half of voice-over, so I don't go into a lot of detail like I do in the feature. I just rewrote that stuff over and over and formed it into this tiny arc about growing up in my father's house, growing up with a survivor -- the scariness of this for a child; the fear in the house.

Then I decided to go to Germany to see where his house was and where he had to say good-bye [to his folks], and from there to follow the path that his parents had taken, or were put on, to Auschwitz. During that trip to Auschwitz, I found out that my grandparents had died in that concentration camp. It was very difficult to tell this to my dad. It really upset him. . . .

DH: You just summarized or rather tied together a couple pieces of the narrative, but they are so condensed in this film. How were you attempting to tie them together through the images and the voice-over narration? Did you have a specific scheme that you were working with?

KN: I got into this five sections thing [at first, but then ended up with more]. The first section is an introduction: I know that you don't know anything that I am saying to you but I am going to pull you in.

I tell this story about my father. My father once said to me that he was deserted by God, so I wrote about a dream I had where in essence I see him as Jesus nailed to a tree in a forest and I have to watch him. As a second-generation child, I am helpless to help my father or to help those who were in the Holocaust, and so I allude to that in the dream. I had to stand still and watch, and I'm helpless. I bring in the idea of the family blood going into the ground, and there is a lot about the ground being both where bodies are buried as well as where trees and living things grow. It is the idea of life growing out of death, the ground being nurtured by the dead bodies. So that's the first section. I set up what I am going to talk about, but it was very important for me not to hit people right away with the film being about the Holocaust, but to hypnotize them, to draw them in with beautiful images and get them into my style. I really believe that you have to set the rules of a movie in the first few minutes to draw the audience in, let them understand in maybe some unconscious way the rules of how to look at this film.

The second section consists of what it was like to be a child of a survivor: to be fearful of the basement, the closet, and the things in the house where I was isolated. I would see the furnace in the basement and I knew enough that it was very scary to me, so I got another child to go down into the basement and look in the furnace for me. It was all about the scariness of the house.

The third section was about being a teenager, when I became more conscious of my sexuality. I hit puberty and I started to wonder about my father's puberty, about how the Holocaust affected his sexuality as well as my own. I got into all this really weird sexual stuff that I was fascinated with. As a psychological thing it was fascinating to me, what makes people turn to this type [[[what type?? although really it's not crucial to have it spelled out for us]]] of sexuality. I also brought back the idea of Jesus again. Jesus was a teenager once and we never hear about that. I am fascinated with the idea of Jesus as a teenager and how he must have fought with his parents, how weird that must have been. Next, in the film, I talk about my relationship with my dad again: how, in order to feel connected with my father, I had to give up my self-esteem because he saw himself as a victim and also saw me as a shit-head. Part of this is connected to the idea of a Bar Mitzvah, when a Jewish boy of age 13 becomes a man, so in the film I actually have myself singing from when I was 13. I talk about my father's Bar Mitzvah; Jesus was Bar Mitzvah'ed; I was Bar Mitzvah'ed; my grandfather was Bar Mitzvah'ed -- it represents a connection down through time, through this ritual.

Then in the fourth section I go to Germany to find where it all started. I wanted to look at my dad's house. I go from my own house to my dad's house. I talk about the Jews as "freaks" at this time, when they were looked at as such outsiders that you could just kill them. At the same time I also thought about when my father had to say good-bye. It was a story that I was told as a kid and it totally affected me to think about having to say good-bye to your parents at age 14, and if he knew at that time or not that he would never see them again. . . . Then I have the sound of the trains in the background, as a sort of foreshadowing of what's going to happen. This is also when we brought in the horror movie music and the horror movie imagery.

As a child I was so into monster movies, and later on I realized that the reasons for this were two-fold: first, I identified with the monster as an outsider. I was really sympathetic to the Frankenstein monster because he was misunderstood. I saw myself in him, and then I also realized that looking at monster movies was a way for me to deal with horror that was under my control: I know they were in make-up, I know that this is a set, I know it's all man-made. It's within my grasp, whereas the reality of the Holocaust is totally outside of my understanding. You can't say, "it's just . . . about the Holocaust." The movies became my way of dealing with horror, perhaps unconsciously. . . .

I named each section of this film, and the fourth one is called "Fatherland." Germany is the fatherland, as in, I'm going back to where my father started out and what affected him as a child -- the fear that he must have lived through as a teenager. I thought about myself as a teenager and I thought of my dad as a teenager during the war and how that affected him.

Then I start this idea about taking the path that my grandparents took starting in 1943 when they were sent to Terezienstat, [[[I haven't found the exact spelling yet, but it's close]]] this ghetto outside Prague. I went there and took pictures. After that I tried to get on a train to Poland to go to Auschwitz. I spent two days trying to get a ticket to Auschwitz, but either the train didn't run that day or there were no more tickets. So I kept coming back to the train station. I thought how odd, how ironic, I want to go there. Fifty years ago nobody wanted to go there. So I got on a train, finally, and of course all along the way I had to think, could I have survived as a teenager like my father did and all these other people who survived? I just thought, I couldn't have done it, I couldn't have done it. What would a young Jesus have done? As a deity could he have saved his father? So I bring Jesus back into the film. Part of the Holocaust for me is wondering, wouldn't the Messiah come back during this? If Jesus was a Jew, wouldn't he return as the Messiah or send the second Messiah along? This was a call and nothing happened, so now my whole family is atheist. How could there be a God if there was a Holocaust? Why wouldn't God come and stop this? If that's the way you believe in God.

So I went to Auschwitz and [in the film] there is that whole train sequence. This is the first thing that moves in the film: all the images are slides up to this point, but then the train comes and the train just keeps on going and going and going, over and over again. It goes straight into the furnace. It's a shot of the tracks going into the furnace, dissolving over and over and over, and you see Jesus in the furnace and Jesus on the railroad tracks and all these little babies.

At Auschwitz I asked about my grandfather. I'm named after my grandfather, and when I arrived there they gave me a little piece of paper about when he arrived. I didn't look at [it] for two days. And two days later when I returned and looked at the paper, I realized that it was the exact same date. I had arrived 50 years later to the day that my grandfather had arrived at Auschwitz and been killed. I went in that gas chamber and thought, man, this is where my grandfather was, this is where he died, and it broke me up. It was the weirdest experience. Had the train not been two days late it wouldn't have happened that way so it was a very weird coincidence. I'm not much of a believer in astrology or even an after-life, but this was such a strange coincidence that I really wanted to believe that I was more connected to my grandfather through this and picked up his spirit and carried it out. I ran out of one building crying, sat down and immediately fell asleep. I decided I had to sleep outside to be connected, and to prove that I could survive, to feel the feelings being outside in the cold. That's my way of hiding, to go to sleep. I had these strange dreams about flesh being pulled and twisted and then I woke up on this bench and spent the rest of the day exploring and taking pictures. . . .

Was this maybe the 5th section (all the Auschwitz stuff)?

The sixth section is called "Frozen Tears," and it's about trying to come to grips with all these people who died in my family -- cousins, uncles, and aunts who all died, and their friends and everyone else's families who died. Sometimes as I look up into the sky and see stars I think that all those stars represent those who died, and the constellations represent all the families. It seems like that many people to me. I am still connected to them by genetics, through biology, so there is some way that I am still like them and still carry their genes and the name. The name has become so important because I am the last one of the Nussbaums with the name to pass on unless my sister keeps her name when she marries. . . .

The final section was me on the train, which I shot by holding the camera up as I was pulling into my father's home town. As I was shooting out the window, another train went by really loudly and I started screaming from tension. I didn't think about it at all -- I was just so upset emotionally that I started screaming. I saved that piece of tape and put it in the movie at the end. I wanted to sum up what it was like for me to make the movie and to make the trip, and that's where I talk about how looking at so much death makes me feel alive, and that looking at so much sadness makes me feel connected to people. Then I had to ask, what's my connection to my dad?

My connection to my dad is through a lot of pain and sadness and I'm thinking to myself if I let go of this pain, will I still feel connected to my father, since that is such a deep bond between us. So that's the last question I ask, and then there is the release of the horror through the big scream. I had tried to explain all this stuff and understand it myself and sometimes you just can't put it into words or pictures, so I just scream.

DH: I would like to change the tone a little bit here.

KN: Short answers? (Laughing)

DH: I don't know if they are going to be short answers or not, but I wanted to ask you about two things, one of which is time, because you have mentioned that moment you realized that you had arrived at the camp the same day your grandfather had arrived. When I was watching the film, that was really stunning to me. Fifty years later so many things have changed but some things haven't changed: the pain is still there and you were at the same exact position geographically yet so far removed temporally. The other question is about time on the formal level of the film -- how long images last on the screen. They don't last long. We don't get a chance to fully see; we the viewers get a lot of referents but we don't often come away from an image thinking "I know what that was an image of." How were you working on those two levels?

KN: One of the things that fascinates me is how we see images briefly, and if we don't see them long enough, they become richer. That is what horror movies are based upon. You barely caught a glimpse of something and it was horrifying and the fact that you couldn't hold on to it or see it clearly made it really mysterious. Not just horror movies but also dreams are like that. We have this vague sense of what we saw and it's fascinating to us. One idea about that is that history is constantly slipping away, so I want these images to be constantly slipping away. You could grasp them but not for a long time. That's how I feel about the Holocaust, history, and my grandparents' history -- that it's just slipping away and I'm trying to grasp hold of it. It's like you want to hold them and name them but by the time you can figure it out, it's gone. So what I wanted is the whole sense of everything constantly dissolving away from us. I also wanted the film to keep rolling where you could never catch it. I don't want you to know where you're going because when I watch narratives sometimes I sit there constantly trying to figure out what's going to happen. In a way that is interesting, because in a way I am trying to figure out how to work it, but as an audience member it's not that interesting and [the narratives] usually do exactly what you think they're going to do. In my film I like to go faster than the audience can go, so they are constantly running after me with the images, trying to put them all together. This also makes people want to see the film twice because there are things that they know they have missed, things they haven't seen, so they can watch it twice and look in the corners. A lot of the visuals are centrally structured so that when they dissolve from one to the next they are right on top of each other, but I also put things in the corners and around the edges, so that if you have time to look, there is a second or third layer. This dissolving is definitely like dreaming and is hallucinogenic.

DH: I wanted to ask you about the title of the movie and the diagram of the optical cross that appears several times in the film.

KN: Well, I'm thinking that there were a couple of things about time that I have not answered. Fifty years later -- you know, 50 is a pretty good number for looking back. It's taken this long to look back. A lot of things are coming up now about the Holocaust in the newspapers and some people ask, "why now?" I think it's because the second generation is going to look at it now, because they now have to carry the story into the future. The survivors are now realizing that they are going to die soon. They want to tell their stories and they want to pass this to the second generation to tell the next generation. So there is a real desire to get it out now. Time is slipping away.

In the beginning of the movie, underneath the title you notice there are a couple of dates: 5756 which is the Jewish year of 1996, and 51A.D., which is 51 years after death or after the Holocaust. It starts the new Messiah clock. In a way, Auschwitz represents this incredible break in time for Jews and the whole world. The whole concept of evil changed, of what was capable of being done to other humans. It was an important moment for art in that after it everything was fractured and art too became fractured -- how we see the world became fractured. I don't know how to make it clear, but there is a big break, there is totally new horror.

DH: Can you talk a little bit about the title, the "Optical Cross"?

KN: The optical cross is two things. In the brain it is the place where the optic nerves cross, the two optic nerves running from your eyeballs to the brain. That is where information from your eyes is shared so you get stereoscopic vision. That's a metaphor for me of two different viewpoints being combined to get one image. This is how I see it with my father and me. He lived through [the Holocaust] and he has one image, and I hear about it and see books and I have another image, and so the movie is all these double exposures which implies two points of view being combined into one image. Also the optical cross is the burden of seeing certain images when you are young that get burned into your mind and you carry them the rest of your life. Both [the burden of images that] my father sees that he probably doesn't even tell me, and the images I saw of the Holocaust as a child that were just burned in there that I carry everywhere I go. I am fascinated by how certain images get magnified and stay in our brains, and others just go by and you never remember them. Why do certain ones just get stuck there? It's all different for everyone, which images get burned in as a child.

DH: There was one more thing that we talked about in our previous conversation, and this is the beauty of the images, how rich the color is, and how well composed they are, but that when you look at specific elements they can be quite disturbing. They are not beautiful at all. There is a synthesis of things that are horrible and frightening on one level but that are beautiful on another.

KN: When I started doing that, I realized that these are really beautiful images, but they are about horrible things. I got really worried. I feel a responsibility to the survivors. They are looking to the second generation to carry on the stories, but they are really worried about how we are going to do it. I have become tired, and I think audiences have become tired, of seeing the black-and-white images that are straight-forward documentary. They did have incredible power when they first came out -- people could just not believe it, and all that was needed was to show what happened. But since the media shows us so much stuff now, [those black-and-white images] have lost their power over time. I felt that we needed to have a new way of showing the horror and the stories.

I have this way of seeing that is different. I didn't set out to make some new form for the Holocaust, but that's happened. I think that it's important that we appeal to the new generation -- both the second and the third generation. They need to get the information in a way that speaks to them. They are no longer interested in black-and-white old movies. It leaves them cold.

I felt when I first started making beautiful images that I was nullifying the horror and trying to gloss over it like a commercial, like a commercial image in that it is so beautiful. I had a lot of trouble with that. I felt like maybe I was diminishing the whole experience. I realized, though, that this is the way I see images. That the way I want to make them is this beautiful way that attracts you, and that once I have you attracted I can tell you things and show you things that make connections, or if you pay attention you can see that it is a beautiful image of something horrible, and it gives the viewer this struggle: can I think it's beautiful or is it just horrible? It creates a conflict just in looking. It's like in the movies when someone gets hit and you laugh and then a moment later you think, "why did I just laugh when someone just got hurt?" It makes you think about your reaction and your feelings about what you've just seen.

I was so afraid of upsetting the survivors by making beautiful images of horrible things. I didn't want to make them upset or have them think that I was not taking it seriously, but I think it's my natural style -- the grotesque beautiful. In a way I see beauty in the human body both inside and out. I am fascinated by the way that the body works. I've gone to many medical museums and I think it's gorgeous, the creativity in the human body even when it's dead, and I wanted to show that, because it's part of the beauty of life. Some people have said that I am showing these horrible sad things but I am also showing the beauty of life by what I show them, so there is this dichotomy, the beauty and hope of life, and the sadness and despair of life.