from ///Froth///

here's an excerpt from an interview that "indieWIRE" did with filmmakers Nick Dorsky and Stan Brakhage...

iW: -- yesterday, Nick, when I saw your film "Variations," from 1998, I was shocked to see a very familiar-looking scene involving a plastic shopping bag floating around in the wind in a city street. It looked exactly like the scene in "American Beauty," except you documented something real. Was there a connection?

Dorsky: I have not seen the film "American Beauty," and some people have told me that I shouldn't. When I made "Variations," I included a scene with a plastic bag, which I almost didn't use, because the image is similar to what has been used by many avant-garde filmmakers in the past - even back to "Symphony of a City" in the '20s, but I was walking on the sidewalk and there was this thing happening, it was very magical, and I shot it, and the light was perfect and I took a really good shot. I thought, well even though this is really kind of an avant-garde cliché, I would use it because the shot had so much psychological depth to it.

iW: Jem Cohen has a similar bag sequence in "Lost Book Found," from 1996, which is also a city film.

Dorsky: Yeah you can't help it;- it's like one of the characters of the city. So anyway, then "Variations" came out [in the 1998 New York Film Festival] and Stephen Holden in the Times wrote a review of the festival's avant-garde showcase. I think it called something like 'Avant-garde film: Heavenly and Harrowing,' and the opening part was about "Variations." It said something like, "Is there a cinematic image more beautiful than a plastic bag circling around on the pavement in the wind? Not in the case of Nathaniel Dorsky's 'Variations,' one of many shots expressing the evanescence and ineffability of life," et cetera. So that came out, and four days later, I get this telephone call from a woman, and she says, "Hello, I'm calling from Dreamworks. I represent the director of 'American Beauty.' He read about your film in the New York Times, and he would like to see it." So I said, "What is American Beauty?" At this point, the film was maybe at the beginning of post-production. She says "Oh, it's a love story." I said, "Why do you want to see it?" She said, "The director read about it and thought it might be very interesting." So I said, you can rent it from Canyon Cinema.

It's funny, because my good friend Jerome said, don't send it to them, they're gonna want to rip you off. And I said, no, maybe I'll get a job shooting a montage for them. The point is, I don't really know what happened. But, as I said, it's not an original idea, you know, people have shown me versions of the script which mention the plastic bag. The script may have been done years ago. So I think it might have just been a coincidence. But the weekend it opened, I got six phone calls from people around the country telling me, "they ripped you off." In the midst of this, I called Stan up and said, "What should I do about this Stan?"

Brakhage: I said, "Don't worry about it. It's not a bad movie." When you want to worry about it is when they rip you off and make a bad movie or sell some product that's disgusting. We've all had a lot of that. But if someone makes a decent movie that's the way it should go...

Dorsky: Have you heard Stan's "Superman" story before? He happens to know that the birth sequence in "Superman" is based completely on [his 1974 film] "Text of Light." He knows because they rented it three times when they were making the movie. It looks very similar. But he wasn't upset. He says to me, "You know, when I was a fat little kid running around Denver in my 'Superman cape,' if I ever thought that my films would affect a 'Superman' feature, I would have been really proud!"

Here's P. Adams Sitney on the same subject:
"...the difference is : if you look at the two films, Dorsky is wonderful, it really is beautiful. He spent all his life learning how to do it so when he films the bag it's gorgeous. The Hollywood film looks like there were machines, [...] blowing the bag. It looks bad.
You can imitate but you can't absorb, because these filmmakers spend every week of their lives looking through the camera, thinking about it. You can't absorb that, it's personal style."