Well, I will keep on with the original intention to see work with other people. I’m thinking of showing films by Jean Painlevé who was a member of the surrealist group though he wasn’t really an artist. What was interesting to me was that he made films for the Scientific Film Unit in Paris. What is very interesting and strange about him is all his films are accepted as art, but he was making these films as a scientist. It’s still unacceptable in art schools today to be making something which isn’t art, or not destined for the gallery system to have the perception of an artist in its creation and I’m just really amazed by that.

Originally we’d show a film and some people would make notes and discuss it. For instance I showed this early portmanteau film Dead of Night (UK, 1945) and I presented it in relation to logical boundary theory which is to do with how things interrelate to each other. This film was really to do with the philosophical position of Great Britain in relation to Europe in terms of philosophical tradition. It was to do with Oxbridge philosophy, logical positivism and empirical philosophy relating to emerging post-structuralist continental philosophy. The film is to do with this weird set theory of film structure where you had four different directors who were sub-sects within the universe, of the man who has a recurring dream and you weren’t quite sure when he was awake or asleep. It’s to do with him having an argument with a psychologist, who is European and in the end he kills the psychologist. So I was looking at it in that kind of context.

Yeah, they were all intelligent people, so they weren’t afraid or bored by the idea; they were quite excited by it. Maybe that is the thing with the Wayward Canon, it does require quite a lot from the audience. It’s the same with my own films as well as I always hope that the audience will be stimulated by something and think with it. They are the sort of films that need people to think quite hard. You don’t need to know loads but you need to not just be passively receiving things.

With Sunset Beach, you could just love it for the gorgeous bodies on the screen but you could also see that it is an amazing dead-end of Hollywood and Greek mythology. At the end of Sunset Boulevard is Sunset Beach. The film Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, USA, 1950) is at the end of black and white film and the beginning of colour and so it relates to all these things. David Lynch also nicked some of the actors from Sunset Beach for Mulholland Drive (USA, 2001) and so all these things interrelate.

The underlying idea is just trying to encourage people to see things in a different way. So that maybe, as is the case with the more recent project La Société des Amis de Judex, that an old film isn’t just a dusty old film, but has something frightening about it or has something odd going on it. It is quite hard because it is a dusty old film so it’s quite a difficult jump to make, but it sort of gets half way there. It doesn’t work if you just add Queen to the Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927) soundtrack, all you get is a load of Queen fans but they’re not necessarily getting more out of the film. I didn’t get any more out of Metropolis by watching it with that soundtrack.

I’m interested in doing these durational projects because it actually does take a lot of time for it to sink in. I was quite amazed with Sunset Beach that for some of the people it took them a lot of drugs, a lot of drink and until four in the morning before people, and these are some very bright people, came up to me and said, ‘oh Mark, I finally understand what you’re getting at!’ It’s interesting it took so much time to get to that point.

Yeah, to get over the initial idea that people think its going to be this gay German film that’s full of sex and fetish, which is probably most English people’s view of Fassbinder. But it actually has a lot to do with freedom in society and despair. It was very apt to be showing it in this cold warehouse space in December with people who were just eking out their existence in London. It was warm by the end of the night but it was cold outside.

That probably helps you feel closer to Franz Biberkopf, especially after he gets run over.