I'm guessing this was the first Robbe-Grillet retrospective in NYC. Even though Last Year at Marienbad had been a fairly big art-house hit in the States—Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay—his subsequent films as writer-director had not made as big a splash. They remain somewhat obscure.

I got heavily into the guy in college after reading a book or two in lit class and then seeing Marienbad. Any description of the film makes it seem unwatchable: shots and sequences are repeated with minor variations throughout, dialog is sparse, and there is no plot. Many shots feature background actors frozen in position, or slow tracking shots through hotel corridors with monotonous voice-overs and Messiaen-like solo organ. Nonetheless, for a certain type of audience the proceedings are fascinating. I include myself in that audience, at least when I'm in the right mood. I was certainly in that mood in college, exposed for the first time to Kafka and Borges, the Theater of the Absurd, modern architecture, and twentieth-century academic music, heady stuff for a rube from Columbus.

Robbe-Grillet was one of the leading lights of the Nouveau Roman, the French new novel of the 1960s. Books I was first exposed to included La Jalousie (Jealousy), Projet pour une révolution à New York (Project For a Revolution in New York), and especially Pour un Nouveau Roman (For a New Novel), a 1963 book of essays that explained the theoretical underpinning of his work.

Unfortunately this book had a profound effect on what I was writing in those days. I published a shamefully derivative short story called Room With a Couch, a miniature of Jealousy, in a Cincinnati literary magazine called Syzegy. A short screenplay called Lakewood, a miniature of Marienbad, was turned into a large-scale student production when anyone who joined the crew got academic credit. I'd also secured access to the Broadcasting Department's television studio for the entire summer, along with a broad selection of 16mm equipment. One part of that equipment pool, a Sony sync-sound deck recommended by a film teacher, doomed the entire project as we unknowingly recorded every piece of dialog out of sync. I could fix it today on the computer, but in 1975 it was impossible.

Here's the gear I was using, set up on a table in my bedroom for several months. In the top two photos is a 4-gang synchronizer, which theoretically allowed me to align a strip of mag film containing the audio with the images. Below that is the Moviescop, which let me see the results. Finally there is a 16mm splicer where I made the cuts and glued together the two newly-shortened strips of film. If the equipment looks antique to you, it is; everything I used (except for the tape head to read sound) could have been found on an editor's table in the 1920s.

Even if we had succeded in finishing Lakewood, my Robbe-Grillet infatuation had guaranted in advance that no audience would ever understand what the fuck I was doing. I had little understanding myself except that I wanted to write like him, and if my audience didn't get it, their fault not mine. This attitude has never been much of a template for success. Of course I was unconcerned with success; I was going to be an artist. For more photos from the Lakewood epic (or How My Film Career Was Nipped in the Bud) see this 1975 entry here.

Despite the insisting asterisks in the program above, Robbe-Grillet was there taking questions at every screening I attended. He was teaching a literature class at NYU only a few blocks from the Anthology Film Archives. I imagine that he was excited to see his films with an actual New York City audience.

The band was in the middle of the set when we stepped outside for a couple of snaps. Anna (the owner of both Downtown Beirut bars) can be seen in the foreground. She gave us the space and a keg as a wedding gift. Bill Pritz the baker brought a huge carrot cake from his shop up in Harlem, also a gift. When I first saw Carolyn in the Betsy Johnson dress it took my breath away.

Friends Roy Edroso and John Terhorst (along with Gene from Bad Tuna on the kit) generously gave us a rocking, total-skronk set for the reception. Loud and pure noise at its best! What a gift: I'd like to know who else in the world can say the Reverb Motherfuckers played at their reception.

It was an extremely casual affair. I recruited my best man Bob, the guy who took this photo, out in the parking lot before we got started. Originally slated outdoors for the Park of the Roses, an hours-long deluge forced a shift to the reception venue, the women's club next door. Power was knocked out for half of Columbus; we got dressed for the ceremony in the dark.

Technically this was still part of the honeymoon, an overnight ferry between the Shetland Islands and Iceland. I sectioned it off from the rest of the trip because the place was so extraordinary. The only way these photos could do justice to what we saw would be to print them billboard size.

The Iceland ferry route starts in a channel between rows of massive monochromatic peaks; I ran out of color film soon after the passage began. It's almost hard to say which prints are in color and which are in black-and-white. Most were Tri-X, my favorite film stock then and now. I’ve confused things even further by tinting the last image and then giving it a title: to me it looked a century-old print found in a junk shop.

Like a switch being thrown, the second we cleared the channel we both became seasick. Gone were dinner plans; we spent the rest of the evening horizontal in our cabin. Carolyn crawled out for Dramamine at one point, miming vomiting for the woman at a service desk who kept a supply. During the night the sea swells became intense; wallet, brushes, books, and change on a night table went flying. Note that the night table had raised edges to prevent this from happening. Our cabin was four decks above the waterline and we saw rising waves higher than our porthole.

I'd been dreaming of ocean adventure for years, dreams like George Bailey’s fantasies in It’s A Wonderful Life. Now all I could think about was how cold the water would be, how dark, how deep.

Kansas cannot be depicted in Academy ratio; it is a place made for widescreen, like Zinneman’s Todd-AO version of Oklahoma. In this photo I was cropping to 70mm aspect ratio. If the desert looked that good in Lawrence of Arabia, why couldn't Kansas?