An Interview with Steve Fagin

The following is an edited transcript of an interview, conducted in the spring of 1987, concerning Steve Fagin's two feature-length videotapes. Virtual Play: The Double Direct Monkey Wrench in Black's Machinery (1984) is a video essay on representation, narrative, and love humorously woven through the life of Lou Andreas Salome, the turn-of-the-century romantic intellectual who captivated, among others, Freud, Nietzsche, and Rilke. The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel (1986) is organized around the lives and writings of two solipsistic, indulgent, maternally obsessed personalities who, as it has been said of Balzac, saw nothing and remembered everything. The mood of the tape fluctuates between vaudeville and opera, and the narrative unfolds in the form of letters, diary entries, and postcards -all fictitious. Both tapes are distributed by The Kitchen and Video Data Bank

Cinema and Media Studies · Digital Games and Media · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Psychology