Born in New York in 1965, Pip Chodorov is both a director and a film music composer. After studying cognitive science in the United States, he studied semiology in Paris. A member of Light Cone, the distributor in charge of videos that led to the creation of Re:voir in 1998, he specializes in experimental, historical and contemporary films. In 2003, he received the Anthology Film Archives award in New York for his work as a publisher.

How did you come to create Re:Voir?
The first reason is that I was working at Light Cone, a cooperative of filmmakers distributing their own movies for galleries and museums, and many film programmers wanted to see the movies before renting them. Of course, showing the films meant the copies eventually got scratched. So we began asking filmmakers whether they had a videotape lying around on a shelf somewhere just in case someone wanted to see the film before renting it. But Maya Deren saw things differently, and thought they should be distributed. I thought it was a very good idea, and that if we didn’t do it, someone else would, perhaps not as well, and just for the money. It was important for a filmmaker to handle it for other filmmakers, and not a big company. I wanted to do it well and make quality editions.

What is Light Cone?
Light Cone was founded in 1982 by two filmmakers, Yann Beauvais and Miles McKane. It’s a cooperative in which all the filmmakers are members, including me, and participate in the distribution of 16mm and Super 8 copies. We have general meetings regularly. There are three cooperatives in Paris, plus others in different towns: San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Toronto, London…

What problems does publishing experimental films pose as compared to mainstream movies?
Quality, audience, logistics… Filmmakers are very iconoclastic in their concept of cinema and they have particular demands. Filmmakers like Peter Kulbelka reject video; others, like Michael Snow, only reject it for certain films. When Kubelka makes a film, it’s a certain kind of work, it has to be seen in specific conditions: to understand it, you have to see it in a big, dark room with a big white screen and the projector behind your shoulder. In a little box, these works lose their meaning; you’re better off describing them in a book and reproducing photograms, rather than publishing a video, which gives a false idea.

Do you always prefer VHS over DVD?
MPEG 2 isn’t satisfying. The algorithms aren’t designed for unnatural and unpredictable images. When a car drives by or someone talks, there’s no problem. But when the image is painted or etched by hand, when it’s a film where each image is different from the others, details get lost.

Can Blu-Ray fix these problems?
Blu-Ray is much better because the data rate increases from 9 MB per second to 45 MB, and disc space increases from 5 GB to 45 GB.

At Re:Voir, how do you choose between VHS and DVD?
I don’t publish any experimental films on DVD, only less radical ones we’re offered that aren’t too jerky – for Philippe Garrel, for example, and for portraits of filmmakers. For the last three years, I’ve really enjoyed publishing them, but I don’t have a choice, because people don’t buy VHS anymore. So everything’s on hold for Blu-Ray. As a matter of fact, I asked for a subsidy for Blu-Ray in 2005, I was the only one, and the first one, in France, but they refused it because there was no market.

Speaking of which, why are the Fluxus films published on DVD?
We’ve only made a special edition for the FIAC, limited to a hundred numbered copies for €100 each. We could have made a lot of money with it, but didn’t want to put thousands of copies in circulation. We just wanted to make €10,000 with this project in order to implement Blu-Ray. For the time being, we’ve sold forty and are a bit behind on production. There are very few of us and we’ve got very little cash flow; it’s always difficult to put money up for each project. We’re struggling with five titles we should have released two years ago.

What are your upcoming releases?
Traité de bave et d’éternité by Isidore Isou, a film by Jean-Jacques Lebel, a documentary by Patrick Bokanowski, Hallelujah Hills by Adolfas Mekas…