Sweetblood article in Lightstruck 1994

SWEETBLOOD begins with my name, the name of the father.  "Sanguedolce" in English means "sweet blood," so it seemed an appropriate way to title a diary film.  In the film I look at a photo of myself and say,  "The picture is me, the lines on my face are my father's."  It began with my collection of still photos, it's part of growing up Italian, you don't throw anything out, so I had all these photos.  I started pasting them up onto boards--one filled with old family portraits, another showed friends and lovers, another showed pictures of adolescence - Bob Dylan at the Gardens and vials of hash oil and Pabsy painting the Scrooge's face while he's asleep.  They were snapshots, a life's journey in pictures, an archive I wanted to reconvene.  I filmed them off the boards with a close-up lens, squeezing out frames like an action painter, adding motion to these still shots.  Reassembling the family in-camera.  The pictures replayed an archive of photographs and I decided to take the same approach with the sound, so I began compiling sounds collected over the past twenty years - interviews and late night jams, telephone calls and drunken talks, and cut them together as a fragmented mosaic.  So now I had photos and voices.  But something was still missing.  At the time I was sleeping with a walkman next to my bed in order to record my dreams, keeping a dream diary.  I wrote them all out and then pulled out moments or images that related to the pictures and wrote a kind of dream poem that appears in the film a line at a time.  Overtop the pictures.  So you watch the photos through these dreams, the dreams of the past and present joined in the film.