HOW TO SHOOT A CRIME (1982/1987) A CRIME A FILM A CITY ANXIETY, LONGING AND FEAR Chris Kraus The through-line

of my film How to shoot a crime is composed from a series of videotaped conversations that Sylvre Lotringer had with two dominatrixes over the course of several months in 1982. The women, Terence Sellars and Mademoiselle Victoire, visited Lotringer's loft separately and together seven or eight times to be "interviewed," on camera, about sadomasochism. Lotringer was teaching a class on sexuality and death at Columbia University at the time. There was a certain glamour to this: uptown meets down. The videotape was shot by East Village filmmaker Marion Scemema, who was one of Lotringer's girlfriends, and the loft was well stocked with stimulants and wine. Perhaps because Lotringer didn't know what he was looking for, the "interviews" devolved or evolved into long conversations about the two women's lives. Terence Sellars, a pro-domme with a dungeon in Chelsea, was a sometimewriter and fixture on the lower Manhattan club scene, who'd been trying off and on to get out of "the life." But Mlle. Victoire was purely an amateur, and she pursued S/m with mystical zeal. (Years later, she would become a lay Carmelite nun). Both women find the interview process highly ennobling. Lotringer seems to share their belief that S/m has some greater meaning outside itself. If they can tell him how it really is, he can help them give their lives a greater resonance and form. Lotringer proves to be an excellent listener. Through him, we hear the two women talking to themselves at a moment lower Manhattan, 1982 when lives were lived desultorily and examined passionately and everyone thought there was plenty of time. Throughout these long conversations, Marion stood behind the camera,

panning with subliminal ease, between boot-tips and faces and jittery fingers, and everyone agreed she was cool. "How old are you, Marion?" asks Victoire, who's real name is Vickie, and Marion replies, " 32," in a heavy French accent, and everyone agrees that 32's cool. Sylvere's soft questions and nonjudgmental manner lead them both to say the most amazing things. "It's so difficult," Victoire says one late afternoon, "to get to anything organic," while describing her urge to kill someone in the most conscious and ritualised fashion. Lotringer's own stake in these conversations is never very clear. He has no personal experience of S/m, and no apparent urge to acquire any. The fact that he is a child survivor of the Holocaust barely registers within himself, and is unknown to the women. He is merely the interviewer. And since it is lower Manhattan, 1982, there is no imperative that anything be finished, that analysis ever reach a terminal point. Yet his separate conversations with the two women both move towards the same climax: each confronts his opacity. "Why do you have to be right all the time?" Sylvere whispers, teasing, to Terence Sellars, and she bounces back: "Don't you? Twenty years from now there is only going to be this videotape of me when I was 30 years old, talking." Victoire confronts Sylvere more directly: "We are not going back and forth. We are not bouncing these experiences up against ones that you share. This is not a conversation. This is only half a conversation. We need your dick out here." I made the film in 1987 from an urge to make sense of that earlier time. More specifically, since I'd started living with Sylvre Lotringer, I wanted to understand his opacity, and with typical grandiosity, thought that this personal issue might somehow be reflected through the culture at large. Pop sadomasochism had become a hip rebuttal of feminism: the season's hottest coffee table book (at least in New York) featured "broken birds";

tiny young Japanese women with fractured limbs set in casts, and female bondage was MTV's favourite trope. Sylvre's loft no longer existed as such; the Fulton Street buildings had become part of the South Street Seaport development. And it occurred to me that these long conversations, which once seemed so innocent, could be juxtaposed with a second body of video interviews conducted by Lotringer the following year. These tapes were made with a NY Police Department videographer, whose job it was to document crime scenes for use as court evidence in homicide trials. Police videographer George Diaz talked avidly about the tricks of his trade and proffered two hours of crime scene documents out of the vault. It was through his police work that Diaz, who'd once been a video artist, discovered narrative. Because edits can be prejudicial, the NYPD format required that crime scenes be shot in a continuous pan. But homicide juries, like everyone else, like to be entertained, and Diaz worked out a strategy of "whetting their appetites" by moving really slow around the ambient stuff and then flashing very fast across the murder weapon, leaving his captive audience eager to see more. This "more," of course, was the bodies corpses sprawled across a bed or a floor in very sharp focus then soften a bit, bring the audience down, denouement, as the camera trails off. George Diaz's videos were to the present what Weegee's gritty black and white photos were to the early 20th century. Diaz's footage spoke as powerfully to the floating architecture of the city and its disembodied urban space as it did to criminality or the victim's wasted life. The dead bodies occupy the video-screen foreground. Yet the background is equally chilling. Close-up of a skinny week-old corpse in blue jeans and a t-shirt. The boy's face is infested with maggots. We're in an abandoned railway yard in the West 30s. Scrub foliage dilates in midsummer heat. The site is entirely

interstitial. It will soon be demolished, and then become something else. The camera pans up to the city: cars buzzing along the West Side highway, and beyond this antiquated freeway, a line of new high-rise buildings, banks and developers, another ten thousand lives. And what is sadomasochism, really, if not an enactment of urban displacement? Beyond the junk-bond boobs in black leather corselets of early MTV, it's a desire to be someplace, to be locked in an intractable complicit transaction that takes place firmly in time. Thirty year old Terence Sellars, stoned and wanting to be a philosopher, holds out her arm and drawls slowly, "Sadomasochism is like, 50 percent. But murder," and here her voice gets soft and high, "is more like, 100." Cut to: sounds of city, renovation of the South Street Seaport, the world outside the loft: a limitless anonymity in which anything is possible and equally banal. Lotringer saw George Diaz's crime tapes as a form of urban grieving. Unlike the rest of us, he reasoned, murder victims do not go entirely unmourned; they become the subject of an investigation, however cursory. They are logged into the NYPD caseload, documented, and sometimes even "solved." And what is the crime here? Among the dozens of crime scene documents in the video, there is the image of a girl's dead body sprawled face down on a sidewalk on White Street outside the long-defunct Mudd Club on a sunny afternoon. Wearing a black and white 1950s dirndl summer dress and spike black heels, she could be you. Soundtrack of a no-wave song circa the period, Finding someone to take care of you. The girl vocalist speaksings the words "Your mind needs a mind, to think/Your heart needs a heart, to feel." Inside the loft on those long days in 1982, the two women on screen are intent on self-probing, not listening or looking around them. They are highly

atomised single units, barely conscious that they are operating within an environment. And as such, they are emanating everything important about that environment. They are emanating anxiety, longing and fear. Chris Kraus is a novelist, art writer and filmaker who lives in New York and Los Angeles.