by Jodie Keeling

Willie Varela had no job, no girlfriend and no direction. Until, one day,with the money he'd earned from taking a job with the 1971 government census (the first one to recognize Hispanics as an ethnic group), he purchased his first Vivitar Super 8 camera. He would put all his pain and uncertainty onto film. Willie Varela had finally found a reason for living.

Self-taught, the lone West Texas Chicano filmmaker is a prolific imagemaker. He's made over 100 Super 8 films and videos, and has a large collection of work in still photography as well. He creates because he has to. He's a personal filmmaker, with a need to "capture some beauty in the world, to grasp those sights and sounds that are there for only a few seconds...to do something more than just go to a fucking job and take up space and get a paycheck, then come home and watch television." Admittedly, he is also stuck in that world which "requires one to make a living and to allow one's soul to be deadened."

For Varela, the humble act of expressing a personal vision stands as "an individual testament to 'ultimate expression.' " He elaborates; "In a time when so many want to be famous and rich and powerful and influential, to make short videos about how one perceives the world can appear to be, at least on the surface, a pointless, futile understanding. But that is precisely where its importance lies: to not conform to the mainstream, to demonstrate faith in the beauty of the world and follow through and actually finish and share these works is, I think, a brave heroic act."

In terms of the moving image, Varela is currently working exclusively in video. He enjoys the challenge presented by working with a medium that is "inherently cold, to try and turn it into something human." He also enjoys the expanded possibilities that video has to offer in terms of sound. Using ambient sounds in his recent work, he is influenced by John Cage's ideas of chance and his notion that there is "music everywhere in the world." Varela wants his films to have "a sense of being 'of the world' and the sounds that are in the world." So, rather than impose a song or sound effects in order to evoke certain feelings, he prefers to use a soundtrack that might seem "mundane or ordinary to let a viewers emotions arise more organically".

Visually, Varela brings his knowledge of composition, light, color, movement, and rhythm from 30 years of filmmaking to his latest video work. While the unique affordability of the video format allows him to incorporate into his style the extended take, "the Bazinian way of looking at the world, of just letting things evolve over real time." In this way, through video, he may be coming back full circle closer to his roots in Super 8 filmmaking when film stock was so cheap. Back then, his approach to filmmaking was to "let the 'world' guide him to a finished statement." He would shoot, shoot and shoot. "Then, on the editing table, begin to shape the reels and reels of material that had been gathered."

For Varela, his intuitive styled process of creating reigns over product. He knows a piece is finished when his gut has the "sense that the aura of the piece is in place, that by adding or taking away some images or sounds would upset the balance." And while he wants people to like his work, he is not seeking approval. Instead he is most interested in moving people, in making a connection with his audience, and "That," he says "is really hard."

Willie Varela is the featured guest artist of the Cinemaker Co-op's upcoming Screening Salon Series scheduled for June 1st and 2nd. He'll present a screening of Super 8 films and recent video work, then teach a workshop on the subject of developing a personal aesthetic. He's currently working on an exhibition titled Crossing Over: New Video Installations and Photographs.

The show consists of 3 video installations and a series of 22 large scale photographs he's taken over the last 30 years. It is scheduled to open in late October at UTEP and will travel to, among other places, the Blue Star in San Antonio. For more information about the artist, go to his website at www.geocities.com/film8. Read the complete interview from which this article is based at www.cinemaker.org.