Excerpted from an interview with French art critic Pierre Cabanne, circa 1967

“The movies especially amused me because of their optical side. Instead of making a machine which would turn, as I had done in New York, I said to myself, ‘Why not turn the film?’ That would be a lot simpler. I wasn’t interested in making movies as such; it was simply a more practical way of achieving my optical results. When people say that I’ve made movies, I answer that, no, I haven’t, that it was a convenient method–I’m particularly sure of that now–of arriving at what I wanted. Furthermore, the movies were fun. The work went millimeter by millimeter, because there weren’t any highly perfected machines There was a little circle, with millimeters marked off; we filmed image by image. It took two weeks. The equipment wasn’t able to take the scene at any specific speed—it was a mess—and since it was filming rather quickly, it created a curious optical effect. So we were therefore obliged to abandon mechanical means, and make everything ourselves. A return to the hand, so to speak.”

— Marcel Ducham