mark hejnar

I remember myself as a seventeen year old tripping strong acid with my friend, Mark. I'd just gotten a tape comp from Hyde Recordings that had this really twisted experimental song on it with lyrics about a grandmother. The name of the project was Pile Of Cows. I put in this song and it completely freaked us out. A vision of a goat head, a real rotten grandmother, and a walk through the icey neighborhood featuring a screaming piss session in the neighbor's yard followed. After that, who knows what happened to the tape? A number of years passed and the same friend showed me a video called Affliction which was directed by one Mark Hejnar. It included many underground characters such as GG Allin, Annie Sprinkle, Glod, and Mike Diana. It was great. Lots of offensive stuff... Still more time went by before i finally made the connection between Pile Of Cows and Affliction. Of course, Mr. Hejnar was responsible for both of these. I should have paid more attention.

I shot my first project in the spring of ’81 using black & white open reel video tape as a backdrop for my high school band, The Special Effects. I hand spun vinyl at irregular speeds, recorded & mixed them on my dad’s ancient reel to reel & we yelled over them. So the visual and aural elements developed at the same time. Some of my earliest film experiments appear on Herd Mentality (1998) in a condensed state and while these pieces are a bit referencial of film school avant garde, the work still has an edge.

The soundtracks for these pieces, as well as the majority of your other material, were provided by your project, Pile Of Cows. What made you choose this peculiar moniker and was the musics original intent to serve solely as part of your films or was it something that stood on its own and just happened to blend well with the visuals?

We were all in a bar in Milwaukee and all our leather biker jackets were stacked on a bench. Hippie commented, “look, a pile of cows,” a plumb gal nearby thought he was referring to her and she hit him with a bottle. Thus began musical practical joke that just wouldn’t die. The band had many incarnations and phases over the years with anywhere from 2 to 15 members. The earliest pieces Dave Cow created were tape loops with guitar and percussion or voice. I was making films before the band and we did tons of live shows independently of the film work but I thought much of the audio was perfect soundtrack material. I made videos for some of our club shows and several of these bits became the foundation for Bible Of Skin (1990 & 1997). I’ve started with the film first and made or modified the soundtrack to fit the piece and I’ve started with the music & created a video around it as well.

Bill Cow called up the hospital & offered our services. The blue hair thought we were a country & western outfit because of the name. We went in with 2 reel to reels, some chains and a mic and did this low moaning drone. Some of the inmates ballroom danced and we got paid in cupcakes and coffee. There’s no footage of this because there’s strict legal restrictions concerning cameras and hospitals, they really kept an eye on us. For every event documented , there’s another 10 that weren’t, just remembered with loose teeth and lawyer fees. Camcorders as we know them didn’t exist, they were these crappy cameras hooked up to bulky heavy porta-decks. Long before the advent of reality-based fox network tv shows.

And how active is a cow? We do the rare recording as a two-piece for my soundtracks but there’s tons of muck left over in the gut-bucket that makes it to the surface. Jeff came out in 1999 but uses an unreleased soundtrack from 1983. We occasionally get together just to play in the basement but I doubt we’ll ever be a live unit again.

My partner TM Caldwell is among other things, a Detroit scavenger. He found all the old 16mm films we used in abandoned buildings, trash bins and basements. These poor conditions give the original film stocks a decaying snowflake or dead leaf-like texturing that would be impossible to create. Imagery includes 30’s circus footage, ww2 polish newsreels, V-2 rocket experiments, medical and astronaut footage, Edison’s elephant electrocution clips and some clowns with handicapped kids. This is set to a Larval soundtrack. Caldwell and I have a new piece we are putting together with a soundtrack by another Detroit unit named Paik.

The project is still in its infancy due to both of our schedule constraints but it is scheduled to premiere at the Chicago Underground Film Festival in august of 2001. We’ve started a rough sketch but full production won’t begin until late spring although it is on both of our minds. Don’t expect a dramatization with dolls or a specific killer named.

Production is never completely done till the piece comes out as I see it. The project documents the US tour from march of 2000 and features Cat Hope, Wendy Van Dusen, Diane Nelson, Karen Thomas and Zipperspy. It also includes performances by Eugenics Council, Pineal Ventana and Veek Sheck and comments from William Bennett. There will be a short version for festivals and for those not accustomed with this sort of material and a full length version for those who are. Documentary is about capturing material as it happens: if I didn’t tour last march there’d be no project. And usually I’m cutting one project while still shooting another so all the project schedules overlap. As a result, I don’t have a release date at this time but I’m quite pleased with the material I’ve shot. This is also my first entirely digital video project.

I’ve well over a hundred hours of video tape I shot with GG documenting a several year period, in between hospital beds and prison cells. It was very obvious it wasn’t going to last long so I captured as much as I could. It concentrates on events as they happened and includes interviews with his mother and the Jabbers. I plan on a release around his 10 year death anniversary in the summer of 2003. The Mike Diana project covers his obscenity trial for publishing Boiled Angel and has a lot of footage from other artists commenting upon his case and their own publishing problems.

Being aware that Full Force Frank, who appeared in your highly-praised documentary, Affliction, long ago went into isolation, i was just wondering if there has been any word at all concerning his present activity?

Are there any plans to do a follow-up to Affliction considering the excellent response that it received and the substantial number of extreme underground artists who were not featured in the first installment?

None at all. I don’t consider it an installment piece. Affliction documents a rather specific time and grouping of characters, most of whom I was already acquainted with because of my interests. I’d hate to see it become a bad HBO franchise like G-string divas or a show on the atrocity network.

I felt the 50 minute 1990 version was rather dated and a bit ambiguous and just way too long. I liked the ideas behind it but the actual execution didn’t excite me anymore. I’d spent a long time on the project, over a year shooting and editing and several years before that collecting materials and making the pieces to be used in the live performances that I hated to let it remain as the final document of that period. So I went back to my original film and video source tapes and started over again, then re-mixing and condensing all the sound. There’s a great deal of electronic manipulation in the piece, re-detailing and re-photographing off of monitors and I felt I could improve upon my original efforts. The 12 minute 1997 version is the final version.

I’ve done 2 projects with God Loves Over Dose in the early 90s and several with My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and there might be another one with Groovie Mann in the works in the future. I’d prefer not to mention any future collaborations until they are more concrete.

Your rapid-fire editing technique is (in my opinion) best demonstrated in the four minute piece, Jeff, based on the crimes and trial of Jeffrey Dahmer. What sort of work was involved in the filming of this and do you plan on directing other shorts with similar themes?

Jeff like many of my pieces began out of a personal obsession or interest. I followed the Dahmer case quite closely at the time, attending the trial, shooting in Milwaukee, collecting materials but not really having a conscious plan of what to do with it. This was back in ’91 and early ’92. The material sat on the shelf for a few years and then was cut and mixed several different ways before it found its true shape, which is often the way I work. Certain events were staged and modified and mixed with location materials so that everything flows evenly together. All of the media footage has been re-shot and re-focused. There’s a great deal of factual information presented in the piece, there’s 2 different audio tracks that run throughout, but it’s mixed in a way that makes it impossible to assimilate all of the details. Instead you are left with an impression or a mood. This 4 minute piece took several months to create and I’ve no plans to start a series.

Taken as a whole, it’s a ball of crap. The challenge is to decipher the information and pick out the tidbits that please you. TV Ministry’s message is very much against television. I use broadcast clips to disprove each of the groups’ articles of faith, as much of what they hate are the aspects I most enjoy. It also allowed me to dispose of hundreds of little clips I’d been collecting for years, as I’m a pack rat at heart. Jeff concentrates on very specific details of the Dahmer trial, again the ones I personally find of interest, out of the mountains of information available. I remove it from the original moralizing context of the media and re-shape and re-invent it as I see fit.

Minor trials and tribulations, some lack of inclusion but nothing major like obscenity charges or police at my door. I think I exist a bit under the radar. I’ve no desire or intention of forcing my work on anyone.

Motivations change over time, but it wasn’t because my parents gave me razor blades to chew on or because the next door neighbor diddled me as a kid. I make what I like to see. The work itself is foremost, the satisfaction comes in the actual process and from the time spent alone in the editing room. Putting it out there is secondary. For many years I was perfectly content to do the work and only have a handful of people see it. But I’ve discovered the great benefit of screening is the number of like-minded souls you encounter along the way and the varied people you wouldn’t ordinarily get to meet.

Herd Mentality as it weaves, compresses and compiles over 15 years of visual and sonic work. The 45 minute document was assembled from over 200 source tapes and films that I can box up and be done with, content with their final presentation. But my name will always be associated with Affliction (1996).

My day consist of 24 hours, just like yours. I earn a living from my craft but not from my released projects. I work a full time day job directing and editing educational testing lectures and have done so for years. In the old days, this provided me with access to expensive equipment but with changing technologies I now have better gear at home than at the antiquated shop. Before that I worked on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse so I’m not really sure if I’ve advanced. I’ve tried to keep my ‘art’ separate from my job so that I can make exactly what I want without compromise or concern about compensation. But it takes me much longer to get the work done due to these intense time commitments.

Slow Death Of A Large Animal can be viewed online at: http://neokino.com Affliction can be ordered in the US from: http://www.nextgen-video.com or from Hejnar directly and in Europe from Chainsaw Video at: http://www.chainsaw.demon.nl

A collection of Hejnar's shorts will be available soon & look for many of his works at local film festivals. He can be reached at: mailto:mhejnar@hotmail.com A website should be up and running by march at: htpp://www.hejnarvision.com


	pindrops and cathedral bells \| home pineal ventana \| chad rullman \| praying for oblivion \| lockweld \| mark hejnar \| warcom media \| gaya donadio \| den of iniquity \| kimberlee traub \| lux mammoth \| whitehouse \| necrophilia \| horace walpole & julius evola \| nicolo paganini & ancient roman creation beliefs \| reviews \| distro \| links mark hejnar I remember myself as a seventeen year old tripping strong acid with my friend, Mark. I'd just gotten a tape comp from Hyde Recordings that had this really twisted experimental song on it with lyrics about a grandmother. The name of the project was Pile Of Cows. I put in this song and it completely freaked us out. A vision of a goat head, a real rotten grandmother, and a walk through the icey neighborhood featuring a screaming piss session in the neighbor's yard followed. After that, who knows what happened to the tape? A number of years passed and the same friend showed me a video called Affliction which was directed by one Mark Hejnar. It included many underground characters such as GG Allin, Annie Sprinkle, Glod, and Mike Diana. It was great. Lots of offensive stuff... Still more time went by before i finally made the connection between Pile Of Cows and Affliction. Of course, Mr. Hejnar was responsible for both of these. I should have paid more attention. (Jeff) At what moment did you decide that film was a medium that you wanted to explore and, looking back, what are your views on your first works? I shot my first project in the spring of ’81 using black & white open reel video tape as a backdrop for my high school band, The Special Effects. I hand spun vinyl at irregular speeds, recorded & mixed them on my dad’s ancient reel to reel & we yelled over them. So the visual and aural elements developed at the same time. Some of my earliest film experiments appear on Herd Mentality (1998) in a condensed state and while these pieces are a bit referencial of film school avant garde, the work still has an edge. The soundtracks for these pieces, as well as the majority of your other material, were provided by your project, Pile Of Cows. What made you choose this peculiar moniker and was the musics original intent to serve solely as part of your films or was it something that stood on its own and just happened to blend well with the visuals? We were all in a bar in Milwaukee and all our leather biker jackets were stacked on a bench. Hippie commented, “look, a pile of cows,” a plumb gal nearby thought he was referring to her and she hit him with a bottle. Thus began musical practical joke that just wouldn’t die. The band had many incarnations and phases over the years with anywhere from 2 to 15 members. The earliest pieces Dave Cow created were tape loops with guitar and percussion or voice. I was making films before the band and we did tons of live shows independently of the film work but I thought much of the audio was perfect soundtrack material. I made videos for some of our club shows and several of these bits became the foundation for Bible Of Skin (1990 & 1997). I’ve started with the film first and made or modified the soundtrack to fit the piece and I’ve started with the music & created a video around it as well. How did Pile Of Cows come to play a mental hospital and why is none of this footage on Herd Mentality, a document of the project from 1981-1997? Bill Cow called up the hospital & offered our services. The blue hair thought we were a country & western outfit because of the name. We went in with 2 reel to reels, some chains and a mic and did this low moaning drone. Some of the inmates ballroom danced and we got paid in cupcakes and coffee. There’s no footage of this because there’s strict legal restrictions concerning cameras and hospitals, they really kept an eye on us. For every event documented , there’s another 10 that weren’t, just remembered with loose teeth and lawyer fees. Camcorders as we know them didn’t exist, they were these crappy cameras hooked up to bulky heavy porta-decks. Long before the advent of reality-based fox network tv shows. Are Pile Of Cows still considered to be active? And how active is a cow? We do the rare recording as a two-piece for my soundtracks but there’s tons of muck left over in the gut-bucket that makes it to the surface. Jeff came out in 1999 but uses an unreleased soundtrack from 1983. We occasionally get together just to play in the basement but I doubt we’ll ever be a live unit again. Could you give some details on your latest work, a series of circus cut-ups set to the music of Larval entitled Slow Death Of A Large Animal? My partner TM Caldwell is among other things, a Detroit scavenger. He found all the old 16mm films we used in abandoned buildings, trash bins and basements. These poor conditions give the original film stocks a decaying snowflake or dead leaf-like texturing that would be impossible to create. Imagery includes 30’s circus footage, ww2 polish newsreels, V-2 rocket experiments, medical and astronaut footage, Edison’s elephant electrocution clips and some clowns with handicapped kids. This is set to a Larval soundtrack. Caldwell and I have a new piece we are putting together with a soundtrack by another Detroit unit named Paik. What is the current status of the Jon Benet Ramsey short that you're working on with Peter Sotos? The project is still in its infancy due to both of our schedule constraints but it is scheduled to premiere at the Chicago Underground Film Festival in august of 2001. We’ve started a rough sketch but full production won’t begin until late spring although it is on both of our minds. Don’t expect a dramatization with dolls or a specific killer named. Having finished production on the EMFW documentary, when is the proposed release date and what artists will this feature? Aren't there going to be both long and short versions? Production is never completely done till the piece comes out as I see it. The project documents the US tour from march of 2000 and features Cat Hope, Wendy Van Dusen, Diane Nelson, Karen Thomas and Zipperspy. It also includes performances by Eugenics Council, Pineal Ventana and Veek Sheck and comments from William Bennett. There will be a short version for festivals and for those not accustomed with this sort of material and a full length version for those who are. Documentary is about capturing material as it happens: if I didn’t tour last march there’d be no project. And usually I’m cutting one project while still shooting another so all the project schedules overlap. As a result, I don’t have a release date at this time but I’m quite pleased with the material I’ve shot. This is also my first entirely digital video project. What can be expected from the upcoming documentaries on GG Allin and Mike Diana? I’ve well over a hundred hours of video tape I shot with GG documenting a several year period, in between hospital beds and prison cells. It was very obvious it wasn’t going to last long so I captured as much as I could. It concentrates on events as they happened and includes interviews with his mother and the Jabbers. I plan on a release around his 10 year death anniversary in the summer of 2003. The Mike Diana project covers his obscenity trial for publishing Boiled Angel and has a lot of footage from other artists commenting upon his case and their own publishing problems. Being aware that Full Force Frank, who appeared in your highly-praised documentary, Affliction, long ago went into isolation, i was just wondering if there has been any word at all concerning his present activity? In Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture II, there’s a chapter about a guy who sounds like an older more articulate Frank named Joe who posts on alt.true.crime. Are there any plans to do a follow-up to Affliction considering the excellent response that it received and the substantial number of extreme underground artists who were not featured in the first installment? None at all. I don’t consider it an installment piece. Affliction documents a rather specific time and grouping of characters, most of whom I was already acquainted with because of my interests. I’d hate to see it become a bad HBO franchise like G-string divas or a show on the atrocity network. What made you decide to shorten the length of Bible Of Skin from one hour to twelve minutes? I felt the 50 minute 1990 version was rather dated and a bit ambiguous and just way too long. I liked the ideas behind it but the actual execution didn’t excite me anymore. I’d spent a long time on the project, over a year shooting and editing and several years before that collecting materials and making the pieces to be used in the live performances that I hated to let it remain as the final document of that period. So I went back to my original film and video source tapes and started over again, then re-mixing and condensing all the sound. There’s a great deal of electronic manipulation in the piece, re-detailing and re-photographing off of monitors and I felt I could improve upon my original efforts. The 12 minute 1997 version is the final version. What sort of music video work have you done and do you plan on doing more in the near future? Are there any artists in particular that you'd like to collaborate with? I’ve done 2 projects with God Loves Over Dose in the early 90s and several with My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and there might be another one with Groovie Mann in the works in the future. I’d prefer not to mention any future collaborations until they are more concrete. Your rapid-fire editing technique is (in my opinion) best demonstrated in the four minute piece, Jeff, based on the crimes and trial of Jeffrey Dahmer. What sort of work was involved in the filming of this and do you plan on directing other shorts with similar themes? Jeff like many of my pieces began out of a personal obsession or interest. I followed the Dahmer case quite closely at the time, attending the trial, shooting in Milwaukee, collecting materials but not really having a conscious plan of what to do with it. This was back in ’91 and early ’92. The material sat on the shelf for a few years and then was cut and mixed several different ways before it found its true shape, which is often the way I work. Certain events were staged and modified and mixed with location materials so that everything flows evenly together. All of the media footage has been re-shot and re-focused. There’s a great deal of factual information presented in the piece, there’s 2 different audio tracks that run throughout, but it’s mixed in a way that makes it impossible to assimilate all of the details. Instead you are left with an impression or a mood. This 4 minute piece took several months to create and I’ve no plans to start a series. Seeing that it has been a major influence on your work, will you please give your thoughts on mass media? Taken as a whole, it’s a ball of crap. The challenge is to decipher the information and pick out the tidbits that please you. TV Ministry’s message is very much against television. I use broadcast clips to disprove each of the groups’ articles of faith, as much of what they hate are the aspects I most enjoy. It also allowed me to dispose of hundreds of little clips I’d been collecting for years, as I’m a pack rat at heart. Jeff concentrates on very specific details of the Dahmer trial, again the ones I personally find of interest, out of the mountains of information available. I remove it from the original moralizing context of the media and re-shape and re-invent it as I see fit. Have you had many problems with censorship? Minor trials and tribulations, some lack of inclusion but nothing major like obscenity charges or police at my door. I think I exist a bit under the radar. I’ve no desire or intention of forcing my work on anyone. If you had to name one source of motivation, what would it be? Motivations change over time, but it wasn’t because my parents gave me razor blades to chew on or because the next door neighbor diddled me as a kid. I make what I like to see. The work itself is foremost, the satisfaction comes in the actual process and from the time spent alone in the editing room. Putting it out there is secondary. For many years I was perfectly content to do the work and only have a handful of people see it. But I’ve discovered the great benefit of screening is the number of like-minded souls you encounter along the way and the varied people you wouldn’t ordinarily get to meet. Personally, what do you believe to be your best work thus far? Herd Mentality as it weaves, compresses and compiles over 15 years of visual and sonic work. The 45 minute document was assembled from over 200 source tapes and films that I can box up and be done with, content with their final presentation. But my name will always be associated with Affliction (1996). What do your days consist of? Do you make enough off of filmmaking alone to survive? My day consist of 24 hours, just like yours. I earn a living from my craft but not from my released projects. I work a full time day job directing and editing educational testing lectures and have done so for years. In the old days, this provided me with access to expensive equipment but with changing technologies I now have better gear at home than at the antiquated shop. Before that I worked on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse so I’m not really sure if I’ve advanced. I’ve tried to keep my ‘art’ separate from my job so that I can make exactly what I want without compromise or concern about compensation. But it takes me much longer to get the work done due to these intense time commitments. To end this, what do you see the state of the nation becoming now that a new president has been "elected"? I don’t think it really matters. You can support the Vikings or the raiders but they are both football teams and essentially the same. But it doesn’t appear promising. (Slow Death Of A Large Animal) Slow Death Of A Large Animal can be viewed online at: http://neokino.com Affliction can be ordered in the US from: http://www.nextgen-video.com or from Hejnar directly and in Europe from Chainsaw Video at: http://www.chainsaw.demon.nl A collection of Hejnar's shorts will be available soon & look for many of his works at local film festivals. He can be reached at: mailto:mhejnar@hotmail.com A website should be up and running by march at: htpp://www.hejnarvision.com (Affliction)