Rob Tregenza isn't considered a "typical" filmmaker. He isn't pining for a deal with Miramax, nor is he consumed with hitting it big in any commercial sense.

Tregenza -- and a handful of like-minded directors -- seeks to use film as an art form. In his hands, celluloid is a canvas on which he can explore abstraction, experiment with storytelling and play with the conventional "grammar" of the medium, all the while challenging viewers to create their own interpretations of the work.

Tregenza has been making experimental films out of his Sykesville studio for 20 years. The Kansas native earned his Ph.D. in theater arts from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1982. His three feature-length films are: "Talking to Strangers" (1988), "The Arc" (1991) and "Inside/Out," which made its world premiere this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

By far the best-received of his movies, "Inside/Out" features an ensemble cast portraying mental patients, hospital volunteers and an Episcopal priest, all of whom are exploring what it means to be inside or outside of society's institutions. "Inside/Out" opened for a weeklong run at the Charles on Friday.

I recently spent an afternoon with Tregenza and his wife and producer, J.K. Eareckson, on the terrace of their 18th-century farmhouse, hard by Patapsco State Park. (The couple's home also serves as the headquarters for Baltimore Film Factory, where they produce feature films, advertisements and industrial films for corporations, and Cinema Parallel, a distribution company for foreign and American art films.)

To the occasional accompaniment of the couple's three German shepherds and three horses, we discussed the state and future of art films and the irony of being "hot" when heat couldn't matter less.

When I was reading the production information about "Inside/Out," there were things in the synopsis of the plot that surprised me. In fact, much of the plot was obscure for me.

A lot of the things you expect to see in a film about people in a mental hospital are not in the movie. All the scenes you'd expect from "A Cuckoo's Nest" or one of those kind of films are just not there. Part of the narrative's displaced, it's outside of that. So you have to make the connections. You're never in a position where you can say, "I understand what this part of the story's exactly about." It's like when you wake up from a dream, you have a sense of narrative, but you don't really have a way of explaining exactly everything that happened. It's sort of playing with a different kind of narrative, where the viewer ends up having to do a lot more work.

How would you prepare audiences to see your films?

I think the first thing is not to think you can understand everything. One of the things that narrative has done is, it's made everything appear, at least initially, to be understandable. So you go into a theater assuming that I can understand a movie, that I can understand everything that's here, that everything is explained. And it's not. There's a lot of things going on that you don't know what the heck's going on. But if I can follow the sense of causal progression, then I feel safe. I feel like it's under control, I'm under control. So I like to suggest that people go into a theater and realize that it can be a lot of fun because you can go in without a safety net.

Basically you're creating meaning, without it having to be the meaning I intended specifically or the meaning the writer intended. So I think playfulness is important.

It's no different than if I go to a museum and see a painting. If I understand everything in that painting the first time I see it, then I'm going to walk past it like I would walk past a billboard on Charles Street. It's to be consumed immediately in one viewing. So why go back? But a painting's not supposed to do that. A painting's supposed to resonate with enough different possible interpretations and meanings that I can stand in front of it for an hour and be filled partially and come back the next day, or come back in six months, and stand there for longer. There's a sense of companionship, a sense of dwelling with the thing, but not a sense that you can completely possess it. If you feel that you can completely possess a work of art then it's obviously ceased to have any power or any reason for you. The dialogue's over.

As an unapologetic maker of art films, do you feel embattled?

Yeah. I don't think that we're the avant-garde. I think we're the rear guard, frankly. And I think that the people who are still attempting to maintain that dialogue, we have two problems. The first is that we're carrying the weight of the tradition. And as with any tradition over time, as it extends itself, there's more collective memory associated with it, which can be a weight. [Art filmmakers] have to carry the weight of the hundred years of cinema, plus the 2,000 years of culture, plus all the art-related influences that are in there. Cinema, to me, is not a pure art. It's a mongrel that has so many elements in it. So the longer we've gotten down the line, the more collective weight you have to carry as a filmmaker. You have to deal with that discourse, you have to deal with that tradition.

The other problem is that there are fewer and fewer people who seem to be interested in continuing the dialogue in terms of an audience. So you're carrying more and more weight, and also you realize that there's a diminishing audience. So it's a bit of a paradox. You say, "Well I don't want to be engaged in an elitist endeavor that just basically produces something that's for 10 art critics or 20 movie critics; I want to create something that's in that tradition of cinema." And it is difficult. I think that maybe art cinema will end up like opera, where it will have had its glory days, it will have had a period when there were major composers, and over time an ever-fluctuating but diminishing audience relative to popular music or classical music.

What about exhibition? It seems like there are plenty of films being made, but fewer places to show them. And the economic pressures on theaters militate against the sort of slow and

deliberate audience-building art films need. Do you think the expansion currently under way at the Charles bodes well for your kind of work?

Exhibition is the biggest problem now. I think [Charles owner] John Standiford will be in a position to play films that he wouldn't play otherwise, and then in a sense opening up the doors to a free market. If, for example, he wanted to run one of my films in a small theater and let it develop an audience, then probably or hopefully it could develop an audience. If he wanted to take one theater and say, "OK, I'm going to run nothing but John Waters movies for the next six months," he could do that, as long as his operating expenses are being covered for the other theaters. It does enable him to see if he can build back an audience for certain kind of films. He can literally say, "I'm just going to run Antonioni in this theater for the next six months." And he's courageous enough to attempt that.

You've experienced a tremendous reception with "Inside/Out" on the festival circuit this year, starting at Sundance and continuing DTC through the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Cannes and the Toronto film festival. Production companies are clamoring for your next script. Is that what you're going for?

I am going for what I've got, what I am. The older I get, the more I realize that there is a specific market for this. And it's not good to sort of fool yourself that these films are going to be Miramax-type crossover pictures. And if you're saying, "I'm doing art," and thinking, "But I really want to do 'The Postman,' " then probably you're fooling yourself. You have to get to a point where you say there are a certain number of human beings on this planet that really enjoy this kind of music or really enjoy this kind of painting, or really enjoy this kind of cinema. And that market needs to be expanded, yes, but the question becomes how do we find it, how do we get to it and how can we efficiently hit that niche?

But it's also true that you've got to be happy with less. And it doesn't mean you stop growing or stop trying to challenge the envelope. You just have to define what your own notion of success is, and don't let somebody else define that for you. For me it is [having] a resonant life, that resonates with the values and the people I care about, my child and my wife and my animals. That sort of spiritual package is the first thing.

Then under that is what you do the rest of the day, which is, in my case, filmmaker. There was a time when I put that before my family, before the spiritual component of my life. I don't do that anymore. I'm a happier person because of that. The issue is defining your own notion of what is success for you, and don't let Hollywood define what success is, don't let external elements define that, because then you're never in control of what your life's about.

Pub Date: 9/27/98