A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

while I was making

11 ? 14,

to take my mind off itit's the exact opposite of

11 ? 14. Chicago Loop

is actually three small, separate films: they were going to be called

Chicago Loop, Chicago River, Chicago Cubs,

but I never made the titles so it's just called

Chicago Loop

from the title of the first film. They were made a week apart, all in the camera. The film is made to play forward and backward. When you get to the end, you can play it in reverse.

MacDonald:

In

One Way Boogie Woogie

narrative elements have almost completely disappeared.

Benning:

There are, however, cross references between the sixty shots. Hopefully, by the end it becomes more spherical than linear and you remember the film as a coherent whole. Color schemes run through the film. Smokestacks punctuate it. Three Volkswagens appear in all the possible permutationsyou see each one by itself, you see all the possible pairs, and then you see them together. And three shots refer directly to filmmaking. One starts with the aperture closed. It slowly opens, giving the effect of walking into a dark theater and sitting down: you slowly define the theater as your eyes adjust to the darkness. Finally, as the aperture continues to open, the image washes out. The, second shot involves color separation. It's a shot of some old oil tanksjust a triple exposure in the camera. Each time I used a different color filtercyan, magenta, and yellowso that anything that's recorded all, three times becomes a normal color, and anything recorded only once will be the color of that filter. Then there's the negative shot of smoke coming out of a factory. Other than those three shots, there's not much manipulation. And there are recurring jokes. As you say, the film almost dispenses with narrative as a context for form, and uses form as a context for itself. The overall structure is defined very tightly: the film began with the idea that there would be sixty one-minute shots.

MacDonald:

The title's reference to Piet Mondrian's

Broadway Boogie-Woogie,

and,

Victory Boogie-Woogie

is pretty hard to miss since somebody carries a Mondrian across one of the images. But why ''One Way'?

Benning:

There are a lot of one-way signs and one-way streets. It's

Page 235

shot one way: there's no camera movement, always a static frame. Movement was generally kept at a minimum, so that any particular movement would draw attention to itself.

MacDonald:

I first saw

One Way Boogie Woogie

at the Whitney, where photographs similar to the various shots were mounted on the walls of the auditorium. Were they meant to be a separate work?

Benning:

I had shot the color slides to study different framings, since I knew I wanted to do sixty static shots. Then I liked a lot of the slides, and made them into eight-by-ten color prints.

MacDonald:

The film was shot in Milwaukee?

Benning:

Yes. I used to play in that section of Milwaukee as a kid. We would hop freights and take them to the baseball games at County Stadium. It's a rather romantic place for me, though I didn't want to romanticize the factories. Generally I would film on Sunday morning, when no one was there.

MacDonald:

I first saw it with J. J. Murphy. He kept responding in a way that suggested you were doing unusual things with the camera. I was unsure what he was seeing.

Benning:

Basically I was using a wide-angle lens, which gives the image greater depth, but also tends to distort the axis. If there is movement away from the camera, things get smaller more quickly, which points out the illusion of three dimensions. I shoot perpendicularly to a flat surface, so that there generally aren't any depth clues to allow you to deduce the length of the lens. For instance, the shot of the two workmen carrying the Mondrian painting into the frame has a flat wall as a background. When they walk through, they're right next to the wall, so that the frame is very flat. The street in the foreground seems vertical, but then, at the end of the shot, a forklift comes by very close to the camera, in very sharp focus. It gives you a new depth cue that, by defining the distance between itself and the wall, almost flips the street straight out. As soon as the forklift disappears, the scene flattens. I use that technique constantly.

A lot of the compositions look like Mondrian paintings. The very first image has a blue square in the corner, some red garage doors, and a green fence. If you squint, you get blocks of colors. It's a green fence, and Mondrian rarely used green, but it's related. Red, green, and bluethe primary colors of light. Then my daughter [Sadie Benning] runs through dragging a stick on the fence, She's dressed in red, yellow, and bluethe primary colors of pigment. If you're not used to looking at a film that way, you'll look for a narrative, while the shot deals with colors and sound. The off-screen sound of the stick against the fence goes on for almost a minute, giving you the sense that that fence is a half mile long. You hear it getting louder as you watch, and assume that the

Page 236

source of the sound is getting closer. Actually, I recorded the sound five weeks later at a different location. Everything in the film is post-synched. That's true of all my films, except for

Grand Opera,