A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Page 238

Page 239

Homages to Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, George Landow

(Owen Land), and Hollis Frampton in Benning's

Grand Opera

 (1978).

Page 240

It doesn't make total sense to have Yvonne [Rainer] in the film, except that I like her and her films. The other people have been called structuralists, and I refer to structure throughout the film, so it made more sense to include them.

MacDonald:

There are also many allusions to other films.

Grand Opera

begins with the body discovery scene from

Wavelength

. The circular pans of the houses juxtaposed with the stories about your life read by someone else remind me of Frampton's

nostalgia,

and so on.

Benning:

I'd meant to make reference to a lot of works, but people point out references I had no idea I was making. Once you start, you read almost every scene as a reference.

MacDonald:

Stan Brakhage is the source of the title. He thinks that sound competes with the visuals, but in your case sound constantly adds something different.

Benning:

I agree with what he says, basically that you can't see and hear at the same time. It made him decide to work visually, but I concluded the opposite. I wanted to use sound

because

it makes you look at things differently. I've also worked with no sound as a sound, or at least as another option.

Grand Opera

starts with black leader, and you hear a voicethe speech from

Wavelength

. Then you see a notebook, and you don't hear any sound. Next, you see and hear somebody singing. The film begins by cataloging those possibilities: what follows is about sound-image relationships, among other things.

MacDonald:

During the film you review the history of pi, and present pi in various ways. At one point, you talk about the person who calculated pi to 607 digits and found out that it was incorrect after 527. This is followed by a passage that 'visualizes' the digits, but you included only 525 (yes, I counted them!). Why didn't you go to 527?

Benning:

Pi is represented three times in the film. First, a voice with an Argentine accent talks about somebody who derived pi to thirty-five places. Then there's a black-and-white flicker film: three white frames, then punch a hole for the decimal point, then one white, four black, one white, five black, nine white . . . to thirty-five places. It's silent, so it's suggestive of the early history of cinema, as well as a reference to the body talks about pi, you see a color flicker film with sound, again suggesting the progression of film history. I think I go to 100 digits that time. The third time is when I take

One Way Boogie Woogie

and re-edit ten scenes, assigning a digit to each scene. It was supposed to go to 527, and if it is short, the other two digits might happen in the soundtrack. The sound continues after the picture to give the dot-dot-dot effect of infinity.

The idea of the 527-part representation was to take my last film, which was highly formal, and restructure it by using the digits of pi,

Page 241

which can be proven to be random. I wanted to see what that would do to those ten scenes: what new juxtapositions would occur and how that might change your perception of the original image. It's a tedious part of