Page 223
The Aaron/Bremer parallel is further confirmed and extended by Benning's recognition of his own involvement with these assumptions: his choice of a continuous, relentlessly regular, minimal structure for
American Dreams
is implicitly a critique of the male-dominated structural cinema 'that was developing during the years of Aaron's and Bremer's final achievements. Of course, just as Aaron's accomplishments strengthened the position of blacks in American life, the accomplishments the structural filmmakers opened new territory for feminist filmmakers concerned with confronting Western consumer culture's imaging of women and men.
Benning's most recent features,
Landscape Suicide
(1986) and
Used Innocence
(1988), use rigorous, unconventional structures as a context for examining three people convicted of murder.
Landscape Suicide
explores the ways in which the crimes of Ed Gein (the prototype for Norman Bates in
Psycho
[1960], as well as a source for the butchers in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
[1974] and for Buffalo Bill in
Silence of the Lambs
[1991]) and Bernadette Protti (a teenager who killed a classmate in a posh suburb of San Francisco) reflect the landscapes in which the crimes occurred.
Used Innocence
is a portrait of Lawrencia Bembenek, who is currently serving time in Wisconsin for murdering her husband's ex-wife.
My interview with Benning began in March and June of 1980. I asked Bette Gordon to be present when we discussed the films she and Benning collaborated on. In November 1986, Benning and I updated the interview. I have left the update separate: so much time passed between the discussions that combining them would have resulted in distortions.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Part 1
MacDonald:
How did you get into filmmaking?
Benning:
I was in graduate school studying mathematics, but painting and drawing a lot. I decided I didn't like school anymore, and ended up in a half-black, half-white hillbilly ghetto in Springfield, Missouri. I bought a cameraa regular 8mm Bolexnot to document the area, but to use as a kind of paintbrush. I didn't do much, though. Then I moved to a farm and started to do little shots of flowers and things like that.
Actually, what motivated me to buy a camera was
Meshes of the Afternoon
[Maya Deren, 1943], which I had seen about seven years