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before on public TV. My whole vocabulary came from watching TV or going to the local theater, so I had no idea what
Meshes
was about. It just stuck in the back of my mind, and finally I bought a camera. I went back to school to finish my masters in math [1970]. Actually I wish I'd gone on to a Ph.D. I'd love to teach, math. Then I got a job teaching at Paul Smith's Collegea small, very conservative school in upstate New York. I lost my job. The circumstances were strangesomebody burned a building down, and I was one of the people who got investigated. Scary stuff. I went back to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, thinking I couldn't do anything but hide. I was going to go for one semester, but I stayed for three years and got an M.F.A. in film and graphic arts [1975].
MacDonald: Time and a Half
[1972], the earliest film you list for distribution, is very different from your later filmsit's a conventional narrative, a grim day-in-the-life of a drill press operatorthough your interest in framing and in working with sound are already clear.
Benning:
It was the second 16mm film I made. I hadn't seen much except theatrical film, so it was logical for me to begin with scripted, fictional, documentary narrative.
MacDonald:
The way you go in and out of fantasy material is reminiscent of the foreign films that were popular during the sixties.
Benning: Time and a Half
was what I remembered of working on a drill press: it was boring, and the speed of the machine regulated, you. You'd get bored and try to daydream, but the lengths of the daydreams were dictated by the machine. It's dangerousif you stick your hand in at the wrong time, you put a drill through itso you have to have short thoughts and get back to work. I put that into the film.
MacDonald:
The soundtrack is unusual.
Benning:
It's a combination of two tracks: one was noises that would synch with what was happening, not necessarily generated by something in the frame but which seemed to fit the visuals; the other was the slowed-down sound of a big cylinder being ground. I wanted the noise to be repetitious and circular, because I was trying to get at a way of life where every day seems the same. Everything was post-synched.
MacDonald:
It was shot in black and white and printed on color stock?
Benning:
Yes. At first I worked with a small lab in Milwaukee. They didn't do black and white. Earlier, I had made a one-minute film, which they printed on color stock. I liked the way it looked, so when I did
Time and a Half,
I had certain scenes tinted a little green, a little brown.
MacDonald
[
to Gordon
]: What was the nature of your collaboration on
Michigan Avenue?
Gordon:
The collaboration happened spontaneously. We'd been talking about ways of getting things across on film: I would say one thing,