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problems the film raises, especially the body and voice of the woman being consumed by the body and voice of the man. As his voice gets louder, and his image gets larger, the female voice gets more muffled. This gets right to the point of women in the cinema being consumed by the male, voice, women's images as a male projection. Our spontaneity revealed, once the film was finished, the basic condition of women in the cinema.
MacDonald:
I assumed that the idea was that many women in the mid seventies, though in touch with their feelings on a personal level, were dealing with the emotions that come from moving outinto the world, whereas men were trying to get in touch with their feelings, Your movement away from the camera and James's toward the camera, are interlockedas though each is the context for the other.
Gordon:
That's very interesting. Actually, we were trying to combat the art historical tradition of the female body depicted nude and frontally, while the male body is always covered.
Benning:
I don't think there were any politics behind the film, except the idea of collaboration. The initial idea was that we'd each act, each do camera work, each do optical printing, and each do sound. I think it's probably the closest you can get to a perfect collaboration, in terms of equality of the partners.
Gordon:
I disagree. I think the politics of sexuality were there whether or not they were completely articulated during the making of the film.
Benning:
It's very electric when we pass through each other.
Gordon:
It's like intercourse. The two shots were made ten minutes apart, late in the day, and the shadows under the bridges were different enough to cause a strobe effect. We cut back and forth, one frame to the next, so that, in fact, the man and woman are never on screen at the same time.
MacDonald:
How did you choose the location?
Benning:
Mostly by accident. The trucks passing over the highway create a lateral movement, compared to the way we move perpendicularly through the frame. Certainly, we were aware of superhighways and railroad tracks as American public symbols. We chose extremely loaded images, not knowing everything about how they might be read.
Gordon:
We didn't say, "Let's make a film about sexuality," but I think intention should be seen as separate from the reading of the images. Jim has gone on to do his kind of films, but I got more and more intrigued with the idea of sex and sexualityhow I, as a woman, would present my own sexual images without being exploitative, though the cinema is, in part, the pleasure of looking at the body of a woman.
MacDonald:
When I first saw
The United States of America,
I had a