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Benning:
I've probably been holding back. I want to make a much funnier film. Some of my humor is so dumb thoughpuns that I should resist, but don't.
MacDonald:
Where was the film shot?
Benning:
Mothy Lake, about forty miles from Milwaukee. When I was small, there would be about five or six other people. Now, since it's so close to Milwaukee and Chicago, there are miles of people.
MacDonald:
It's a funny situationthousands of people "getting away from it all."
Benning:
They rebuild a suburb.
MacDonald:
In many of your films you seem aware of a certain kind of AmericanaNiagara Falls, Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore . . .
Benning:
I hate a lot of that stuff, but I also like it. It has a certain political meaning to me.
I used to be active in local politics, working with people trying to figure out how to live. The last time I did that was in Springfield, Missouri, where I helped set up a dropout school [in 1967] and helped people try to get jobs. I knew that I could quit whenever I wanted and that the people I was working with Couldn't. It got to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and I finally decided that you either give your whole life to working for political change or you don't. I wasn't sure what my own life was about, and I had to try to define it, so I quit working there and tried to define my life by being an artist.
When I started to make art, I realized I still had a lot of political concerns. Was I or was I not going to put those into my films, or my drawings and paintings? I was trying to experiment, and if you're experimenting, by definition, you don't communicate with a large audience. I thought it was rather silly to try to put political issues into an esoteric context. If you're trying to make political changes, you should use the language that is easiest to understand. But I was trying to develop my own language. Little things creep into my films that suggest I hold certain political beliefs, but they're not meant to change the audience's beliefs.
I suppose if I think of my films as dealing with politics, it's with the way you look at the screen. If you look at things differently aesthetically, maybe you'll look at things differently politically. I do feel I'm doing something that isn't totally self-serving.
MacDonald:
One difference between
8 1/2 × 11
and
11 × 14
is that in the latter at least three plot strands are followed: the women driving, the guy hitchhiking, and the older white-haired man who's out sometimes and home at others. After a certain point, because there's no regular alternation, you're not sure whether the next image will connect with any of those strands. The viewer has to examine every image to see if and where it fits.