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Benning:
You don't really know those three strands exist until the film is over. It's a totally different film on second viewing. You might need three or four viewings to sort out the different narratives. And there are interjected scenes that deal with formal issues. Maybe that's a fourth narrative.
MacDonald:
Also, even if you do follow the strands, things get ambiguous. In the Mount Rushmore scene, we see characters who look like the two women. One wears a red blouse like the woman in the car. In a narrative sense, though, she almost can't be the same woman.
Benning:
She
is
the same woman. The other woman is a new companion, though she
looks
just like the first. Two different women play the same part. And the older man wears that blouse in one shot. I change clothes among the characters, so the narrative gets confused. Every time you see that man, he's dressed differently and he seems to be defined differently: you see him saying good-bye to a woman; you see him in a kitchen with a family; you see him working at a gas station; you see him in front of a poster of Lenin; and finally, you see him playing golf. The scenes don't seem to match.
MacDonald:
As in
9-1-75,
most of the individual images look candid and recorded in synch, but the more closely you look, the more evident are the clues that indicate that the images can
not
have been recorded the way they first appear. The film is a training ground for nonillusionistic seeing.
Benning:
That was a major concern when I was making
11 × 14
. When you start to watch the smokestack scene it's obviously a smokestack, and you can apply particular meanings to thateven cliched meanings like pollution or a phallic symbolbut since it's on for seven and a half minutes, eventually you have to deal with it as swirling grain on a screen. Near the end of the scene, however, a plane comes through, so that after you've begun to look at the image formally, it's reintroduced into the narrative: in the scene before a plane takes off, and in the next scene a plane lands. Hopefully, the film teaches you how to watch the film.
MacDonald:
One image that particularly struck me was the one with the two women in bed. You hear the Dylan song and see the record going around on the turntable. But, since the women are moving in slow motion, the music can't be coming from that record. And there's the image with the moon, where everything looks fine until you look away slightly and the moon shakes.
Benning:
The blatant sceneslike the ones we've just mentionedmake you look carefully at scenes that aren't as blatant. Eventually, you question the reality of every image.
MacDonald:
A lot of the shots in
8 1/2 × 11
are fairly long, and, of