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shot where a truck goes by on a country road and you pan and follow it, then the shadow of a plane comes through the image. In
11 × 14,
the middle section was eliminated, and the viewer sees two shots.
Benning:
That's the only different one. The others are lifted right out of
8 1/2 × 11
and put into
11 × 14
.
MacDonald: Chicago Loop
[1976] seems an attempt to combine techniques explored in Ernie Gehr's
Serene Velocity
and Michael Snow's
Standard Time
and
Back and Forth
.
Benning:
I was probably influenced by both people. I made
Chicago Loop
while I was making
11 × 14,
to take my mind off itit's the exact opposite of
11 × 14. Chicago Loop
is actually three small, separate films: they were going to be called
Chicago Loop, Chicago River, Chicago Cubs,
but I never made the titles so it's just called
Chicago Loop
from the title of the first film. They were made a week apart, all in the camera. The film is made to play forward and backward. When you get to the end, you can play it in reverse.
MacDonald:
In
One Way Boogie Woogie
narrative elements have almost completely disappeared.
Benning:
There are, however, cross references between the sixty shots. Hopefully, by the end it becomes more spherical than linear and you remember the film as a coherent whole. Color schemes run through the film. Smokestacks punctuate it. Three Volkswagens appear in all the possible permutationsyou see each one by itself, you see all the possible pairs, and then you see them together. And three shots refer directly to filmmaking. One starts with the aperture closed. It slowly opens, giving the effect of walking into a dark theater and sitting down: you slowly define the theater as your eyes adjust to the darkness. Finally, as the aperture continues to open, the image washes out. The, second shot involves color separation. It's a shot of some old oil tanksjust a triple exposure in the camera. Each time I used a different color filtercyan, magenta, and yellowso that anything that's recorded all, three times becomes a normal color, and anything recorded only once will be the color of that filter. Then there's the negative shot of smoke coming out of a factory. Other than those three shots, there's not much manipulation. And there are recurring jokes. As you say, the film almost dispenses with narrative as a context for form, and uses form as a context for itself. The overall structure is defined very tightly: the film began with the idea that there would be sixty one-minute shots.
MacDonald:
The title's reference to Piet Mondrian's
Broadway Boogie-Woogie,
and,
Victory Boogie-Woogie
is pretty hard to miss since somebody carries a Mondrian across one of the images. But why ''One Way"?
Benning:
There are a lot of one-way signs and one-way streets. It's