Page 235
shot one way: there's no camera movement, always a static frame. Movement was generally kept at a minimum, so that any particular movement would draw attention to itself.
MacDonald:
I first saw
One Way Boogie Woogie
at the Whitney, where photographs similar to the various shots were mounted on the walls of the auditorium. Were they meant to be a separate work?
Benning:
I had shot the color slides to study different framings, since I knew I wanted to do sixty static shots. Then I liked a lot of the slides, and made them into eight-by-ten color prints.
MacDonald:
The film was shot in Milwaukee?
Benning:
Yes. I used to play in that section of Milwaukee as a kid. We would hop freights and take them to the baseball games at County Stadium. It's a rather romantic place for me, though I didn't want to romanticize the factories. Generally I would film on Sunday morning, when no one was there.
MacDonald:
I first saw it with J. J. Murphy. He kept responding in a way that suggested you were doing unusual things with the camera. I was unsure what he was seeing.
Benning:
Basically I was using a wide-angle lens, which gives the image greater depth, but also tends to distort the axis. If there is movement away from the camera, things get smaller more quickly, which points out the illusion of three dimensions. I shoot perpendicularly to a flat surface, so that there generally aren't any depth clues to allow you to deduce the length of the lens. For instance, the shot of the two workmen carrying the Mondrian painting into the frame has a flat wall as a background. When they walk through, they're right next to the wall, so that the frame is very flat. The street in the foreground seems vertical, but then, at the end of the shot, a forklift comes by very close to the camera, in very sharp focus. It gives you a new depth cue that, by defining the distance between itself and the wall, almost flips the street straight out. As soon as the forklift disappears, the scene flattens. I use that technique constantly.
A lot of the compositions look like Mondrian paintings. The very first image has a blue square in the corner, some red garage doors, and a green fence. If you squint, you get blocks of colors. It's a green fence, and Mondrian rarely used green, but it's related. Red, green, and bluethe primary colors of light. Then my daughter [Sadie Benning] runs through dragging a stick on the fence, She's dressed in red, yellow, and bluethe primary colors of pigment. If you're not used to looking at a film that way, you'll look for a narrative, while the shot deals with colors and sound. The off-screen sound of the stick against the fence goes on for almost a minute, giving you the sense that that fence is a half mile long. You hear it getting louder as you watch, and assume that the