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source of the sound is getting closer. Actually, I recorded the sound five weeks later at a different location. Everything in the film is post-synched. That's true of all my films, except for
Grand Opera,
which has a few synch scenes.
MacDonald:
There's a lot of mystery in
One Way Boogie Woogie
. It reminds me of de Chirico, partly because of the sound track. Things that we can't quite identify seem to hover around the image.
Benning:
When I set up the structure of sixty one-minute scenes, I thought it would be very demanding on an audience. My idea was to make it a little more accessible by making it more like a game. I built mysteries into it, along with "clues." For instance, the structure of the film is spelled out in the shot with somebody doing jumping jacks, counting from one to sixty. Another puzzle happens, in the shot where you hear a woman speaking French, reading a mathematics problem I made up. The idea was that if you didn't know French and wanted to know more about the film, you'd have to have somebody translate. But, you still wouldn't have the answer, because it's a problem, and you'd have to figure the problem out. But the problem is written in such a way that you assume it's going to ask a certain question, and the question at the end isn't the question you'd expect, so you have to go back and rework all the information. That's the extreme of the game-playing aspect of the film.
MacDonald:
There's a scene where a person's gagged and lying in the middle of the street. Also, at the end, a car stops and the person slumps over the horn. In a conventional narrative those scenes might be serious, but since there is no sequence, they declare themselves as humor.
Benning:
The image of the woman tied up has been criticized as sexist. The scene before that is the baby carriage rolling down the street, a reference to Eisenstein and the Odessa Steps sequencea silly film jokeand in the background somebody with an accent is speaking about capitalism and the working class. The next shot is the woman who's tied up and gagged, which I meant as a reference to the working class.
MacDonald: Grand Opera
seems to be your first attempt to come to grips, at least in film, with your own history as a filmmaker.
Benning:
Of course, it's also distanced. It's an attempt to use my past, but not to explore it. I do show all the houses I ever lived in, and I include stories that are true, or that I think are true, about things that happened when I was in those houses. But they're read by a woman, which distances them.
I started
Grand Opera
in 1977. There was no real script. I just did things that suggested other things. When I edited, I rearranged it and pared it down. The blowing up of the Biltmore Hotel in Oklahoma City