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was the first shot I made: it became a metaphor for the end of my structural concerns. Then I thought, why not tell a little more about my life, about what brought me to that point? I wrote the short story that's printed at the beginning of the film as a continuous sentence. The story of the young boy memorizing the digits of pi seemed like a metaphor for my life as an artist and for my decision to become a structuralist filmmaker. He's like an artist trying to define something indefinable, something you can get lost in.
I was also thinking about doing short performances. Two got into
Grand Opera
. One was to visit every house I'd ever lived in and measure my feelings against what I had thought the houses would suggest. I did the other performances in Oklahoma. I went to the same river every three or four days, from the shortest day of the year to the longest day, again trying to measure my own feelingshow
I
changed from day to day compared to something that was itself both the same and different. Those performances don't give the audience the same feeling they give me. At the time I felt that my films were getting too academic, too far from a personal meaning that might be more important.
MacDonald:
Did you modify your memories of the places where you lived?
Benning:
That section is about storytelling: basically they're true stories, but they have little twists, either to make them funny, or more interesting, or to give a clue to the way I perceive things. When they're not true, they're metaphors for truth. I did find somebody dead in the backyard, and I did find a cow that was dying, and I did fall through the ice.
MacDonald:
Though
One Way Boogie Woogie
is probably the film one would most identify with structural film,
Grand Opera
is so full of allusions to structural filmmaking and filmmakers that unless you know that tradition, it would be hard to catch all the implications.
Benning:
I would rather show it to a group that doesn't know of Snow, Rainer, and the others. The laughter then comes at entirely different places. I suppose I was thinking of my own audience when I made it, thoughpeople who have seen my films, and other films that I like.
MacDonald:
Did you decide to use Frampton, [George] Landow, Rainer, and Snow because they were especially important in your development?
Benning:
I like all four of them, but the way I used them changed as I made the film. I started
Grand Opera
right after
One Way Boogie Woogie,
when I really did believe in Minimalism and felt that less was more. By the time I finished it, my feeling was more like the Bob Huot postcard you sent me: "Less Is More . . . But, It's Not Enough" [Huot, postcard of
Billboard for Former Formalists,
1978].