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Benning:
It's easy to remember because it's the day the hostages were taken in Iran: November 4, 1979.
MacDonald:
Since then, all your films
Him and Me, American Dreams, Landscape Suicide
have dealt with crime or death. I assume that incident was pivotal for you. Did anyone question your innocence?
Benning:
Only the police department when they talked to me in the morning. I'm not worried about anybody's suspicions about me. For a while I did have a huge amount of guilt: if I had awakened at the right moment, I could have saved her. It's interesting that you ask that though, because I've been talking about that incident with a woman in prison [Lawrencia Bembenek, subject of
Used Innocence
] who says she's innocent of the murder she's serving time for. She told me, "All it would have taken to convict you would have been a jealous boyfriend who said, 'Yeah, they were having a big fight before it happened.' " I could have ended up in prison like she did. I'd never thought of that.
The making of those films, starting with
Him and Me,
was a way of dealing with how I felt about discovering death so close to me. It certainly changed my life. As you say, all my films since have dealt with some kind of deatheven
O Panama
[1985], and I didn't write that script [Bert Barr did].
MacDonald:
When I've shown
American Dreams
and
Landscape Suicide,
I've found them accessible even to people not acquainted with unusual forms of films. My audiences have a harder time with
11 × 14
and your other early work. Were you trying to be more accessible?
Benning:
Not at all. I would love to be more accessible just because I would like to make enough money with my films to support myself. But it isn't really a concern. The change you mention is just a by-product of adding more narrative information. Probably parts of the films still aren't accessible. In fact, I worry that people aren't seeing those parts of the films. At least in the older works the audiences were confronted directly with the major formal issues. In these new films they might miss half of what's going on, but maybe I'm not giving the audience enough credit.
MacDonald:
When I saw
American Dreams
for the first time, I was frightened of missing some of the text that moves across the bottom. Perhaps because of the sexual hooks in the narrative that unfolds in the text, it quickly became the primary focus.
Benning:
I think that's mainly a function of our educational system, where so much importance is put on reading and hardly any on visual thinking. Also, if you're watching TV and something runs across the bottom of the screen, it's generally a storm warning or some emergency, so you have to read it. Text is always given more importance than image. Even when
I've
watched
American Dreams
and I know what the film's