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what I shot to look like 1957, and there was no trouble doing that. If you bring in some old cars, it looks like 1957, 1940, 1930. The actual store where the murder took place had been redone, so I didn't film that. Orinda County feels brand new.
MacDonald:
There's a certain woodenness in the way the lines are delivered by the Gein and Protti characters. After our screening last night, the people from our Criminal Justice Program said that delivery was absolutely in keeping with the way they've seen people confess. Did you research that aspect of the film?
Benning:
No. But I had a feel for it. I knew I was going to be shooting these close-ups and I wanted the language to be delivered matter-of-factly. I knew any little emotion would really show on the screen. By playing it down, I could play it up. So that was my direction to both actors. I think they did a wonderful job, and Rhonda [Bell] had never acted before!
MacDonald:
When Protti and Gein are being interviewed, the voice that asks the questions is clearly in a different space from the room in which they're confessing. That reminds me of your experimentation with on- and off-screen sound in the earlier films.
Benning:
I wanted a detached, off-screen voice because I wanted to focus on the confession itself. I like the separation you mention, but mainly it's a way of having the confessions seem like monologues rather than dialogues, even though the original texts I quote are questions and answers.
MacDonald:
Also, in the shots of Orinda, even when it's clear that the sounds that accompany the landscape images are the kinds of sounds you might hear in those spaces, they're either a little too loud, or there's something that detaches them just a bit from the place we're seeing.
Benning:
I've always been interested in that. I don't re-create reality, I create a metaphor that suggests reality. Within that metaphor I make things a little hyper-real, or surreal, just off balance.
MacDonald:
In this film that approach seems especially appropriate. It's the separation between what Gein and Protti did and who they were perceived to be that's so creepy. Also, they don't remember doing these things, so they're disconnected from themselves.
How much did
Landscape Suicide
cost?
Benning:
About sixteen thousand dollars. That's just material costs. I do all the camerawork, the editingall those types of thingsand I don't pay myself a salary. My actors work almost for free.
MacDonald:
Is the computer piece,
Pascal's Lemma
[1985], an homage to Hollis Frampton and
Zorns Lemma?
Benning:
There's a general reference to Hollis because of his interest in computers and because I've always admired his work. And I liked him.