… to be out there all by yourself, and it’s very hot, and you’re wet with sweat, and you hear the wind blow down those rivers and you look down and see …
This is from A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers by Scott MacDonald (2006). This is from his interview with James Benning:
[ … ]
MacDonald: One way of thinking about the development of landscape painting in this country, especially on the part of the people writing about it recently, is that it was exactly at the moment when the original American landscape seemed in danger of totally disappearing that it was recognized as something worth holding on to. In Deseret you’re playing with that theme, too, as you made clear when you were talking about the structure of the film at the screening tonight, and its relationship to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the concept of entropy.
Benning: Absolutely.
MacDonald: The film begins with a beautiful image of a butte, but by the end, we’ve moved into a sensibility where we’re no longer sure whether we’re looking at a beautiful landscape or an environmental disaster.
Benning: People living in southern Utah, in one of the most beautiful places in the world, are still dying of cancer from nuclear testing in Nevada decades ago. They became the “down-winders.” A piece of landscape that looks beautiful can become the opposite of beauty.
But there’s something more marvelous about those landscapes than all of that, something very mysterious. Out in the middle of a western landscape, where nobody’s around, there seems to be some answer, a feeling of getting back to something that’s much more real than what we generally experience. I think Robert Frank expresses it really well in his video Home Improvements [1985], when he points the camera out his window in Nova Scotia and says, “The answer’s out there, but every time I look out, it’s different; it’s always changing.” I think maybe that’s what it is: a search for an answer out there, where every moment is different from the moment before. Landscape is always changing in very subtle ways and sometimes in very dramatic ways, but it has to be experienced.
It’s quite remarkable to get up at five o’clock in the morning, when it’s already eighty degrees, and walk eight or ten miles through the canyonlands to where the Colorado and Green rivers meet, to be out there all by yourself, and it’s very hot, and you’re wet with sweat, and you hear the wind blow down those rivers and you look down and see one red river and one green river mixing together — there’s something special about that moment. But basically the experience is indescribable — you have to do it.
[ … ]
MacDonald: I’ve heard you talk about the idea of filmmaking as performance, not so much for the audience as for yourself, and about how the shots in the trilogy are sometimes records, or emblems, of the “adventures” you went through to get the shots.
Benning: That’s a part of some of my early work, also. In Grand Opera [1978], I documented what I thought of as two one-person performances. For the first, I went to the same spot on the Canadian River outside of Norman, Oklahoma, every day for a whole year and made one shot each day. In the film you see a series of those shots that reference my performance and measure my mental state against the constant of that place, though that “constant” changed every day, because of weather conditions or whatever.
For the second performance, I visited every house I’d ever lived in within a two-month period and made a 360-degree pan of each place.
But it is true that when I made the [California] trilogy, it was really one hundred and five performances: me going to one hundred and five places and recording how I felt at those places at those moments. The trilogy is an accumulation of performance.
MacDonald: The performances you do in Grand Opera declare themselves as performances, whereas in the California films, the performance necessary to make the shot is rarely evident: the drive you took from Reno to LA to get your camera, then back to Reno to get the shot of the forest fire doesn’t declare itself within the shot.
Benning: But that’s true with a lot of filmmakers. When they watch their films, it’s always a completely different experience, because every shot has a story that for the audience is not part of the film. It’s kind of nice to be an audience and not know all those stories, so you can watch the film purely.
However, I do think that unconsciously all the work that goes into making an image somehow ends up in that image. That might be a bold statement, and I don’t think an audience could tell you the exact facts; it’s a subtle feeling. For instance, when you see the sand blowing in Death Valley with such intensity, you don’t know the story of how difficult it was to make that shot and how I was almost delirious from the one-hundred-thirty-degree heat and the forty-five-mile-an-hour winds that were dehydrating me, but I think the shot itself has such intensity that you almost feel that that could be the story. I’m hoping that’s true.
MacDonald: Hemingway said that when a writer knows what he’s talking about, he can leave things out and retain their impact; the reader will sense in what’s left all that the writer knows.
Benning: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
My most recent previous post from MacDonald’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 