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'You Think You've Been There': |
James Benning’s films have always been
difficult to classify. Although structure is a major concern in most of them,
they are not structural films; despite their preoccupation with landscape and
ecology, they are not environmental tracts; some can be described as
documentaries, although the layering of text, image and sound, and – since his conversion to digital – the use of compositing often tips them
from fact into fiction. Benning’s recent ventures
into found footage filmmaking (with Youtube Trilogy and Faces in 2011 and The War in 2012), and now his 2012 remake
of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969),
have been seen as radically new departures in his work, but in fact they
foreground a practice that he has engaged in since the 1970s: replication. This takes various forms in
his films, including appropriating texts and objects, recycling or referencing
bits of his previous films, and making works that revisit earlier works or
experiences. Revisiting and recycling can produce complex temporal schemes that
combine the historical time of a place or object with the time spent by Benning in observation, exploring the capacity of film, as
a time-based medium, to reconstruct or even retrieve the past time registered
by landscapes and artifacts (most notably in casting a glance [2007]). His art
projects beyond filmmaking have revealed his love of American folk art, in the
copies he has made of pictures by Henry Darger, Martín Ramirez, Bill Traylor, Mose Tolliver and others, and in the craft skills he employs, including building and
quilting.
Benning’s practice of copying as a way of making and learning is not the pastiche
of the postmodernist, but the apprenticeship of the folk artist, for whom
originality sits side by side with eccentricity. The notion of the ‘outsider’
knits together Benning’s admiration of these artists
with his interest in oppositional politics, counter-culture and criminal
psychology. Near his home in the Sierra Nevada mountains he has built two
cabins, replicas of those inhabited by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond and Ted
Kaczynski (the Unabomber) in Montana, creating a dialogue between the
transcendentalist and the terrorist. As in his film American Dreams (1984), the simple act of juxtaposition creates
surprising resonances between a hero and a psychopath. And, just as the first
person discourse of American Dreams allows spectators to read the diary entries of the failed assassin Arthur
Bremer as if they might be the intimate thoughts of the filmmaker himself, so Benning has an oblique personal investment in Kaczynski’s
story: both men were born in 1942 and both began adult life as students of
mathematics (there but for the grace of god …). Copying and comparing are
generative logics in Benning’s work, ways of making
things, but also ways of situating himself, as an artist and as an American, as
a figure in a landscape.
Benning’s Easy Rider is a film that
takes stock, measuring change over a period of more than forty years. Retracing
the journey made by Wyatt and Billy in 1968, the film pays attention to the
landscape in the first instance, noting the changes that have taken place, but
also looking and listening in a way that Hopper’s film does not. Working with
digital editing software, Benning uploaded the
original film onto a computer and replaced each scene with a single shot. With
no actors, his film stars the original locations or equivalents chosen for
practical, aesthetic and critical reasons. The soundtrack mixes ambient sound
from these locations with samples of the earlier film’s soundtrack, creating
acoustically haunted landscapes. The semiotic reduction that results from
replacing each scene with a single shot allows certain themes and motifs to
emerge more prominently than in the original film, as well as enabling Benning to place his own interpretation on the bikers’
journey and its conflagrant end. The road movie joins a long American
tradition, running through 19th and 20th century
literature and the Hollywood Western, of favouring traveling over settling. As Thomas Wolfe and Nicholas Ray would have it, ‘You Can't Go
Home Again’. Benning picks up on this cultural and
historical dichotomy and, in our conversation, criticises the bikers for their
ingratitude to their hosts and their lack of respect for the commitment made by
those who put down roots. A prominent system in the film features various
dwellings in which people might live, each with its own socio-economic and
historical implications. But while Benning may
respect community and commitment to place, his camera behaves like a latter-day
Huck Finn, continually lighting out for the territory. The only interior shots
are quotations from the original; Benning shot no
interiors. In the scene at the commune, a restless Hopper says: ‘If we’re going, we’re going, let’s go’. To remain free, it may be
necessary to stay outside. This restlessness inevitably raises the most
political question for contemporary Americans: the conflict between freedom, as
embodied by the open road, and responsibility, particularly towards the
environment. Pulling away from the original’s solipsistic concern with sex,
drugs and death, Benning confronts this issue in the
devastating conclusion of his film.
This interview was conducted at Benning’s home
in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in
October 2012, and revised in correspondence. After a few general questions, the
discussion follows the format of the remake, shot by shot, and is presented in
the form of a shooting script.
Alison Butler: Easy
Rider is such an important reference point for your generation, and perhaps
particularly so for you, given the amount of time you’ve spent on the road as a
filmmaker, some of it on a motorcycle and much of it in the West. Scott
MacDonald even calls North on Evers (1992)
your Easy Rider. So it seems fitting
for you to have re-made the film. Could you talk a little bit about what Easy Rider meant to you when you first
saw it, and what you think of it now?
James Benning: Well it’s
hard for me to remember my first reaction to Easy Rider, that’s over forty years ago. I do remember I was happy
to see a film that used a lot of music that I was listening to at the time.
This had never happened before. I also remember thinking that the portrayal of
the hippie commune seemed to be bit one-dimensional, perhaps even cliché, and I
do definitely remember being saddened by the killings. I also hadn’t done a lot
of travelling up to that time and it somewhat awakened a wanderlust in me. I
moved every year for the next twenty years. Today I don’t have a whole lot of
respect for the film. It just keeps moving, never really looking deeply into
anything, never trying to find any real alternatives. It’s very Christian and
capitalistic … the big score and the easy way out. Two things I’ve never been
interested in. Except for that beautiful speech on being free, the main
characters are completely apolitical. The film verifies Malcolm X’s manifesto
that drug use is anti-revolutionary. And for a film made in the late 1960s
about the counter-culture, it’s a bit shocking that the word Vietnam is never
mentioned.
AB: I watched it again recently, and was surprised
that a film I’d remembered as vital and energetic now seemed listless and
lacking in hope. And their dream is such a small one, they really just want to make enough money to retire in Florida. I saw a
documentary on television about Americans who sell up and live in their RVs –
it’s a lifestyle, they all meet up at campsites. Maybe that’s what Wyatt and
Billy would be doing now if they’d lived.
But your film doesn’t obviously base itself in this
kind of critique. It starts with a structure, and the ideas emerge from that.
Maybe we should follow this pattern and you could begin by explaining the
system of the film, its organising principles?
JB: I used the same organising strategy for Easy Rider as I used for my remake of Faces (John Cassavetes,
1968): that is, I made each of my films the same length as the original films
with the same amount (and length) of scenes, respectively. For Faces I copied close-ups from Cassavetes’ film and replaced each scene with these
close-ups matching the amount of screen time each actor had for each scene. In Easy Rider I replaced each scene with
just one shot made at the original location. So rather than glean material from
the original film (like I did in Faces)
I made my own shots for Easy Rider. Many
times I filmed things that were merely passed-by in the original film, things
that had been relegated to the background. By doing this I focus more strongly
on place and less on the narrative.
AB: One of the striking characteristics of the
original film is its use of travelling shots, which makes it involving for the
viewer, who is effectively taken along for the ride. How did you think about
the different meanings you would generate by replacing these travelling shots
with static shots?
JB: They used a lot of travelling shots to give you a
feeling of movement along the road. I was more interested in doing static
shots, so you could look longer, study things more. I wanted to anchor into
place itself – the idea that place has a place. So you feel a place
rather than just passing by it, so you can almost taste it. You have to look
over time to understand. I believe strongly that all learning is a function of
time.
AB: In your shots quite a lot of things pass by – a
number of vehicles move laterally through the frame, as do some pedestrians –
so the passing by is still happening, but it’s not the camera that’s doing it.
JB: I’d probably disagree that there’s a lot of things
moving past, but occasionally something moves through the frame that allows you
to understand that people are passing by, moving through the landscape, which
makes you even more aware that you’re not, that you’re static, watching. In
some places, like in the restaurant scene, where I show the outside of the
restaurant and you hear the dialogue coming from the inside, at times, cars
pass by outside, obliterating some of the dialogue, disrupting the narrative. I
like the fact that the people passing by are of course totally unaware of the
narrative they are disrupting. We are always passing by narratives we are
unaware of.
AB: Did you follow the same itinerary as the original film?
JB: Well of course they didn’t shoot it in
chronological order and neither did I, so there’s a route that the film
suggests, and then there’s the route they took when making the film. The first
shot is supposed to be in Mexico and it’s actually in Taos, New Mexico, so that
probably was shot when they were doing the scenes around the Taos Pueblo on
their way to the commune; although, actually, the commune was not shot in Taos,
it was shot in Malibu Canyon, California, so their locations are sometimes not
where they say they are – there are some lies. But they do go to particular
places, like LAX, Panamint Valley – the valley just to the west of Death
Valley, where they go to pick up the motorcycles, then they cross the Colorado
River and there are particular landmarks, Sunset Crater, Monument Valley, the
Taos Pueblo, St. Louis No.1 Cemetery, etc., and those I covered in my film. I
made some of the same decisions they did – I didn’t go to Mexico to shoot
Mexico because they didn’t, but I didn’t go to Taos to shoot Mexico like they
did, I went to a place in California that looked like Taos that looked like
Mexico. So I took some liberties, but I did go to Monument Valley, New Orleans,
and the very last shot in my film is exactly where the original film ends. I
cheated a little bit because I also shot in Texas, which they didn’t. As the
story goes, they weren’t allowed to film there because they had long hair. I don’t
know if that’s a myth or if it’s true, but I wanted to shoot in Texas because I
think today if you have long hair you can film there (although I don’t have
long hair), and the people there were very accommodating. I shot a Texas
Longhorn to identify it as a Texas shot. You can find them in California too,
but they’re noted for being bred in Texas.
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AB: In some ways, that produces quite an important
revision of the original film. The scholar Barbara Klinger wrote an essay on Easy Rider in which she argues that,
although the film appears progressive and critical of the prevailing ideology
of the time, it actually reinforces nationalist discourse by idealising the
South West, in many of the ways it has always been idealised in Westerns, and
locating everything that’s wrong with America in the South, effectively demonising
the South; overdevelopment, exploitation, racism, bigotry, it’s all positioned
in the South. (1) For someone like me, a foreigner who doesn’t know anything
about the Southern states, Easy Rider had a really powerful effect, it’s the source of many
of my ideas about the South and – along with Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) – the reason why I’m slightly afraid to
go there.
JB: It’s dangerous to assume any Hollywood film is
actually portraying anything as it is, so a lot of people around the whole
world identify things about America through Hollywood films that are completely
wrong. I agree, I mean the South at that time was racist, but so was the North
and maybe in a more insidious way, because it was liberal people there, who
made believe they weren’t racist and acted otherwise. But stereotyping is easy
to do. When making the original Easy
Rider, Hopper told the local people acting in the restaurant scene that the
bikers had killed a white girl on the outskirts of town to get them riled up,
which of course isn’t part of the Easy
Rider narrative. Stereotyping of the South, or really any kind of
stereotyping, is based on partial truths, but if one spends more time paying
attention to those kinds of prejudices they break apart rather quickly. I’ve
met a biker that teaches math at a halfway house for Mexican ex-gang members, a
Mormon that wrote a thirty-page narrative poem about living off the land, a
rich businessman that built houses for Habitat for Humanity. Well, you get the
idea.
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1. Barbara Klinger, ‘The Road
to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider’, in Steve Cohan and
Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book (New York and
London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 179-203.
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AB: The soundtrack of your film combines recordings
from the locations with the soundtrack of the original film, but not all of it
– it’s noticeable that a lot of dialogue, in particular, is missing. You’ve sampled
the sound rather than reproducing it all. Why did you take this approach?
JB: I wasn’t interested in recreating the actual
narrative that was in the original film. A lot of it I find kind of corny and
false. But, by choosing the parts of the narrative that are most potent, I am
able to elevate those ideas, or at least focus on them more thoroughly. I also
wanted to deconstruct the narrative so that it would relate to my first
feature-length film, 11 x 14 (1977), where
I wrote a very precise narrative script and then followed only parts of it,
creating truncated narrative spaces, used mainly to hold formal elements in
place and to also bring about narrative involvement with the audience, that is,
the blanks have be filled in.
AB: How do you expect the spectator to read the
relationship between sound and image – as if it’s one space, or two spaces, or
two times?
JB: That’s an interesting question, because I’m going
to have a different answer depending on whether the audience is aware of the
original film or not. If they are aware of the original film, then the dialogue
helps connect my film back to the original, causing a direct correlation
between the two films – so there’s an added question of narrative and memory.
If you don’t know the original film, then the way the sound and image connect
is different, it’s more about trying to make some narrative sense from the
skeletal narrative I provide, and how that connects to my images. In this case,
you may start to perceive the ambient sound more strongly, in the way it
affects the image. You might be more aware of it, because you won’t be
distracted by the original narrative. Memory in this case is also something different, it’s about what you bring from your own life,
your own narratives, not the specific narrative of the original film.
Maybe a better answer is that, when I make something,
I never consider audience. I’m not really thinking about how the audience will
watch something. I set up problems for myself and then try to solve those
problems, and hopefully an audience will be interested in what I am interested
in. For me, audience consideration is dangerous. If I would think about
audience I probably wouldn’t push my films as far as I do. I’d feel bad about
making people uncomfortable confronting a new language, and nothing would move forward. The language of cinema would remain stagnant. I
don’t mean to sound arrogant with that answer, but I think it’s important for
me to make problems for myself and then put those out into the world, and
either they work with an audience or they don’t.
1. EXT. JUNKYARD – DAY.
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AB: The film begins with this shot of a junkyard in a
desert town, under a blanket of cloud. Tell me about the location …
JB: The first shot was made just north of a small
chemical town in the California desert called Trona.
Just north of where I made this first shot is where I made the third shot,
which is also in the original Easy Rider.
It’s where they pick up the bikes near the Ballarat ghost town, deep in the desert. Using the same framing as in the original, I
made a shot of the small road that crosses Panamint Valley, the one they drove
their bikes down. On the way back from making this shot, when I was driving
back towards Trona, I looked off to the east and saw
a junkyard, and thought, oh, that looks a lot like Mexico. The opening shot in
the original film takes place in a cantina that’s connected to a junkyard, so
this place seemed perfect. I like it a lot because it’s a little more wide-open
and you have more of a feeling of desert. The sensation of place is very
strong.
AB: There seem to be some similarities between the mise en scène of the original opening scene
and your equivalent shot, in the colour in particular. Did you make any attempt
to reference compositional elements in the original?
JB: I was aware of the particular look of each scene,
but I wasn’t looking for anything exact like specific colours, it was more a
kind of feeling. It seems to fit the opening scene well, but there’s a kind of
mystery about what’s going on (because I use the dialogue from the drug deal),
but it’s off-screen and it’s very low in volume. Nevertheless, the colours do
match closely.
2. EXT. LAX – DAY.
AB: Drugs are much less prominent in your film than in
the original. In the previous shot, where they’re buying them, there is some
dialogue about it, as you say, but in this one, where they’re selling them,
there’s no reference to it at all.
JB: Here, I was somewhat relying on the audience
knowing the film; it’s a very memorable scene, because of the LAX location. If
you know the film is a remake, you would definitely recall that scene. But my
film is not just a remake of Easy Rider, it also
connects to my own filmography. The shot reminds one
of a prior film of mine, Ten Skies (2004), and when the plane lands, it looks like a shot from Ruhr (2009), so I’m also referencing
these films.
AB: This shot is particularly like the airport shot in Ruhr, in the ways it plays with our
understanding of film space, on- and off-screen, and the relationship between
film sound and the image. We hear the plane and we don’t know whether, when or
where it’s going to enter the frame – and then when it does, it’s incredibly
close. In Ruhr, there is a more
extended play with the viewer’s expectations, as the same thing happens a number of times, but it’s essentially the same game,
about the limitations of the frame, and the way we understand causal
relationships as they extend beyond the frame.
JB: Yes, in Ruhr the shot is about repetition and expectation. Here there is no repetition.
But the way the sound follows after the plane has passed is quite surprising.
If you witness this phenomenon you never forget it. It happens twenty to thirty
seconds after a plane has passed, almost like a ghost.
3. EXT. ROAD – DAY.
AB: The third shot is really beautiful. The location
is taken from the sequence in the original film. It’s recognisably the same
place as in one of the shots, but is very selectively sampled. You’ve lost a
lot of detail from this sequence, which has a lot of shots, some camera
movement, music (Steppenwolf’s ‘The Pusher’ and ‘Born to Be Wild’) and a key
bit of exposition …
JB: This is the sequence where they pick up the bikes,
Peter Fonda throws his watch on the ground, and they drive down the road. My
shot just has the road that they drive down, and if you look at the original
film and mine, you can see that the hills in the background are exactly the
same, framed the same. The road has got wider in forty-something years, but
it’s still very desolate, in the middle of nowhere. The location is adjacent to
an old ghost town, on the other side of the mountain range from Death Valley. Charles
Manson’s hideout was up in those mountains. He occasionally came down to the
store on his dune buggy to get supplies.
AB: This sequence in the original film is very
involving, using a mobile camera, zoom lens and music to make spectators feel
that they’re being taken along for the ride, whereas your equivalent shot is
both sparse and slow, and this has a distancing effect, reinforced by the music
you use, which is also sparse and slow, with your daughter Sadie singing ‘You
think you’ve been there, you think you know’. You seem to be making the point
that the spectator isn’t along for the ride.
JB: I don’t want to simulate the trip, I want to involve viewers with the actual place where the camera is sitting, so
that things move by them, like the passing pick-up truck and the navy jet
practising manoeuvres. There’s a naval base nearby that uses that valley for
war games. I’m interested in how these places are used and by whom. You’re
standing on the road and feeling what’s there … and the words to the song are
suggesting that maybe you don’t know. We pass by all these places too fast, and
now we have some time to look. Time to contemplate, to wonder
what’s happening.
AB: But is it not also the case that no matter how
hard I look at that image, I still haven’t been there?
JB: No, no, that’s for sure, films are films – but you
may want to go there now. That’s a funny thing, that I’m making films that are about perception and about being in a place, yet when
you see them you’re with an audience in a dark room, and you’re provided with a
stare that’s surely impossible to maintain outside in the real world. It’s
impossible to look the way the camera can; the camera is completely
disciplined, it won’t look away once I set it there. Because of this
discipline, you look closer, but it’s not the experience of being there. I do however
think it gives you a metaphor for place, a heightened feeling of being there.
AB: But it opens up the question of how people watch
your films, because there is a naïve way that you could watch them, as
vicarious experience, like an acceptable substitute for actually going to the
place, so with casting a glance, for
example, I may feel that, having watched the film, I don’t really need to visit
Spiral Jetty, you’ve been there for me. Then there is a more sophisticated way
to watch, where you are aware that the camera has been there, the filmmaker has
been there, but what you’re watching isn’t an unmediated object or experience,
it’s a kind of discourse about being
there.
JB: I think casting
a glance does it best; it tells you that even if you go there you won’t be
there, because if you go there again it won’t be like that, it’s constantly
changing, and the jetty is this kind of barometer to measure change. That’s
true with all place, right? Time is always working and
entropy happens, things collapse and are rebuilt.
Reality is never static, it’s always moving. What I’m trying to do with films
is provide a metaphor for being there, but also the idea that this is just one
view, and that many other completely different views exist. That’s what’s
interesting about making a film forty years later in the same locations – some
of those places look the same and others weren’t even there, I had to make them
up.
AB: There’s a sense in which you’re making them all up
– or remaking them all – because of the medium. You’re trying to inhabit a
precise point in space and time as fully as possible, but also recording that
inhabiting, and it’s like when people take family photographs or holiday snaps,
to capture the moment, but they’re not preserving their experience, they’re
falsifying it, fictionalising it. We see that all the time in the way that our
personal photographs stand in for memories and, in doing so, come to replace
them. So I suppose what I’m suggesting is that, as a consequence of making the
film, maybe even you haven’t been there!
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4. EXT. COLORADO RIVER – DAY.
JB: In the original film, there is a tracking shot
across the Colorado River Bridge from the point-of-view of the motorcycles. I
chose this camera position because I wanted to show the Colorado River and the
bridge from which they left California. That’s really the beginning of the trip
for them, that’s where the title Easy
Rider appears. And then there’s the railroad bridge right next to it, so I
thought, well, I’ll wait for a train and also reference my film RR, consumerism and capitalism.
AB: Yes, because it’s a goods train, isn’t it? This is
another example of a scene in the original that has traveling shots and point-of-view figures, to direct the audience as to how they should
relate to the scenery (which is what it is), and you’ve replaced this with what
David Bordwell calls a planimetric shot, a very frontal, very symmetrical shot with a strong central perspective,
very typical of you. (2)
JB: Yes, everything is passing, all the goods are passing by in the train and in the trucks on the highway, and
the river’s rolling by. So you’re locked down again, and for me the important
thing is place, what is happening to this place. The Colorado River has such an
interesting history of being damaged by irrigation, for corporate farming, so
for me it’s a very loaded image. At the beginning of the 20th century,
the Colorado River was accidentally diverted into a rather make- shift
irrigation system in the Imperial Valley, and the river filled the Salton
sinkhole creating the Salton Sea. Which is one of my thirteen
lakes (13 Lakes, 2004). For
the next three years, the Colorado River never made it to Mexico, denying them
water for their farming. But even after the river was ‘fixed’, the water we
sent to Mexico had such a high salt content level, due to our irrigation use,
that it wasn’t of much use for farming. When Mexico discovered oil, they
negotiated that the US needed to clean up the water, if the US wanted to buy
oil. So, because of this, the river now has a lower salt content. These things,
of course, aren’t in my film, but they’re in my head when I’m looking at the
river, and watching trains and trucks go by. So, for me, it’s a very loaded
shot.
AB: And making this ideologically-loaded shot at the
Colorado River re-situates the film’s engagement with the question of what
might be wrong with America back in the South West – where we also find what
might be right with America, rather than the South, where it is in the
original.
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2. David Bordwell, ‘Shot-consciousness’, at www.davidbordwell.net, January 16, 2007.
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5. TITLE CARD: EASY RIDER
AB: Your title, Easy
Rider, appears at the start of your film, but then the title of the
original film, also Easy Rider,
appears here, at the same point into the film that it appears in the original.
This stress on structure and timing indicates that you’re more interested in
using Easy Rider as an armature for
this new work than in paying homage to it. As a journey film, it provides a
readymade structure for another journey – is that a large part of what
interests you about it?
JB: Yes, the actual trip they took is an interesting
one, and not only to me. Many Harley owners have made this trip; some even have
websites and post photos they’ve taken along the way.
6. EXT. MOTEL SIGN – NIGHT.
JB: They try to get a place to stay for the night in Bellemont, Arizona, near Flagstaff, but the owner answers
their call with NO VACANCY. That motel is still there, but the sign isn’t.
There’s a Harley-Davidson dealership just down the road. They have what they
claim to be the original sign but it isn’t, it doesn’t look anything like it.
Perhaps it’s from that motel, but it’s not the one in the film. So I did a
frame blow-up of the sign from the film and had a sign-maker in Los Angeles
make a neon reproduction. I filmed it with the same on and off rhythm that
occurs in the original.
AB: So the sign is a remake, too.
7. EXT. CAMPFIRE – NIGHT.
AB: The five campfires are a system through the film, aren’t they?
JB: The original narrative is basically structured
around these campfires; a lot gets said during them, much of which I wasn’t
interested in, so I edited their dialogue quite a bit. I like the idea of how
the narrative continues through the campfires. I added up the amount of time
taken by the five campfire scenes. It totals seventeen minutes. I then built a
fire, and filmed it for seventeen minutes, while it burned down and almost out.
The progression of the fire has a narrative of its own, which matches the
film’s narrative; as the fire burns down it gets closer to the end, and the
talk develops in a similar way, at first about drugs, then something important
about America, and finally ‘we blew it’.
AB: So the campfire shots are sequenced chronologically throughout the
film?
JB: Yes, it burns down until it’s almost out. When I
was shooting the campfire, the wind was blowing and the flames were starting to
go a bit out of frame, so I took a shovel about two-thirds of the way through,
and I hit the fire to bring it back into the frame. When I did that, a bunch of
sparks shot up, and then when I cut the campfire into the film, those sparks
turned out to be exactly where Jack Nicholson gets killed, so I thought this is
very bizarre, that the narrative I created by fixing the fire coincidentally
matched the narrative of the film. I didn’t have to move it one frame, it was
in the exact same place.
AB: That’s amazing … There’s something interesting
about watching a fire in the cinema, because looking into the flames of a
domestic fire or campfire is a kind of primordial pre-cinema. It’s amazing to
have a cinema audience spend a sustained period of time just looking at flames.
JB: The very first time the flames come on, Dennis
Hopper says in a most delightful way, ‘I want to go to Mardi Gras,
get me a Mardi Gras queen’. He says it right at the beginning of the fire
scene, and I thought, oh, that’s such a beautiful introduction to these
campfires, it’s happy; and if there’s anything Easy Rider lacks, it’s happiness. Even though they weren’t allowed
into the motel, they made their own way.
AB: Like real cowboys.
8. EXT. DERELICT HOUSE IN THE DESERT – DAY.
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AB: This next shot is also part of a system, I think,
consisting of different kinds of dwelling, different houses where people might
live and put down roots. I’m interested in the fact that the camera never
enters these, as if it’s determined to stay on the open road; but also in the
varied ways of life and historical moments represented by these structures.
What can you tell me about this one?
JB: This is a squatter’s house. I think in the
mid-1940s, throughout the Mojave desert, if you built a house of a certain
minimum size, something like 10 x 12, and you made it a permanent, functional
house, you could get a certain amount of land, I think it was five acres, for
about $35, which was mainly a filing fee – though back then that would have
been a lot, but it was still cheap. (3) So people went out and built these
little houses in hopes of eking out a living. Probably today 90% of them are
either gone, or in ruins, and maybe 10% of those people stayed and added on or
built something bigger, though a few are still living in those very little
houses, which is interesting. This was one of those houses that had become
completely derelict. I built a campfire there – you can see its remains – to
make a narrative connection with the fire scene before it. At the very end of
the shot you hear their motorcycles leaving, the sound is from the original
scene. This isn’t the exact house that they camped by – I had no idea where
that was – but it was one of these houses, that is, similar but not the same.
AB: Just as replicas are similar but not the same … Was
this system of dwellings something that you intended?
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3. See Kim Stringfellow, Jackrabbit
Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape (Chicago: Center for American Places, 2010).
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JB: Yes, I was very interested in portraying a number
of houses, or kinds of houses, that are in the original film, mostly that they
drive by. This is the first one that we have a good look at. They’re camping
next to it, and Peter Fonda walks around and picks up some relics that are left
behind, and you see that there was life there at one time. And then, later in
the film, they camp at an Anasazi ruin, from around
900 AD. The ruin is still standing, and was the centre point of culture in the
South West at that time; in fact, in Chaco Canyon there were structures made
out of stone large enough to house 900 people. The Anasazi stayed there until around 1000 AD, and then vacated, building cliff dwellings
to the north at Mesa Verde, so they were either running from something or just
moving on. After they left Mesa Verde, they probably became the modern Pueblo
Indians. So the first house you see is a squatter’s house and the second is
something much older that connects to this amazing Anasazi culture, much more sophisticated than the little houses in the desert. The Anasazi built irrigation systems and lived off the land in
a place that was very harsh.
AB: So these structures are historical markers?
JB: Yes, those two, and then later there’s a mansion
outside of New Orleans, an antebellum house that probably had slaves, and also
the black church that I mentioned before, and a number of other structures –
the Pueblo at Taos, a gas station in Arizona, some houses in New Orleans’
French Quarter, and a gasoline cracking plant.
AB: The commune is a dwelling as well, although you
don’t represent it as a physical structure.
JB: Before they get to the commune, you see the Pueblo
at Taos. They drive by it right before. I filmed it using the same angle and
framing that Hopper used. The commune they wanted to film at was near the
Pueblo. But it was having so many visitors that they didn’t want any more
publicity, so they wouldn’t let them film there. They ended up making a replica
of it in the Malibu Canyon and filmed it there. I didn’t want to film in the
Malibu Canyon, so I filmed a river instead. There’s a reference to the river in
the commune scene, a woman says something about the water being very cold. The
commune scene is seventeen minutes long, which is the same length as the
aggregate of the fire shots, so that fire and water are equally represented in
my film.
9. EXT. HORSE – DAY.
10. EXT. MOTORCYLE – DAY.
AB: With these two shots, are you breaking with your
principle of replacing each scene with a shot? Is it two shots for one scene?
JB: Yes, I guess that is true – a flaw in the system.
Actually, the house, too, is part of that scene, so there are three shots for
that scene. This is when one of the bikes has a flat tire and they push it into
a ranch yard, and ask the rancher if they can use some tools to fix the flat.
Coincidentally, the rancher is shoeing his horse, and they crosscut between the
wrenching and the shoeing, two ways of life, two different speeds. They then
sit down with the family and have lunch. It’s a really idealised view of life,
and they recognise that, but move on. The horse is my neighbour’s up in the
Sierra Nevada just down the road from my Two Cabins project, and the bike is
mine, shot in my Val Verde backyard. So the locations are wrong, but that’s
because I never did find the location of that scene.
11. EXT. FARMHOUSE – DAY.
JB: The lunch takes place out on the porch. I think it
was a movie set somewhere in Arizona that no longer exists. I searched and
searched. I really wanted to find it, but never did. Instead, I filmed a field
of cacti in southern Arizona and Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood ranch near Johnson,
Texas, and then composited the two images together, so at least the bottom half
of the frame is in Arizona.
AB: But does this digital creative geography go
against your principle of paying attention to place?
JB: Adding the cacti was my attempt to relocate
Johnson, Texas to Arizona, where the movie set was. In a way I suppose I could
argue that the original ranch was a set, and I just created a virtual set. So,
in some sense, my composed ranch is no less fake than
the movie set ranch. But no argument is really necessary here, I was just
having fun.
AB: You’ve sampled the dialogue from this scene quite
selectively, losing a lot of lines about marriage and the Catholic large
family, and keeping the discussion of living off the land. Is this an important
emphasis?
JB: I also included them saying grace, so there’s a
reference to their religion and family structure. I do leave in the line,
‘Honey, will you get a cup of coffee’? – I think that’s an important line, who’s going to get the coffee. But the most important thing
I wanted to show is that they recognise – or at least Peter Fonda recognises –
that this is an idyllic place, and yet he never makes a right decision
throughout the whole film. When he goes to the commune, I think he wants to
stay but he doesn’t, and he knows that they’re hurting, and he and Dennis
Hopper have lots of money stashed in that gas tank – but they eat their food
and leave nothing behind.
12. EXT. SUNSET CRATER – DAY.
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AB: This shot is really extraordinary – I don’t even
know quite what I’m looking at. The horizon is almost at the top of the frame
and the scale of the image is really hard to read, with what look like giant
clods of earth and tiny trees …
JB: It’s a lava flow. In the film they ride along the
Sunset Crater lava flow and pick up a hitchhiker, who takes them to the
commune. That’s the location where they meet him, you
can see the lava flow in the background. I wanted to look at a pure landscape
that somewhat represented how the world works, showing the kind of force that
it can muster, that these disruptive things can happen, like the birthing of a
mountain. It’s so mysterious that, when we look at it, we don’t even know what
we are seeing. It’s a shot about the mystery of life itself. I often think when
I’m out looking at things: what the hell is all this stuff? Obviously, they
shot the scene there because of the lava and its mysterious look, but they
really don’t look at this spectacular place. It’s just so incredible. Again, I
think they don’t look at things because the film has invested itself in a
narrative that isn’t about paying attention, or learning – it’s about anxiety
and paranoia. And then, afterwards, they advertised that the film is about
looking for America, but there’s no looking for America whatsoever, it’s just
about the big score. As you said earlier, they’re like people who retire to
Florida in their RVs. That’s exactly their desire, to retire in Florida.
AB: I want to return to the issue of the legibility of
this shot – it’s really hard to read this as an image of landscape in terms of
topography, scale, perspective …
JB: There’s a small tree in the frame about a hundred
yards out, but you can’t tell how far out it is, or its actual size, and then
there are huge trees way out on the horizon, but you can’t tell how big they
are. The depth cues are puzzling. It’s why the place is so mysterious. When I
was framing the shot I could see immediately that it questioned perception
itself. What can you believe?
AB: And it’s almost more like land art than landscape; found land art,
maybe.
JB: Exactly.
13. EXT. GAS STATION – DAY.
AB: I like that the gas station shop is called Spirit
Mart, like a reference to the idea of selling out – which is what Fonda and
Hopper have already done, right at the start of the film.
JB: Yes, but I don’t think they, as characters or as filmmakers, saw it
that way.
14. EXT. (CU) FACE AT WINDOW – DAY.
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AB: This shot comes as something of a shock – a face,
in close-up, in a landscape film. It’s especially surprising as your recent
films seem to have followed two distinct traditions from painting, landscape
and portraiture: Faces and Twenty Cigarettes (2011) are portrait
films, and most of your other works are landscape films.
JB: North on
Evers, which is older, mixes landscapes and portraits. I really wanted to
reference the portrait here. In the original film, the window is much smaller
and the shot isn’t so much a portrait, it’s just a young girl looking out of a
window, but here I wanted you to see the person, her face, and how she’s
reacting. I told her to just do absolutely nothing, just look out the window. I
want people to bring their own reading to what she’s longing for. I think it’s
quite a haunting shot.
15. EXT. MONUMENT VALLEY – DAY.
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AB: This is an iconic image, in both films, but done
very differently – in the earlier film it comes at the end of a pan, with a
really lurid sunset and on the soundtrack The Band playing ‘The Weight’,
whereas your shot is in full daylight, very squarely framed, very sedate, very
quiet.
JB: It’s shot from John Wayne Point, near the
visitor’s centre. I spent the whole day there waiting for the most subtle light
shifts of the day. Actually, the light changes quite a bit during the five
minutes of the shot, but it changes so slowly you hardly notice it; and then
there are a few cars driving on a gravel road that look like ants, almost
crawling.
16. EXT. ANASAZI RUIN – SUNSET.
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JB: And then the next shot of the Anasazi ruin
has a rather psychedelic quality.
AB: Did you make this shot at Wupatki Pueblo,
where the original was shot?
JB: You’re right, they shot
their Anasazi ruin at Wupatki,
not too far north of the Sunset lava flow. Wupatki was one of the outstations of the Anasazi, it wasn’t
their main location – that’s in Chaco Canyon, where the big houses are, their spiritual
centre. I shot there and filmed Arroyo House just as the sun set. It looks very
similar to the one in the original film, but mine is a much larger structure.
The light changes strangely throughout the shot. That’s the psychedelic quality
I was referring to. Chaco Canyon is a favourite place of mine.
17. EXT. CAMPFIRE – NIGHT.
AB: You’re interested in the Anasazi and yet you don’t use much of the dialogue that’s concerned with them in this
second campfire shot, when the hitchhiker says, in the original, ‘the people
this place belongs to are buried right under you’.
JB: Yes, I don’t have any of that, instead I focused on ‘where are you from? – it’s hard to say’. That line is
said by the hitchhiker in a real smart-guy way. There’s this tension between
him and Hopper, it’s this macho male thing that I wanted to focus on. You’re
right, the hitchhiker does talk about the need to have respect for the dead
underneath them, which perhaps I should have included, but I thought the image
of the Anasazi ruin itself says that – that this is a
special culture, that it’s worth knowing.
18. EXT. PUEBLO – DAY.
JB: I thought this might be a hard place to film, as
many American Indians don’t want you filming them, or their place. So I thought, if that’s the case, I won’t film there, because I didn’t
want to steal a shot where people regard place as spiritual. I was very
hesitant to go there, but I went anyway, and it turned out I had to pay a
parking fee and a $7 fee for my camera, and then I could film. They had
commercialised the place.
AB: Another spirit mart?
JB: Not at all, it’s understandable, it’s a way
that they can make some money.
AB: Once you’ve looked at the Pueblo, the thing that
really draws your attention in this shot is the wind in the trees. You’ve
talked about having fire and water in the film, but you also have earth and
air, with the lava flow and this wind. Is the idea of the elements – or the
elemental – important in your film, perhaps from the point of view of time, as
it puts the human story in a much longer temporal perspective?
JB: Yes, that idea came into play when I was thinking
about the lava flow, but that’s also why I’m interested in referencing these
ancient cultures. Some of their things are still around, but their history is
largely lost; we really don’t know much about the Anasazi culture, much of it is conjecture. As for the elements, of course … earth,
wind, fire and water.
19. EXT. RIVER – DAY.
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AB: This shot stands for the whole commune scene,
which also begins with water (the river) and ends with it (the swimming place).
Although you’ve explained the practical difficulties with filming the commune,
if you don’t know that, the shot reads like a refusal to cross the river and
enter the community … Almost as if the camera itself is refusing to go indoors
– and it’s notable that the film contains no real interior shots. The river
here seems almost like the road – it runs past, carries things away, rather
than dwelling … (This is where Hopper says ‘If we’re going, we’re going, let’s
go!’) The other thing about this shot is how long it lasts – 17 minutes – and
with very little dialogue.
JB: Well, Hopper is expressing anxiety at being in
this place … and I’m very aware that some of the audience might be feeling that
way, too, having to watch the river, and not quite knowing how to watch it for
that long – although I think it teaches you patience. The light is changing
because the earth is turning, and you really are seeing a document of that. And
the narrative comes in and out. I think you can feel the commune a little bit,
even if you don’t know what it is; you can hear the kids playing, grace is said
for the second time in the film – it’s rather righteous about sharing food, so
there’s this idea of real community. Hopefully, I’m making you feel community
in this tranquil river scene. It’s also referring to Siddhartha (1922) by Herman Hesse. I read Siddhartha about the same time that I
saw Easy Rider. It was the first book
that taught me about time, about flow. Our lives are only understood in memory.
If you look at the timeline, the present is just a point with no dimension – it
separates the future from the past. We cannot travel in time, we are always at
that dimensionless point; the future flows towards us and, as soon as it
becomes the present, it is the past. We only perceive through memory. For
instance, a blinking light doesn’t blink. It is either on or off. The blinking
is understood only through memory, as is movement – any movement or, for that
matter, even stillness. If you give in to this shot, really watch it, you will
actually experience this idea of time and memory.
AB: I’m quite resistant to doing so, and I’m not
entirely sure why … perhaps it’s just impatience, or maybe the modern notion
that one must always be productive, even in leisure, so that there have to be
tangible rewards for paying attention – the time that is spent must accumulate
into intellectual capital. But, in any case, what you give the viewer here is
not just the ‘real time’ of the shot, but the synthetic time of the edited
film: the sampled soundtrack evokes one time, the image another. This is not
the viewer’s own memory, although it may prompt recall; it’s more as if one
film remembers – or memorialises – the other. As so often in your films, you
are working with a purely cinematic time form that doesn’t quite resemble time
or memory as we normally experience them.
20. EXT. SMALL TOWN PARADE – DAY.
AB: This is where the guys get picked up for parading
without a permit.
JB: I filmed that in Springdale, California, rather
than in Las Vegas, New Mexico, but theirs wasn’t shot in Las Vegas either. The
exterior of the jail was in Las Vegas, but the interior was somewhere else – in
another nearby small New Mexican town, as was the parade; so it’s all collaged
together. I filmed Springdale’s annual rodeo parade in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada. It’s a small town and perhaps similar to Las Vegas, neither rich
nor poor. Small towns like parades. I filmed the whole thing; it was marvellous. About an hour long. It started with police cars and
then mounted Marines – the authorities – then there was an unbelievable
matriarch with her black horse and white carriage, waving, followed by a Wells
Fargo stagecoach. What I didn’t show were rodeo queens holding banners
advertising the corporate sponsors – McDonald’s, Bank of America, Pizza Hut,
etc., and over a hundred little girls between six and twelve years old,
twirling batons, and fire trucks, and old cars, and on and on.
AB: Although I missed a lot of what you did show, because
I was looking at the background – at an older woman who drags a huge seat out
from her house into her front yard to sit on while she watches the parade. It’s
almost a sofa. This kind of eccentricity would never appear in the original
film; where there are little fragments of reality, they are never so insistent
or so particular.
JB: Yes, this is the background in my shot. I’m glad
you noticed that. When shots are held long enough it gives the viewer time to
become proactive. You can search the frame for details, discover on your own.
In the original film, the parade scene is narrative-driven. The bikers enter
the parade and are arrested. The parade is used to represent something
provincial, where the bikers are the outsiders. There is no attempt to understand
the small town. The narrative does, however, rely on the fear of bikers that still
existed in the late ‘60s due to the bad press that the Hells Angels were
getting. Today, you see people on Harleys and they are doctors and lawyers or
filmmakers, because they’re the only ones who can afford them.
21. INT. JAIL – DAY.
AB: This shot looks like it might be an interior, but
it’s not really – or rather, it’s from inside the original film, not from
inside a room …
JB: As in Faces,
where I appropriated footage from the original film, this is an image taken
from Easy Rider, from a pan across
the jail cell, showing a drawing on the jail cell wall.
AB: Is it a still? In the original film the drawing is glimpsed very
briefly …
JB: I made it a still – it’s just one frame. I really
like the drawing, so I wanted to give it time in the film. I think it’s a
really great drawing, and the idea of people getting locked up and finding religion
isn’t a false notion. It’s something that happens.
AB: It’s also a very weird piece of graffiti; I
wondered if you were trying to bring out the strangeness of some of the forms
taken by contemporary religious belief, especially in view of its resurgence
since the late ‘60s. The music you’ve used here adds to this feeling of
strangeness.
JB: For sure. The song ‘Born to be Wild’ is performed
by Suzy Soundz, also known as The Space Lady. She’s a street musician from San Francisco. That
song is the only piece of music that’s in both films. This is probably the best
cover I’ve ever heard – I’m sure it affects the way you read the drawing … It’s
a bit from outer space (as I see all religions), but it’s so beautiful too, and
it starts and ends with an electronic sound that mimics a motorcycle.
AB: It’s a very feminine rendition of a somewhat
masculine song – you seem to be adding female voices to the film with your
musical choices.
JB: I was very conscious of trying to liberate the
film from its macho point of view, and lately most of the music I like is by
women, so I chose what I thought was the best.
22. EXT. STREET – DAY.
23. EXT. DISUSED STOREFRONT – DAY.
AB: The next two shots break your pattern again – not
only do they cover a single scene, but there is an analytic edit between them;
the second shot gives us a closer view of a portion of the first.
JB: Yes, rules at times must be broken. I really liked
the signs on the abandoned building in the background, so I did a second shot
just of the building, a kind of detail. That way you can read the political
campaign signs tacked on the boarded-up windows, and you can also see a plaque above
the door reading, ‘Navajo Textiles’ – which could be a business owned by
Navajos, or a white business using Navajo in its name as a marketing ploy, as
so many did. When I was in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where these shots were made,
there was a county election, and the local paper had an article about all the
candidates. I got interested in the election, especially the wife of the last
Treasurer, who was run out of office for fraud. His wife was now running for
that office and had a budget greater than all the other candidates put
together. Probably her husband’s fraud profits. I’m
not sure who won.
AB: It must be her poster that has the slogan
‘Experience Matters’. Not necessarily her own experience, though! This building
is also a ruin of a sort, isn’t it?
JB: Yes, it was empty. As in a lot of small towns,
sometimes half the buildings are now empty and in ruins; young people leave
early looking for work and life elsewhere.
AB: The passers-by move very slowly, and several cars
cruise by very slowly, too. There’s a real sense of things slowing down, maybe
even grinding to a halt, that says something about the economic condition of
the small town – as well as being a part of the cinematic slowing down of Easy Rider that your film performs. One
of the cars is a police car, which is a lucky catch, given that it’s at this
point in the original film that the guys get out of jail – it communicates a
rather oppressive sense that the police and the power (or abuse of power) they
represent are never far away.
JB: This shot is very near the town square. I filmed
there on a Saturday afternoon. Young people cruise the square on weekends for
entertainment, to show off their cars, or motorcycles, or girlfriends. It’s
another kind of parade, and it takes on the pace of a parade. The motorcycle
that you hear at the end of the shot was recorded there. The police car was
making its hourly rounds. When I filmed there. the procession really hadn’t yet begun, but by the time I
packed up it was in full swing.
24. EXT. PASTURE – DAY.
AB: This shot of a herd of newly shorn sheep grazing
replaces a section of travelogue, with traveling shots of countryside and country people standing by the roadside. Again, you’re
stopping to look at something in particular, instead of just passing by. There
are a number of shots of animals in the film – maybe more than people, or at
least as many – the horse, the Texas Longhorn, the sheep, and they’re given
quite a lot of space. Is this a meaningful system?
JB: They’re basically there because I wanted to
represent the countryside and how it’s used, for grazing in this case, to
provide both food and clothing, and in the case of the horse, how it provides
riding pleasure. But I also want to look closer, to see how animals act, to see
how much closer they live to the necessities of life.
25. EXT. CAMPFIRE – NIGHT.
AB: In this campfire scene, you’ve cut the
conversation about how aliens have been living amongst us since 1946 – ‘they
are people just like us from within our own solar system’. Was it too funny to
leave in?
JB: It was just too narrative and too much talk about
drugs. Too boring. The rant about aliens among us by
Nicholson is the kind of thing that seems genius when you’re stoned, but really
it’s just plain stupid. That’s why I can’t understand the allure of drugs.
Malcolm X was right. But I did like Hopper’s excitement when he thought he saw
something. It’s funny because he’s been seeing things the whole time, but he
never has that excitement. Now when he’s in an altered state and he sees
something that’s not recognisable, he gets excited. I really grew to like
Hopper, just because he was so paranoid and I don’t think he was acting.
26. EXT. TEXAS LONGHORN – DAY.
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AB: You’ve mentioned this shot already. Again, it equates with one of
these travelogue sequences, in which the camera sometimes passes people and
animals without pausing to look at them, and they’re not individuated, they’re
types: look, there’s some poor people; look, there are Mexicans; look, there
are animals. You stop to look at the steer …
JB: And he looks back. What I like about this shot is that the Longhorn
steer is chewing grass, and he swallows, and when he does that he puts his head
forward and stares more. It’s really just the action of swallowing but, for
someone nervous like myself, a few feet away from a
large animal, when he did this he scared the crap out of me. I thought he was
going to charge.
AB: This is one of a number of occasions where the gaze of the camera is
fairly directly returned, isn’t it?
JB: Yes, it’s true. There are the people in Las Vegas, New Mexico, as
well, and the girl in the gas station – well, she doesn’t quite look back, but
she looks out.
AB: And it’s a powerful look that’s given space.
JB: We are watching her too, you’re aware of that. But in the other
cases, you’re aware of being looked at.
27. EXT. BRIDGE-
DAY.
AB: What river does this bridge cross?
JB: The Mississippi at Nachaz.
AB: Is it the exact same bridge?
JB: I like to think so, but I’m not completely sure. If it’s not the
exact same one, it’s very similar and was probably constructed at the very same
time.
AB: This is a moving shot … is it the only one?
JB: Yes, it’s a tracking shot from my car. It’s almost like the bridge
is moving past the camera, because the sky looks stationary.
AB: I don’t know if you can be allowed that argument and the one about
the river shot documenting the earth turning!
JB: You need to read Einstein’s Theory
of Relativity. If I asked you to describe the way the light moves in the
river shot, you probably would say during the seventeen minutes the sunlight
moves across the frame. This of course isn’t at all true. The sun focuses the
light in one direction, and since the earth is turning on its axis, it’s the
river that is moving, not the light. So this shot actually documents how much
the earth has turned (or how much the river has moved) over its
seventeen-minute duration. (The camera is also rotating since it is sitting on
a tripod that is fixed to the earth.) With the tracking shot across the bridge,
the camera is moving of course, but since the sky is completely blue and offers
no cues for orientation, one can easily be fooled into thinking that it is the
bridge that is moving, and that the camera is stationary. This is the same
illusion that fools one into thinking that the light was moving in the river
shot.
AB: I’m not convinced – and I’m starting to feel dizzy
…
28. EXT. CHURCH
BUILDING – DAY.
AB: This is this shot of a Southern church that you’ve mentioned. The
shot replaces a montage of views of New Orleans that dwells particularly on the
‘shotgun’ houses in predominantly black areas like the Lower Ninth Ward. I’m
interested by your decision not to show this type of housing.
JB: I could have shown a shotgun house, I was going to do it, but then I
backed off the idea. When I did organising in Springfield, Missouri, I lived in
one, with three rooms in a line, though it would have been hard to shoot a
shotgun through it because the front door was on the left, and the back door
was on the right, so a bullet would have had to kind of zig-zag through the house.
AB: And why would you want to shoot a gun through the house? I’ve always
wondered that. There is another explanation of the name, which is that it was a
corruption of an African word that came via Haiti and was misheard or
misunderstood. According to this theory, the design also comes from Africa. In
any case, with the shot of the church, you’ve opted for an image that is
socially and culturally much less specific, and quite hard to read.
JB: The loose boarding on the building is a hint that it’s perhaps in a
poor location. But it’s kept up, the grass is cut. There’s a cemetery off to
the right with the graves above ground, typical in Louisiana. You can’t easily
tell if it’s poor white or black, but it’s not rich.
AB: In choosing an image to replace a sequence, there
are instances where you’ve looked for something that distils the essence of the
sequence, or communicates its most important characteristic or function; then,
at other times, you’ve chosen to pay attention to something that the original
film passes by too quickly, like the lava flow. But there are other
possibilities too, including choosing images that offer a direct or indirect
critique of the scene in the original; but also simply blocking or screening
out those meanings. And, in some respects, this is inevitable, as choosing just
one image effects such a reduction in signification – one shot is unlikely to
signify in the variety of ways that half a dozen or more shots can. This seems
to me to be a prime example of this effect – the meaning in this shot is
quickly exhausted; it’s not so much ambiguous as incommunicative, and no amount
of looking will change that. It is what it is. You’re interested in looking and
learning but also, it seems to be, in the simple fact of objecthood – some things just are what they are … I guess this isn’t really a question,
but something you might comment on.
JB: I agree. A number of images in quick succession
can bring about meaning. Usually the meaning that is presented is just that – it’s
presented. It’s determined by juxtaposition, and the meaning is contrived.
There is little room for discovery. By presenting one image for a longer period
of time, meaning is found by the viewer. Oh sure, I still choose the image and
its framing, so part of its meaning is mine. But, by allowing the image to be
examined, the viewers can also come to their own conclusions. In the case of
the church, there are things to be seen: it’s rural, it has above-ground
graves, it’s quiet, a board is loose above the front entrance, there is a small road close by (suggested by the off-screen
sound). The image asks who you are, compared to what you’re seeing. Is this
completely foreign? Now, I do agree I picked an image that is much less loaded
than the black poverty of ‘60s Louisiana as seen in the original film. I really
wanted to stay away from such a loaded image; perhaps it’s too final, or maybe
too recognisable, or too easy, or too cliché. All of which it wasn’t in the ‘60s.
29. EXT. DILAPIDATED STOREFRONTS – DAY.
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AB: This shot of storefronts corresponds to the scene
in the redneck café in the original.
JB: This was in Morganza,
Louisiana. I went there knowing that the café was gone, thanks to Google Maps
street level. When I got there, I found that the stoop is still there, but the
building was gone, except for one row of bricks at the bottom. And there was a
little plaque on the sidewalk out front saying Easy Rider was shot there, listing the names of the local people
who were in the film – which is pretty cool. It looked rather new, like it
might have been put up just a few years ago.
AB: Are the storefronts near there?
JB: They’re actually not, they’re quite a ways away … They’re
in Maricopa, a small town just south of Taft, in the southwest corner of
California’s Great Central Valley. When I saw them they reminded me of Easy Rider, for some reason, I don’t
know why – an old town falling apart – and when I got to Morganza,
there were a number of buildings that were really dilapidated, on the main
street that runs alongside the railroad track, not at all unlike the buildings
in California. So they’re not the right buildings, but they have the right feel
– of things that are left empty when businesses fail, or people die or move on.
AB: There are several contradictory ways of thinking
about this shot. It’s very beautiful in a rather abstract way, with a texture
like a Rauschenberg collage, and these rich colours, and the geometric lines
and the repetition of rectangles, almost like a strip of film, even …
JB: And the blue sky is really blue, and the red on top is gorgeous …
AB: … but at the same time, it is a political image –
or at least a social or economic image. As you’ve said of some of the other
small town images in your film, it’s an evocation of the crisis …
JB: Yes, you really feel it in that image.
AB: But do those qualities conflict? Is there a risk
in seeing beauty in de-industrialisation and dereliction?
JB: One can argue that I’m aestheticising poverty but, in this case, it’s not necessarily poverty, it’s the past – it’s aestheticising the loss of the past. At one time, those
were functioning buildings …
AB: They were probably beautiful then, too.
JB: I do like some things purely for their aesthetics,
and sometimes that can get in the way of your thesis. I know where your
question is coming from, but I don’t have a defence really. For me, it
represents forty-some years ago, just that things happen, again, there’s this
kind of entropy … The café is now actually a vacant lot, which wouldn’t have
looked all that interesting on film, but it might have been interesting, just complete absence, and perhaps that could have been
more powerful, to show that there’s nothing there, it’s gone. I don’t have to
represent it, it’s just gone.
AB: I’m interested in what you say, in relation to the
way that some people have occasionally interpreted your interest in landscape
as environmentalism. But it strikes me that you’re as interested in man-made
landscapes as in natural ones, and that you have a palpable affection for the
way things used to look – for mid-twentieth century American design, really.
The distinction between natural and man-made beauty doesn’t seem important in
your work.
JB: I’d agree with that. I still want to see things
for how they are and, if they’re beautiful, that’s okay. But a lot of people
drive by those buildings and don’t see them that way, and then if they see my
film they might say, ‘oh, wait, maybe there is something to appreciate in decay’.
But it does border on nostalgia and romanticism. You are right about me having
no prejudices between the man-made or the natural. The surface of the Great
Salt Lake is as grand as the Jetty itself – and the other way around, too.
30. EXT. DILAPIDATED STOREFRONTS – DAY.
AB: There are two shots of storefronts, one after
another, and again an exterior standing for an interior, which seems to
reinforce that idea of the camera not wanting to go inside. There is a sense of
distancing here. I like the idea that, if the camera doesn’t go inside. maybe the guys could avoid their fate this time, maybe they
won’t encounter the rednecks and Jack Nicholson’s character won’t be killed …
JB: Although the second shot actually represents an
exterior, as it corresponds to the exterior shots, where the girls follow them
outside and ask for a ride.
31. EXT. CAMPFIRE – NIGHT.
AB: In this fourth campfire scene, there is a long
speech, which you include. Jack Nicholson’s character talks about freedom, and
about how people – he means Americans – talk a lot about freedom but, how if
they meet a really free person, that scares them and they react violently – and
then it happens. Why have you preserved so much of this speech?
JB: For me this is the most important speech in the
film, the idea that one can try to be free, and what complicates that, how many
forces are there against you living your life the way you want to. I left the
speech in, but I cut out Hopper’s interruptions, because it flows really well
without them. This speech can be read as how America has treated the world in
the 20th century.
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AB: The idea of freedom crops up in some of your other
recent work – in relation to Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski, both of who
laid claim to notions of freedom in their writing. Kaczynski even signed his
bombs ‘Freedom Club’, which is also part of the title of the book about your
cabins project. (4)
JB: Kaczynski’s notion of freedom is very interesting,
that is, we should have freedom to control what’s important in our lives, not
freedom to control other people. Freedom to control the important things in
life, like food, clothing, shelter, and being able to defend oneself. But that
doesn’t mean you have the right to control other people – which is ironic
coming from Ted.
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4. Julie Ault (ed.), (FC) Two Cabins by JB (New York: A.R.T. Press, 2011).
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AB: His actions proved the limitations of his
thinking. If you define freedom as control over what happens to you and your
environment, then sooner or later you’re going to come up against other people
and their freedom, and this theory gives you no basis on which to resolve those
conflicts peacefully. Of course, some of his ideas about freedom stem from the
mainstream, as enshrined in the constitution, including the second amendment,
which affirms a man’s right to bear arms.
JB: But Kaczynski does separate his ideology from his
violent behaviour. He has said that his violent acts came out of pure anger,
there was no political motivation involved whatsoever – they were purely from
being angry and wanting revenge. I do, however, think the idea that freedom is
the freedom to control your own life, but not anyone else’s, is quite
beautiful. But, of course, as you suggest, this doesn’t work in the real world.
Nevertheless, for me it is an important utopian idea.
32. INT. BROTHEL (DETAIL OF FRESCO – NUDE) – DAY.
33. EXT. ROADSIDE (HIGH ANGLE SHOT OF BURNING
MOTORCYCLE) – DAY.
34. INT. BROTHEL – (DETAIL OF FRESCO – MARY) – DAY.
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AB: Let’s
talk about these three shots together. They relate to the scene at the brothel,
and they’re all footage from the original film, aren’t they? Two stills and one
moving shot.
JB: The famous flash-forward to the burning
motorcycle.
AB: Yes.
These three shots create a symbolic knot, combining sex and death, and also the
Madonna and the whore. That’s in the original scene, but you’ve given it
considerably more emphasis. At the same time, the idealisation of the whore
rather confounds this opposition – up in the sky, she looks as though she’s
made of clouds; she’s much more heavenly than Mary …
JB: Yes,
that’s what the brothel would want you to feel, that’s what they’re providing,
an angel … It’s a representation of the brothel scene, and where I used the
track ‘Troubled Waters’ sung by Cat Power, which codes both the prostitute and
Mary as the devil’s daughter. So it works the other way, too.
AB: And one
of the prostitutes in the scene is actually called Mary. Is your main concern
here just to foreground the ideologies that are at play in the original, and to
leave the audience to form their own opinions about these?
JB: Yes, but
then I don’t know if the Cat Power song is reinforcing that, or changing the
meaning. For me the song is acknowledging how a woman might feel about being a
prostitute. Nobody grows up wanting to be a prostitute, and the song talks about
people scorning the woman; so it’s about how a woman might feel in that
position. And then, when the same song plays over the image of the mother of
God, I think about how religion often works. I watch TV evangelists who ask
poor people to give them the little money that they have – that’s really evil,
to target people who have little money. As you suggested, the way women were
treated in the original film was at best as objects. I am trying to question
their imaging of women, in the brothel scene, and in the film.
35. EXT. FRENCH QUARTER – DAY.
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AB: This is a very different view of the French
Quarter, where the brothel is.
JB: It was
shot in the morning at the corner of Dauphine and St Louis Streets, dead centre
of the French Quarter. It’s two beautiful residences, rather than places for
nightlife – although there is a bar on the street level of the yellow building.
In my shot, you can hear ambient street sounds with the low rumble of a few cars
and trucks, mixed with the calls of morning doves. In
the original film, the sound of Mardi Gras lingers in the early morning
streets.
AB: More dwellings …
JB: Yes,
both quite beautiful. I suppose many people would love living there. It’s
almost a dream. But, for me today, it would be like living in hell. I’d rather
be fixing up that squatter’s shack in the desert.
36. EXT. CEMETERY –
DAY.
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AB: This is
the famous cemetery scene, filmed in St Louis Cemetery No. 1. To represent this
whole scene, you’ve used a shot of the statue of a weeping child that sits on
top of one of the bigger mausoleums. Another feminine image …
JB: Yes, it
portrays fragility; it is literally fragile from a hundred or more years of
acid rain (again entropy), but she endures. Yes, it is feminine and fragile,
but also strong. I took no sound while shooting this shot. I use the full
soundtrack from the original film. This is the only shot in my film that does
this.
AB: With the
religious statues and the prostitutes, the iconography of the Madonna and the
whore persists in this scene in the original film. Your use of the statue of
the weeping child displaces that a bit, although I’m not sure what meanings it
produces instead – maybe bereftness, or compassion for
the bereft.
Your film
generally has a more melancholic tone than the original, and I don’t know if
this is just because of the time that has passed, or if it’s because your film
is slower. Maybe when you don’t move past things so quickly, the transience of
things themselves – and our own transience – starts to appear. I find it a sad
film, but I’ve only watched it on my own – have audiences found it so?
JB: People
have commented that they felt it was very sad. But would you call the original
film sad, or a different kind of sad? Are they just bringing that to mine?
AB: The
original film is coloured by a strong sense of failure or defeat, almost from
the start. And it’s funny, because it was made at a time just before you could
really see that ’68 had failed. This feeling of failure would make more sense
if it was made a year or two later. I don’t think your film has quite that
sense of failure about it.
JB: Maybe it does, but maybe it’s today’s failure.
AB: The
sadness might be the effect of taking the characters out of the film. It
becomes a bit desolate as a result. But perhaps it also makes us think about
more general problems – like global warming – because we're not distracted by
the concerns of individuals?
JB: Well,
the characters aren't completely removed from the film, but I suppose they do
only exist as ghosts; ghosts that are made to return to the scene of the
crime.
37. EXT. MANSION –
DAY.
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AB: We already talked a bit about this mansion.
JB: Referencing slavery.
AB: A house
like this is a very overt sign of wealth, and raises the question of where
wealth comes from.
JB: Yes, one
can’t make that kind of money without participating in some form of
exploitation.
38. EXT. CAMPFIRE – NIGHT.
AB: And this
is the fifth campfire, where Peter Fonda says ‘We blew it!’ It’s an important
line of dialogue, but kind of surprising.
JB: It does
come out of nowhere. Which is why so many ask ‘what does it mean?’. I think it is obvious. A better question would be, why was it said?
39. EXT. GASOLINE CRACKING PLANT – DAY.
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AB: This
shot stands in for a montage of shots depicting the oil industry in the South.
JB: They
pass by a number of oil refineries, and you see them from the bridge, I think,
driving Northwest out of New Orleans, near Lake
Charles.
40. EXT. COUNTRY ROAD – DAY.
41. EXT. LAKE –
DAY.
42. EXT. COUNTRY ROAD – DAY.
AB: The last
group of shots in the film, from the cracking plant onwards, read like a
montage on the theme of ecological disaster. The film ends with three very
green shots, accompanied by a song which talks about how you can’t play with
polar bears, because they’re not feeling well today. It even includes the line
‘you can’t change the world’. You’ve moved away from the individual deaths of
the characters to this much bigger issue – is that how you want your film to be
read?
JB: The song
was written and performed by The Sibleys, a brother
and sister band that has come of age in Wonder Valley, somewhere in the middle
of the Mojave Desert. They were home-schooled by their mother. That line about
polar bears is very important to me. And yes, there are big issues at stake.
You can’t read it any other way. They’ve been hiding their money in the gas
tank and they go past a gas refinery, the gas tank blows up … When they say ‘we
blew it’, it wasn’t about the oil industry – but, for me, it is. The whole film
is driven by gasoline, literally.
AB: But so is your film.
JB: Yes, I’m
part of it. There’s no way to deny that I burn a lot of gasoline. Luckily, we
only have a few hundred years more of that stuff left.
AB: So you
wind up caught in a contradiction, looking at the problem from the inside?
JB: It’s
like that old Pogo cartoon: ‘We met the enemy and it was us’.
AB: Or like
Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to the future: ‘Dear future generations, please accept
our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum’.
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from Issue 5: Shows |
© James Benning and Alison Butler, October 2012/January 2013. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |
