11 x 14 (James Benning, 1977)
From the mini-narratives of
One Way Boogie Woogie to the layered, ambiguous, open-ended threads that inhabit
11 x 14. There is a narrative residing here, but the concrete moments turn out to be nothing more than ephemeral. Conversation, little that there is, is overpowered by background noise, but they inevitably seem to be passing through the stillness of the frame, and the implacable nature of the landscape. We become familiar with the characters. We ride, looking through the front window of the Evanston Express as we travel towards downtown Chicago for 11 unbroken minutes. The silhouette of a woman accompanies us in the foreground of the frame. At the end, we stop for the first time at a station, and she gets off, replaced by another. We cut. There was an intimacy, but of entirely unusual and different sort. The next long take is of two nude women reclining on a bed. One lying on her back, the other lying the other way, her back to us. Dylan's
Black Diamond Bay plays in its entirety. A study of nudes imbued with this gently-charged formal eroticism, as the stillness is broken by simple stroking. The woman with her back to us shifts position, and they embrace, both of them hidden to us, off in their own intimate space.
Dylan's
Black Diamond Bay is played in its entirety again, this time as a smokestack blithely pumps out white vapour. It induced a sort of mesmeric reverie in me, as I started making connections and leaps - you know, those wonderful moments of clarity and introspection you get when the visual and the mental part ways - that are not directed by the artist, but somehow sublimated by our interaction.
All this embedded in the landscapes of the midwest - South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois - with urban decay, and rural quietude, and constant human-sourced movement that careens across the screen in perfectly choreographed movements. There is movement and existence on film, but it can only go so far. It's all really light and sound and movement, and the rest exists somewhere else.