Cinema can tell stories or
just evoke them depending on the imagination of the spectator.
Between this very simple statement there are numberless shades of
grey. In the Forum-program (the festival presented a restored version
blown up on a 35 millimetre print) one can read: “11x14 is
film theory in images.”
The more films we see the
more books on film we read, over the years a certain accumulation
about cinema is approached.
But what is this knowledge
actually worth it if it is not paired with impartiality, a fresh
mind which still preserve a certain kind of openness? Some years ago,
I watched with a friend Benning´s RR, film composed of long
static shots about trains passing by. Suddenly a person from the
environment of my family came to my mind, someone who has nothing to
do with art, avantgarde,- or experimental cinema but who is a
passionate lover of everything which has to do with railroad or
trains. I can imagine that he would have enjoyed the film at least as
much as I did.
The screening of James
Benning´s first long film 11x14 is not just a rediscovering
of a part of film history but it seems to me as an audiovisual quest
for the reason why we love watching films and what fascinates us that
we can´t stop staring at the screen. Knowledge is a good thing as
long as it does not interfere with a certain curiosity.
There is a long shot
taking place in a local driving train on the way over suburbs to a
big American city. I felt it was about 8 to 10 minutes long. If there
was a cut between this long moment, I have not recognized it. We see
a person dozing in front of the front window of this rail car. We can
hardly recognize more of this person than a shadow. The front window
becomes a screen itself and we see for now nothing else than the
landscapes passing by: industrial regions, suburbs. The noise of the
rail car sliding on the rails is omnipresent.
At first it looks like a
visual demonstration of André Bazin´s thought that the apparatus
and the filmmaker retreat in front of what they reveal, the piece of
the real world displayed on the railcar´s front window. On the other
hand it appears to me as poetry not far away from this long Bob Dylan
song which appears at least twice in this film.
I have often thought and
occasionally written about the affinity between the mechanical aspect
of analog cinema ( both for recording and projecting) and trains,
especially in the films by Ozu. Despite the differences in scenes for
example like the famous train sequence in Ozu´s Banshun, the
train scene in Hitchock´s North By Northwest and their
different dealing with time, these moments came back to my mind.
While Ozu´s and Hitchcock´s montage creates an artificial time,
Benning uses a piece of real time. But despite these differences, all
three train moments are intense and unforgettable. The windows of
this train finally reveal a piece of world beyond the frame of the
film.
The late 70s in Benning´s
11x14 is for me less abstract than Ozu´s post war Japan of
the late 40s or Hitchcock´s thriller of the late 50s, because it
takes place in my life time. It gives me an idea about time which has
passed long ago within my existence.
Cracks in walls and
buildings are visible. The noise of trains sliding on their rails is
almost an acoustic memory of mine in the 1970s, signs of the fugacity
of buildings and machines. The film itself seems like a laborious
restored and preserved ruin. The sense for the mortality of all
things, which is now nearly disturbed by digital image making
devices, is very special here. This is another analogy I often
thought the chemical memory of film and the biochemical of living
beings.Once recorded the whole art, poetry and idea of a film like
11x14 is depending on the matter on which it is recorded like a
human memory from a living body.
Another moment of this
film stays with me. It takes place in a kitchen of an elderly couple.
On the left side of the frame we see the woman making the dishes, on
the right side the man is sitting on a table. Right in the middle of
the picture, we see a corridor which leads into the “depth of the
image” Another person is sensible at the end of the corridor,
probably taking a shower in rooms which are hidden in this shot.This
shot emphasizes at the same time the flatness of the film image but
also its ability to create an illusion of space. In the same shot
the film is what it is but also what it can evoke.
“Film keeps time
captured like amber”, German filmmaker Winfried Junge once said.
The sentence in mind makes each moment in 11x14 unforgettable.
For minutes an image does
not show anything but a big factory chimney which is blowing huge
masses of smoke into the air. Again the Bob Dylan song. At first it
seems like an endless loop of one of these “empty shots” of Ozu
but the longer this moment lasts the stronger my feeling for its
transience increases. Even though this shot seems to get rid of all
traces of “meaning”, it seems very precious to me.
Young people enjoy a
picnic in a park. On a big field, we see a combine harvester. This is
a film where even the small transitions between every shot is
memorable.
And often the films
appears to me as a composition of recorded memories as authentic as
film can capture memories.
The
Austrian Film museum in Vienna restored this film in collaboration
with the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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