Ruhr | James Benning, Steve Anker

welcome to the Billy Wilder theater home of the public programs for the UCLA film and television archive my name is Paul Malcolm I'm a programmer at the archive before we begin as a land-grant institution the film and television archive at UCLA I would like to acknowledge our presence on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Gabrielino antonva peoples we are humbled to do work in this community all the archived screenings in the Billy Wilder theater are free admission thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor and we are grateful for that support finally as you may know LA County guidelines have allowed some establishments to lift their indoor Mass requirements for guests UCLA however still requires mask wearing indoors at its facilities regardless of vaccination status outside of guests on stage speaking everyone is required to keep their Mass on during tonight's program and we really thank you for honoring this request we'll get there one of these days soon we are always looking for ways to improve our operations at the theater and our offerings on screen and hearing from you is an important part of that if you RSVP for this event via Eventbrite we will be sending you out a follow-up email survey so keep an eye out for that and we'd love to hear back from you so um take a moment and send it back thank you very much uh okay housekeeping done thank you all so much for coming out to the first screening in our weekend long celebration of the extraordinary 50-year career of James Benning contested Landscapes three digital features by James Benning was curated by James Brennan and Steve anchor both of whom are here with us tonight so if we can get a round of applause for both of them right now I want to thank James and Steve for organizing this program together for us and for their patients during the two years that we were waiting to put this on this was originally supposed to happen in the spring of 2020 and now we're finally here so thank you to both of you I also want to thank the Hammer Museum and our amazing colleagues there for co-presenting this program with us the entire weekend so thank you Hammer Museum we were presenting three of benning's digital works over the course of the weekend tonight we are presenting River from 2009 and tomorrow night's Temple pass from 2012. then on Sunday we are thrilled and honored to present the U.S premiere of Benny's latest work United States of America we are especially honored to have James Benning joining us in person tonight and throughout the weekend so thank you again James for being here with us Steve Anker has been a visual of a vital presence in American Film culture throughout his distinguished career as a writer programmer and teacher including 11 years as the dean of the school of film and video at calarts and co-curator of film and video events at Red cut in downtown he's curated series or programs for the Museum of Modern Art New York Pacific Phil archive in Berkeley London International Film Festival Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Ann Arbor film festival and other International festivals and museums it's been a privilege to work with Steve on this and so many other programs over the years so to say a little bit more about the weekend and tonight's programs please help me welcome to the stage Steve anchor good evening everybody it's great to be back here had the pleasure of standing in front of audiences at this wonderful theater a number of times and it's always a special occasion so um I'd like to thank Paul again and KJ Ralph Miller the UCLA film and television archive and the Hammer Museum for co-producing the week's three events as well as the Community Partners Old Town House the Los Angeles gallery that is presenting two new installations by James this month which you'll hear more about later they're opening well one's opening next week and one is already up and they're both special events and then of course also the Los Angeles Film Forum everybody was involved in helping come to pass so James Benning James is an internationally renowned independent filmmaker who has been based in the Los Angeles area and teaching at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987. in over 50 years of continual practice James has self-produced several dozens of films digital works and mixed media installations that have been shown throughout the world including festivals at Khan Hong Kong Berlin Vienna Rotterdam and Sundance to such museums as the Museum of Modern Art the Whitney Museum the Hammer Museum the center Georges pompadou the Tate modern The Walker Arts Center among his many awards are two from the National Endowment of the Arts to Rockefeller foundation fellowships in the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and in 2007 James was the subject of a full career retrospective at the Austrian film Museum in Vienna and I've known James and have shown his work beginning in 1979 in Boston and where he presented 11 by 14 and then a new film then I presented several of his new films over the years in San Francisco in recent years Berenice Reno and I co-curated four evenings of films and videos over the years that we programmed together at Redcat so I'm proud to have been able to see his work develop over these decades and his influence as an artist and as a teacher grow upon the release of James's new major work that Paul just mentioned the United States of America which again will be here on Sunday night at seven o'clock the archive and the Hammer Museum have given us a chance to offer viewers a brief overview of James's later work that's a chance to appreciate James's unique aesthetic and cultural achievement from the 1970s through the early 2000s James became known as a consummate 16 millimeter American landscape filmmaker who created a body of 34 films from the early one-way Boogie Woogie and Landscape suicide through 10 Skies 13 lakes and RR his final 16 millimeter film that used the materiality and the Elegance of 16 millimeter Celluloid image and sound with the richness that few others have equaled a large body of writing is analyzed and recognized the importance of these films culminating with a large collection of critical essays published by the Austrian film Museum titled James Benning and the recent book length essay 10 Skies by Erica Balsam and both of these are are still currently available and they're really rich volumes I encourage you to to get them if you haven't already since 2009 James has been working with digital technology extending his concerns in new ways that were made possible through the new medium the duration of individual shots could be greatly extended with digital to create richer discoveries of time and space and to more fully reveal details and contrasts within each shot that could easily be hidden from View The Uncanny Precision of the digital image could reveal new levels of nuance and subtlety sharpening the viewer's perception their senses and their power of observation farther than ever before much of this later work has been little sane after it first shows and written about other than the moment of its release so now we're able we will be able over these three nights to see three of them once again on a large screen and continuous uninterrupted time as opposed to in a gallery or you know in many cases one was watching them at home when we're able to and that's what it'll take to allow these digital films to have their full effect for James Benning landscape is a function of both immediate and historical time his films established situations where individuals have to confront time or as he said in a recent interview quote time is always the present moment well duration is something else time in film is always an illusion it can speed up slow down have ellipses generally speaking the more things that are happening the faster things seem to go in addition to challenging perception and inevitably every viewer's patience James's entire Uber investigates issues of documentary and Truth narrative anti-narrative personal history race Collective memory Place industry and Landscape so the title of this weekend's three evenings is contested landscapes but it's a title that it can also stand for James's entire body of work in addition to creating mesmerizing fields for sensory Discovery James visits and recreates Landscapes that are contested in their histories their uses their understandings when they test our own assumptions they are contested in who controls their uses who defines their value and who interprets their heritage in a sense every landscape is in conflict and remains contested tonight's film Roar made in 2009 was James's first digital work and remains his only film that was made outside of the United States takes place in Germany's Roar Valley one of that country's main Cradles of industrial manufacturer and activity in ways it's an analog to the American industrial town the working class town of Milwaukee and the area of the Midwest where James grew up we see continual evidence of the forces of industry and there's an invisibility of human labor in most of the shots there's a precision and a repetitiveness to the mechanical automatism automatism evident throughout that is in more contrast to the human activities we also occasionally see and that's in contrast with the continual presence of the natural world I'd like to make one note uh more one more note before we begin I'd like to actually before we begin to introduce James for a few words before but I'd like to mention make one last point which is that the on and off screen soundscapes tonight and of the other films this weekend that are captured and created are every bit as subtle revealing and immersive as the wondrous world of the film's images so they are an important and critical aspect of James's Mastery of the moving image and I just call your attention to maybe occasionally just stepping back and just listening as well as what you're looking at and so I'd like to introduce James Benning who just come up and say a few words I agreed to come up here so I could take my mask off I won't say much except thanks Steve for the comments and the other introductions um yeah let's talk about rare when it's finished [Music] um yeah but now now okay I'll see you in a few minutes actually two hours every time I see that last shot at um becomes more overwhelming to me and actually there's a case where it becomes shorter I don't know if anybody has seen that before but uh one would think that when I've seen it but that's never the case with your work I just like to ask um a couple of things and then we're going to open it up to your questions um I know you spend a lot of time uh any time in each each landscape each part each area that you're working in and you're just a little while ago mentioned uh at dinner that when you made the uh casting a glance the film of the Spiral Jetty the Smithson Spiral Jetty we're out there 16 times um he spent a lot of time in the Rural Valley sure over over over months I think wasn't it and I'm just curious uh uh you must have come to these selections uh gradually and um I would I would assume such as in the case with the last image you must have seen that a lot and had good sense of it uh I was invited to duceberg for two years in a row for the deuceberg film week it's a documentary festival and it's for German films so I didn't have anything to show but they invited me to just be there and to do a master class so for two years I did a master class with German students that applied to be in the class and we did a rendition of my looking and listening class so I was I spent a lot of time with the class going to different areas around duceberg and since I didn't know deuceberg when I first got their I had somebody introduce me to somebody that was in the steel industry and that had access to many places and he led me around that whole area so that when I let led the class I had some experience with the different industrial landscapes and then after being there for two years um at the second time I was at the festival somebody approached me from German television and asked me if I'd want to make a a film there and um I was very enthusiastic about that because there were duceberg reminded me very much of my hometown Milwaukee working class heavy industry um and um full of prejudice so Milwaukee when I grew up [Music] was a a interesting place because it had a socialist mayor for 70 years and it had more strikes in the 30s than any other city in the U.S and yet the unions had exclusionary Clauses to keep black people out of the Union and when I was in duesburg I saw that there was the same kind of separation in the working class between white workers and and Muslim workers so um duisburg inversed me a great deal because I felt like it was kind of a duplicate of what I grew up in and so when they asked me to make a film I said yes I'd like to do it and this is where I'd like to shoot and I pretty much named these particular places because I these were the places I had taken looking and listening class too so I thought I would just kind of duplicate what I was looking at in that class and I haven't seen this film in eight or nine years now and I forgot how much I liked the last shot I think I actually think it's one of the best shots in cinema if I if I wanted for if I want to brag I I mean I just I can't believe I made it so by the time you filmed it you had a sense of of the timing and the sense of of how it would look over over that time you shot it you should you chose Sunset I suppose yeah what what we're looking at is a cooling tower for uh making Coke and I had one review where somebody uh said that I filmed the Coca-Cola plant which I thought was hilarious of um at least I couldn't see a cocaine plant I have that too um but Coke is superheated coal and this is a state-of-the-art Coke plant in the world people come all over from all over the world to study this particular plant in duesburg it has 48 furnaces and the furnaces are about 40 yards long and 50 or 60 feet high and about eight feet across and they fill those with regular coal and then they're superheated uh heating system that Heats these layers of coal equally so there's not any hot spots and after uh I think it's 26 hours of cooking they do a push which means they open the front door and there's a thing on this side and it just pushes all of this superheated coal into a train car so whenever they move the train cars you hear a siren so what you are hearing is the train car going to the to the um the oven and then the coal is pushed into that train car and then the train car has moved about a hundred yards to go underneath the cooling tower and once it's under there as you hear the again the siren when it moves towards that then they jump 30 000 gallons of water onto that superheated coal and the noise that you hear that you think is the smoke noise is actually the coal exploding and going about two-thirds way up that Tower and then falling back into the train car and then the steam is what's being released and there's a series of filters in that tower that supposedly traps most of the the fumes that are dangerous um but there's still quite a few that that escape into the landscape there so it isn't really a healthy place to live but this is this is uh the most efficient Tower that's been developed and the one that pollutes the least um so I was interested in in filming it because of that but it also is so Spectacular from the amount of steam that comes off this 30 000 gallons of water that that's uh he used to cool with coal and then that that's made into Coke Coke is superheated coal and it it burns very hot and that's what's used in a blast furnace to make steel or to make iron ore or to make pig iron out of iron ore uh and then the the scalp sculpture in the film that's uh being clean the graffitis being cleaned off is a Richard Sarah monolith that goes many feet above what you see in my film and it's built on top of a Slag Pile that's about uh well it's quite a big mountain actually of slag which the slag comes from um the coal mining and the nearby industry that's used to make this coke and so Sarah was able to capture to use that whole slag mountain and to level it off and keep the whole flat top clean because it it would grow it's it's has a lot of minerals in it and it actually grows a lot of weeds and and a lot of flowers in the spring and the interesting thing about that is a lot of the flowers that grow on top of that slag uh come from Africa from seeds from the iron ore that's brought from Africa to be made into steel the seeds come along on Auburn they move it there by I believe a railroad and so we have these flowers that are transported along with the the iron r i find that the graffiti on that that structure very poignant actually do you know what I don't know what it says I used to see the hearts yeah you see the face and it's just the idea that it attracted uh you know well whoever the kids or the average people sort of interacting with this uh amazing phenomenon which is also this High art piece actually and uh and then this laborer just taking this extraordinary amount of time to clean it off you know fraction by fraction well it it questions what is art and who claims what art is right so yeah before it gets removed and what gets to stay the funny thing is it took about two weeks to clean all that graffiti off and I went back there six months later and it was full of graffiti again so it's kind of a never-ending job I guess so I find each composition um very extraordinary I mean the uh the second one of the steel mill or the steel I assume that you had enough time plenty of time to determine the exact framing of that yeah a series of motions the the film was um paid for by zdf which is one of the biggest television stations uh in there it is the biggest television station in Germany so um because of that you get a a letter that it almost gets you into anything and then a friend of mine they first assigned me a a producer that I didn't get along with at all so I I hired a friend of mine to be the producer that's fluent in English and German and she was really good at getting us into any place we wanted to go plus this letter from zdf so I was able to spend a couple weeks in two different steel mills in duisburg which was quite fantastic and what you see there is the end process of the steel being made they first take iron ore and heat that into pig iron and then they they the pig iron gets different additives into the steel to make it either sharper so you can you know stronger or uh more malleable and so there's they they add these different additives to that and what you saw here was at the end they kind of squirted out like two toothpaste into these long tubes of molten steel and then that steel you saw at uh red hot in the background that would go this way out of frame and then it turned around and what you saw in the foreground was that same steel only three hours later after it slowly rolled over these kind of wave-like surfaces um so that you see the hot steel and then you see what it looks like about three hours later where it's still very hot but it isn't glowing anymore and that was near the end of it and once it gets there then they're able to start to stack it up and the mosque that uh an amazing shot not only being in that location but yeah that was one of those lucky things where I set up the camera not knowing it was going to be a so crowded and I did it I think an hour and a half shot so it starts with a empty uh empty room and then slowly people come in and then got more crowded more crowded so I'd use just the end of the shot basically and I was really surprised that I like that some people want to leave very quickly and then others stay after and and the individual praying is so different than the group praying so I kind of liked what happens in that shot that we we see them near the end of preying on their own rather than a group and you didn't encounter resentment with the county well it's interesting because that mosque was uh was supposed to be built in Cologne and people a cologne didn't want it there and so I don't know if they couldn't get a permit or they decided Well we don't want to go or we're not wanted and then as the city of duceberg which is poor and and needs you know more income they opened their arms to having a mosque built there and it was interesting also because they built the mosque with very large windows so when you drive by you can look in and see that it's a serious religious ceremony that's got it going on it isn't people plotting to you know take over the world or whatever fantasies we have about Muslims and yeah they were they were very kind they were very happy to have me film there because they wanted to show the process and that they're serious about the religion and uh uh yeah they um I came in with my tripod and and they yelled at me because I didn't clean off the bottom you know and they gave me things to like socks for it to wear and uh so I like that Let's uh let's open it up and uh can you raise your hand if you're interested in commenting or questioning uh having a question about it it's a nice film yes take a minute the first shot is a tunnel that's uh that connects two different parts of the steel mill um and uh it's one of the first places I took my class to because you walk into the tunnel it's like living in black and white and then the colorful car comes through and then you hear sounds from from the steel mill within the tunnel that kind of echo through there there's a in fact there's the sound of a I think it's a train whistle that happens at the very beginning of that tunnel and that same whistle happens at the very end of the last shot so that there's kind of a connection and and I didn't put those there those were actually in the shot that they happen to book in the film with um yeah it's just a very old tunnel that's been there a while and uh it's a way to get from one's part of the plant to another so all that traffic has to do with workers going to work or or changing different places they work the steel mills also are very uh highly controlled by computers at this time so there's hardly any people working in the Mills like it used to be it was I was surprised how few people were actually doing things was mainly of a room with a control room with lots of computers and things that were we're going on where there was a lot of hand work in the past it's right underneath um tremendous amount of activity yeah I mean there's not there used to be tremendous amount of activity now it's mainly all somehow done by machines that are controlled by computers can you speak up well I was just going to say your comment about your last shopping really one of the most extraordinary shots in cinema history I think you're right it's really something oh thank you I mean I was kind of kidding but I wonder I think it's one of your greatest shots yeah well maybe that's true okay there's a one over here wow is just that was amazing uh the still plant and and then the the second part with the coke plant and thank you for explaining about the science of the colon and things but yeah devastating uh you cannot help but think where we are today in the world with our Environmental climate crisis but um I I really had um uh optimism I I know that was filmed like I think a couple of decades ago maybe 2000 no it was just 13 years ago okay only 13 years ago but when you look at Germany today how the green party has gained um growth you know every election and that Germany is like the leader with uh getting away from cold and using renewable energy so to me it's like wow the change that is now happening in Germany versus you know when you film that I I was just wondering um if that cooler Center is still in operation I I guess it might be but certainly Germany has probably become more um regulatory with emissions controls and things like that that maybe aren't happening at that level now that they were when you filmed it they're just fascinating nobody is invented a way to uh get um iron ore to melt into pig iron without using coal Coke so there we still need coke plants so if you're gonna drive a car that has Steel in it you're you're demanding that coke is being made and that things get let into the air however that like I said that coke plant is so much more efficient than it was you know even 30 years ago but it's still admitting things but most most of that is steam that is the but there are dangerous things too um yeah yeah thanks yeah oh okay I just wanted to ask about the sound and to what extent any of it is designed versus captured and I thought of it especially in that first shot because you see that minute piece of plastic kind of going along and and the sound really draws your attention to it and it made me think about how much your yeah how much you're doing on set and how much you're doing later it's it's all shot in sync and then um I also I always take extra sound that's wild so if there's a uh a noise that occurs that is seems out of place I might remove that and occasionally I might add a sound but I try not to um I try not to make it clever you know whatever is manipulations I do to the sound I do it to make it sound more real than um more fantasy like or or or a lie really interested in sound image relationships and how um these little quiet sounds are meaningful and and sometimes alert you to off-screen space and things like that yeah but but it it pretty much sounds um like it should sound you know there's nothing uh added to fool you or make it more dramatic now I know you spoke in terms of having known the locations that you wanted to film but I wonder if you had a structure in mind as to the order that you were going to put them in because I noticed that you began it seems that you began underground and gradually came up I I shot a lot of footage for this film which I generally don't do because I didn't know quite what it was going to be and the the very last shot I made actually is the hour-long shot that is at the end of the film and um I had been shooting the that coke Tower I shot it it's right along the um but it's a famous river in in Germany the long one anyway yeah the Ryan River I I shot it from the other side of the Rhine and I shot it from another vantage point where I was as high as the tower and then the very last day I was there my producer and I we uh had a long lunch uh along the river and then where I was going to go back and shoot it from the top again but it was getting dark so I thought I'll do this one from Below and uh so it was kind of an accident that I shot from that angle but I did want to shoot I knew I wanted to do a long shot that would go from dusk to almost dark because I had been watching the tower and watching the way the the smoke where the uh water vapor would change color at the end of the day that really interested me well at the end of the shot it becomes to me at least quite uh I went off monstrous but it's very dark and that is both physically and emotionally um along with like choosing the shots um I'm wondering like when you decide how long you're going to shoot a certain scene um and does that also um influence kind of what could change what could uh happen on like random things could occur like um say something you weren't expecting you know to happen obviously you're there for many hours but yeah how do you decide how long yeah thanks because I didn't actually answer that one question before um that uh once I did the the hour-long shot um that made me understand what what the structure would be because I knew that I wanted to end the film with that hour so I thought okay I'll take some a number of shots that I had made and make that into an hour so it'd be kind of match the second hour so it kind of built it backwards uh and yeah um when you shoot over time you do learn things um but most of this I learned from uh taking my class to these places and observing uh especially at the Dusseldorf airport I took my class under the where they're right at the end of the runway where the planes are landing and we went there kind of later a little later in the day and um I like the landing lights were lighting up the forest and that's the shot I actually wanted to do but when I tried to do that they weren't as bright as I thought they were and they didn't register well on my uh high definition camera um so then I went back the next day and I filmed earlier in the day um and I didn't realize that uh when Jets land they actually drag behind them a weather system and it really uh and it it lags behind so after they pass by what was it 10 or 15 seconds you feel like coming through and then because I was lucky enough to shoot on day where there was no wind you you could tell that the it was the Jets that were creating this weather system uh pulling this behind and the leaves would fall it was I shot it in November so it was at that time of the year that so those things are kind of an accident and uh but if you go and you know if you put yourself in enough places you uh generally find some good accidents like that so I really like that shot and then the timing of that shot the airplanes kind of come in one after another but not exactly at the same pace so some come in faster than others so I like the way the time worked in that shot that it isn't you know a plane comes a plane comes and then one doesn't come for a while and one comes and with the last shot um that process would since they have these 48 ovens they can do a push every about nine minutes and when I was filming after two pushes that we saw two of these they had trouble pushing that one and the process was delayed and so there's a section in the and film where there isn't a push for about 15 or 16 minutes so I kind of like that that this was supposed to be uh I thought I knew the timing would be nine minutes nine minutes nine minutes or nine minutes but that didn't happen and then when it didn't happen it was at the best part of the shot it was where Knight was really just starting so since there was no push you get for it to look at the sky for nine minutes as it slowly gets darker and there you there's some really beautiful blue colors and so again this is kind of lucky that the in the process they had a problem and uh uh it it didn't give what was expected and I like those kind of surprises quick thing um have you ever seen uh Chantal ackerman's news from home I thought a lot about the ending of that movie compared to this and it yeah yeah I've seen that many times and the end is it pulling away and and uh yeah this gives me the same sense of utter Doom yeah personally but God bless her soul hey James um I apologize because I had to step out at the beginning of the Q a so I'm sorry if someone has already asked this question or Steve had asked this question because Steve was suggesting to be suggesting that every time you see one of your films as an audience member and second viewing you experience the duration of time differently and suddenly there can be things it always seems to me Second Time Around narrative elements start to come in because you're sus there's an element of suspense as you wait for the biceps bicycles to come in or you wait for the because you know the next plane's coming so we're experiencing duration differently on multiple viewings and so I'm very curious how you experience that when you're producing the films and really related to your last answer when you're thinking about how long the shot's Gonna Last there's that first time when you see the footage you're experiencing duration in one way the second time you see it you're experiencing it maybe it feels like it's moving a little faster or that kind of thing do you ever have to do you have a process or do you feel a need to ever kind of try and reset to go back to that original experience of the image or how do you experience duration of these shots as you're making these decisions and you're working with the material well you're kind of putting a finger on something that's very difficult to to um field duration and when you know the duration already I haven't seen this film for about eight years so it was like new for me but I I uh it went much quicker today because I uh I didn't have the anxiety that I generally have with I feel bad for audiences that I make them work so hard but I didn't feel that today but yeah it's hard to uh judge um but I always error on the long side so that that's a good part you know I wouldn't cut it short because I'm afraid I'm going to make you uncomfortable yeah um because I don't make entertainment I mean I hope it's it's it's somewhat fun to watch my films but they're also difficult I think people Pro well Charles is even harder I think well it's got more narrative um but I think it uh it makes a I think that that um it's a it's a process of back and forth certainly I mean I can't imagine anybody is zoned in 100 for the duration of two hours on the other hand coming and going in different ways and depending on what they're responding to you know is also such an important experience you never have that in the cinema I was I was really uh I didn't drift off once this time which is pretty good but that's part of it I think you bring your own life into it if you start thinking about having to do your laundry and on and you realize there somehow that's part of the film yeah you have any other questions all the way in the back we we um I tried I tried to get people to understand that it's hard work and when they go they should at least take some time to be on their own I try to keep them separate but I also I also honestly have some fun too um but I I try to get them to really work hard and sit down and really pay attention because you have to practice doing that and then we as I always try to have dinner at the end of the day so then we don't know as talk about what we did but I there's something about eating together that's I think important to bring the experience together with everybody so that's kind of how I think about it and what I've noticed in the past is that a lot of students that have been in the class their work gets more subtle after uh they've taken the class I know that I attended one day's uh class several years ago and James took the group to a forest which had a kind of a precipice a shutting out huge stone that had a big drop at the end of it and it was kind of at an angle actually and I was the dean at the time I was very scared that said I didn't say anything to anybody else but the thing is was rather remarkable uh for everybody to be dealing with balanced further back and then we were there for maybe an hour and after that uh you took us to a river I don't remember which it was but it was quite a dramatic River with lots of jagged Boulders on the side and we were climbing around the boulders for another hour or so um and then during that same semester I know that you took students through a mountain yeah we did that last week again which is but I think I think James takes people if I'm correct about this James takes people into areas that are drivable although sometimes it might take a whole day to drive that he has discovered you know because he's uh James is a Wanderer and he really Sunday's film includes a lot of wandering kind of uh any other any other questions yes how do you know when you're done shooting um how do I know when I'm done shooting a particular shot or or if I should keep looking for other shots yeah I I generally try to do one thing in a day and if I I don't if I finish that I quit you know so yeah because and I don't shoot something right away until I really know it I I don't go somewhere and then just shoot I'll go there first and experience it and then shoot it some other time well I have one more question myself um much in a very different way than with film digital obviously can be manipulated and it conveys a veracity to it like the like the opening shot the tunnel shot um is that something that you're tempted to interfere with ever in terms of the truthfulness of the look of what we seem to be seeing in actual time um yeah I've I've since I've done uh digital I've done a lot of manipulation most of the time it's to make it more uh real uh than surreal um and then where I did that the most was on my film small roads where I would shoot a sky somewhere and put it somewhere else or I'd even change the texture of a road from one row to another uh yeah that was more like oh I like what you can do I gotta try what can I do with this to make it look more real but it yeah digital is interesting uh this film was my first one so I didn't know you could do all that stuff so it's pretty much what I shot okay oh we have one more okay maybe the last all right he's asking about when I was a child about paying attention and I I had an uncle that who adopted uh a son and uh he was my mother's brother and so he would take me and my brother and his adopted son um it just on walks and things and he didn't teach me to look and listen but it he provided experiences that made you want to look and listen so I did that quite at a quite early age yeah I I was all kinds of things would you look and listen look at and listen to I for instance [Music] I was thinking the other day it was it was uh kind of warm but or there was a cool wind and there was Sun and you can feel heat and cold at the same time and I remember experiencing that at about eight or nine years old and thinking how important that was and I didn't really know what I was meant by important until later you know that I think back but I thought I was pretty smart at eight years old to know that it's important to be able to feel hot and cold at the same time and that that's a pretty uh important thing to learn I think you know that two things can happen like that so you so yeah that I've kind of paid attention to things like that early uh and I I don't know I I what really maybe um made me understand looking and listening as uh when I was I dropped out of graduate school and Mathematics uh and I went out west I dropped out because people in my neighborhood friends of mine were dying in Vietnam and I had a student deferment and that made me uncomfortable so I went out west and I met people that were in Denver I met some people that were running a Dropout School or uh I'm sorry that was a different thing they they were running a a halfway house for uh people that were getting arrested for being drunk and they would go to the uh to the courtrooms and and try to beg the judges to allow these guys to come to their halfway house rather than go to prison and so I worked with them for a while then I worked with migrant workers picking potatoes and that and those kind of experiences I think were really important for me to really see and learn about things [Music] of kind of how you feel and different situations and so you helped I was like I felt good about helping people but I also realized I was learning so much more than what I was giving I was very important I think that's what made me uh want to really pay attention those situations well all right well I think we'll wrap it up then and thank James for both the film and for this commentary thank you