Faces (2011)

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Faces (2011)

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When I finished that I thought I should make the ultimate faces film, which is to remake the film Faces. So I did that where I recopied close-ups from Faces. My Faces is only close-ups of faces. I like that film quite a bit. It’s the same length as Cassavetes’s, so its two hours and 15 minutes. My film is silent except for two little pieces of music in it. It is an extremely demanding film to watch. And I really like that film a lot, but it seemed like it wasn’t really my work. For some reason it really reminded me of a Douglas Gordon film.

The lengths of all my scenes are determined by the exact lengths of those scenes. In Faces I would take a scene, like the third scene has three people in it, and I used a stopwatch to add up the screen time each character had, and I would have to average that time if more than one person was in the frame. I determined that Gina Rollins is in that scene half the time and the other two characters are in it a fourth of the time. I would find a close up of Gina Rollins, be it a second long or three seconds long, and stretch it to the length of screen time she had. If the scene was 20 minutes and she had half of it, then I would have to stretch the three seconds to ten minutes. They each have the exact amount of screen time in each scene.

James Benning

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Faces (2011)

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