Benning and Me (3.29-31) part 1

I have to talk about my experience with James Benning not just as seeing his math lecture and how it related to our class, but how my experience with him the entire weekend was preceded with his looking and listening class on Friday. Benning says that his film making is first experiencing, with no recording devices whatsoever, and then reporting back. So Benning took us out to teach us to pay attention, emphasizing to think about why we are looking at our subject. The views were aesthetically beautiful in their own right, and anyone with two eyes would take a minute to stop and take in the scenery, but what was great about this trip was that our teacher had implanted in us the question that "Why am I paying attention to this" "Is it just aesthetic reasons" or is there some personal attachment or history that has shaped my perception of the image and how I relate to it, causing me to take the time and look/ listen for an extended period of time?" My very first stop was on the the North end of an abandoned industrial complex, that first appealed to me because of the opportunity to climb. I climbed up some scaffolding, reached over to a ladder and sat on this metal perch about 90ft. up and caught a glimpse of the earth below. I glowed about my accomplishment for a second before I noticed the shadow of the same building I was perched about had casted a brilliant shadow across the fresh snow down to the train yards on this (the south) side of the Menomonee river. My eye fallowed a few trains for some of them were moving and the glare from the sunlight beautiful. "This is timeless" I thought, before I pulled my sight back and like a cold shower was shocked to see an incredible scope of the city of Milwaukee, my blood, and ideas rushed to my head like an epiphany tangled in a laundry basket trying to get out of the clouds and breathe. "This is where I live?!?!" "This is where I live?" I did not recognize anything about this place; it was foreign, gigantic, and beautiful. I was knee deep in the dust of the city looking back, at the city. The scope was incredible from the train yards and river directly below me, to the highways and exchanges of cars, to the tall buildings of downtown, to the despair of the west-side, which I could see as plainly and dare I say similarly to the east side. i am from the country, the very rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan,a nd I have never seen anything like this. And these were my first thoughts of why I would study, and pay attention to a sight like this. The ins and outs of a city, seen from the vista of the dirt and grim that once built this city. I stayed there for about an hour, constantly being surprised by the small windows of motion and action happening in the larger context of the city. But upon further reflection maybe it was a metaphoric epiphany that I couldn't quite grasp at the time but makes more sense and is more surprising. I live in the city of Milwaukee. But what is the city of Miwaukee to me. I rarely meander anywhere that is not in between my apartment and campus, my neighborhood of riverwest has everything I need (friends, food, culture, drinks.) And I often joke that it is the east-sides buffer zone between it and the ghetto; eluding to Milwaukee's obvious racial divide. What I am trying to get at is I often feel trapped, in this routine, of same places and people, and I often feel stagnated in film making, thinking I need to manufacture all of my images, hence my films thus far being short abstract pieces of small scale. And this thought of being entrenched in this same city that I am looking at in this gigantic scope with the east-side and west-side having no divide whatsoever, that this lines that our drawn in our heads are completely metaphysical, and the lines that are physical actually connect us, was the attraction to seeing the city, the place that I live and feel trapped in, in such a way. Alex Torinus later said " we don't even know the city we live in." And I very much agree. So if Benning had taught me to pay attention to what I was looking at, and I arrived at this conclusion, that I don't know the city I am living in and that there are no physical barriers between me and the rest of this city; then how do I report back . . .?