O Panama
O Panama features a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man's sickness and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O Panama conveys the workings of the subconscious.
James Benning
Burt Barr
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by James Benning
Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian Journal. A film by Richard Dindo. The images were found in the desert landscape from Death Valley south to, and crossing, the Mexican border.
'After doing a re-make of John Cassevetes’ "Faces" [1968], I decided to re-make another American classic, Dennis Hopper’s "Easy Rider" [1969]. "Easy Rider" interests me in two ways: its portrayal of 60’s counterculture – unlike "Faces" which for me is more about the 50’s – and its search for place. I divided the original film into scenes (like I did with "Faces") and then replaced each scene with one shot filmed at the original location (unlike "Faces" where shots were gleaned from the original film itself). My "Easy Rider" tries to find today’s counter-culture (if one exists) by replacing the 60’s music with music that I listen to today.' ~ James Benning
A stunning study of real-time light changing from day to night which was filmed in a forest high up in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains
A 2012 short-film, text by Theodore J. Kaczynski, made of scans of a document from an FBI Laboratory, about the danger of experiments with accelerated particles.
In NORTH ON EVERS James Benning takes the road movie seriously, making his circular trip across the U.S. a marvelously photographed, intensely felt, and disturbing portrait of contemporary America. In many ways, this recent film is a departure of Benning’s earlier films which are characterized, at times, by extremely long, carefully planned takes and a minimal narrative approach. In NORTH ON EVERS, the shots are kept short with a narrative that is direct and detailed, like a diary or a long series of postcards to a friend. What this work shares with the other films is a dry wit and a deep interest in the American social landscape.
James Benning's worrying and also reassuring vision of the Ruhr Valley, shot in six fascinating takes of a tunnel, a forest, a factory, a mosque, graffiti and a chimney.
Shots of 13 great lakes in the USA, with each shot containing half water and half sky or land.
Filmed on November 21 and 22, 2018 in Valencia, California. A gibbous and full moon rising.
After having shared a common experience in Cuba, twelve filmmakers say goodbye to return to their countries and make a pact: to make a collective film that answers the questions: what does it mean to plagiarize images and how to do it in the distance? The mechanism is unusual: a director makes a short and sends it to the next director, who in turn makes his own short for the purpose of plagiarizing the one he received. And so the chain of plagiarism continues until it reaches the last one. Each one interprets in their own way what it means to plagiarize the received film. The first link in the chain is James Benning, one of the world's most patient filmmakers. His extensive plans are replicated in the following fragments. Disobedience moves the exercise away from literality and an exploration of the texture of the images begins. In its repetitive mechanism, we can see that cinema is, in addition to record of reality, an art of images and sound. (Santiago González Cragnolino)
Twenty-four hours in the life of a factory worker.
Also Directed by Burt Barr
A narrative "steeped in alienation," The Woman Next Door is the story of a reclusive male tenant in a New York City apartment, whose life is disrupted by the arrival of a new next-door neighbor. Spurred initially by simple curiosity, the tenant begins to anticipate and follow the woman's movements, eventually assuming the role of voyeur. Seen entirely from the tenant's point-of-view, this is a bleak narrative of anonymity, isolation, and expectation. Barr writes: "The man's life is so restrictive, that every sound she makes, every glimpse of her becomes a monumental event." With its echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, its limited language and strict economy of means, this work relies on the visual structure and subtle ambient soundtrack to convey the narrative in a spare and minimal style.
The Elevator is a tale of urban anxiety in which Barr alternates the stories of two women (Trisha Brown and Wendy Perron), each confined and isolated in an elevator, literal and metaphoric prisoners of their everyday lives. Barr writes of the work's "obsessive [nature], both in its unbroken verbal narrative — and also in its singular camera action — that of the zoom." His use of a succinct formal device — the continual opening and closing of an elevator door — propels the narrative structure. The elevator door opens to reveal one woman speaking directly to the camera; her narrative is then interrupted by the closing of the door as the camera zooms out. The women's deceptively ordinary vignettes are transformed into eerie, self-contained fictions via Barr's use of fragmentation. By cutting from one woman to the other, Barr merges their individual monologues into a seamless narrative flow.