James Benning
James Benning returns to the location of his 2012 film Nightfall, this time at daybreak.
The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in response to the last frame of the previous minute.
A film about a small town in California's Central Valley, founded by Black Americans in 1908 to establish a place to live and work outside of Jim Crow America.
an excerpt of a conversation between James and I during the Fall of 2019 - Santa Clarita, CA
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)
The portrait of an art institution: James Benning explores the building and grounds of the California Institute of Art. Each image creates a tension, a constant urge to move on the next one, as if landscape and space could be the scenes of a crime.
Amy is ravaged by the notion that she is going to die tomorrow, which sends her down a dizzying emotional spiral. When her skeptical friend Jane discovers Amy’s feeling of imminent death to be contagious, they both begin bizarre journeys through what might be the last day of their lives.
61. La Verdad Interior reveals the creative process behind TELEMUNDO [screened in the New Visions section], a collaborative film directed by James Benning and starring himself and Sofía Brito. It is a journey, an interview. The connection between a film director with a great carrier and a young actress who decides to film the creative process that thrives between the two. A film-essay in which these two beings find ways of overcoming the language barriers.
One-hour-documentation of James Benning's participation in the Moving Billboard project.
This three-channel video installation by James Benning shows three scenes from David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The two-minute-long screen arrangement of imperceptibly moving images alludes to the beginning of racism. The three screens each show a solider in the American Civil War, black slaves picking cotton in the field, and imposing KKK.
The 3-channel video installation brings together four histories: the 1860s scorched earth policy of Kit Carson used to drive out the Navajos from their homeland in Canyon de Chelly, the 1967 execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the 1972 carpet bombing of Hanoi, and the 2016 Cedar Fire in the California Sierras. The radio transmission is from a US Air Force B-52 (Stratofortress Bomber, code name Lilac 02) recorded on the evening of December 26, 1972 during which 116 B-52s attacked Hanoi and Haiphong dropping all of their bombs within 15 minutes.
"scorched earth is a film that is part of the Untitled Fragments Project. It's 60 minutes at dusk, just one shot of the burned over forest (from this summer's fire) near my Two Cabins in the Sierra Nevada." - James Benning. This work first premiered at MSU in Zagreb as an installation with Ash 01 under the title Ash 01, curated by Tanja Vrvilo as a prologue to the 10th edition of her film festival, Film Mutations: Festival of Invisible Cinema (Filmske Mutacije: festival nevidljivog filma).
As we ascend a mountain, we move backwards in time. Like most of Benning's films, Spring Equinox is at once direct and mystical. Simple images and landscapes become charged with meaning. As the film develops, changes in altitude and time give way to subtle shifts in light and texture; the result is as thrilling as it is breathtakingly beautiful.
Last week I made a film of 49 of my T-shirts called Fresh Air. It was to be purely structural. For sound I recorded (in sync) the quiet ambience of my Val Verde neighborhood. Then I decided to add the sounds of a radio playing. I set up my Sound Devices and began to record NPR’s All Things Considered. It was 3:00pm on December 2. The regular news was interrupted by breaking news from San Bernardino. By the end of my recording 12 people were dead along with two suspects. My film is no longer purely structural.
"Ash 01 is a declassified recording made from a B-52 bomber on December 26, 1972 during the Christmas carpet bombing of Hanoi." - James Benning. This work first premiered at MSU in Zagreb as an installation with scorched earth under the title Ash 01, curated by Tanja Vrvilo as a prologue to the 10th edition of her film festival, Film Mutations: Festival of Invisible Cinema (Filmske Mutacije: festival nevidljivog filma).
Towards the end of 2015, James Benning made one of his occasional expeditions to Utah, to the place where Robert Smithson's colossal land-sculpture Spiral Jetty (1970) extends out into the Great Salt Lake. The water-level was low, leaving the vast bulk of the Jetty exposed in the crisp air. His film measuring change captures two thirty-minute periods of that particular day, in the unblinking, unmoving takes that have become his trademark––beginning at 8:57am and 3:12pm respectively. A belated digital companion piece to his 16mm masterpiece casting a glance (2007), this new film hypnotically contemplates Smithson's art-work in relation to its wider environment and to the humans who walk on and around its gargantuan coils.
In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.
A stretch of highway blanketed by snow becomes the stage for one accident after another in US 41, perhaps Benning’s first disaster movie, or a comedy of (automotive and meteorological) errors. Returning Benning to his favorite subject of the American character as reflected in our landscape, US 41 is an almost transcendental contemplation of mortality by way of traffic camera footage and Bob Dylan.
In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown during the summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight...
In 54 static shots, Benning provides a picture of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. With the exception of the first three shots, he chooses areas that are normally closed to the public: offices, store rooms and empty corridors. A characteristically meditative Benning, even though this time he chooses to stay indoors.
In 1985, former oil rig worker Richard Linklater began a film screening society in Austin, Texas, that aimed to show classic art-house and experimental films to a budding community of cinephiles. Eventually incorporating as a nonprofit, the newly branded Austin Film Society raised enough money to fly in their first out-of-town filmmaker: James Benning. Accepting the invitation, Benning met Linklater and the two began to develop a personal and intellectual bond, leading to many future encounters. Starting in the 1960s, Benning had been creating low budget films mostly on his own, while Linklater had just begun to craft his first shorts. The filmmakers have remained close even as their careers have diverged. After the cult success of Slacker, Linklater went on to make films with Hollywood support. Benning, meanwhile, has stayed close to his roots and is mainly an unknown figure in mainstream film culture.
One day, father makes a shocking decision in a family gathering. The family disagrees with it and against him in the very beginning. However, they make up their mind to support him at the end. A portrait of family disorganization casting the master of experimental film, James Benning.
In summer 2011, James Benning returned to his hometown of Milwaukee to make a third version of his seminal 1977 film 'One Way Boogie Woogie'. In 1977 he filmed 60 locations in Milwaukee’s industrial valley each for 60 seconds, creating short, minimal, playful narratives. In 2004 he remade the film as Twenty Seven Years Later, with the same 60 camera positions. This 2012 installation version, presents 18 locations similar to, and reminiscent of, the original.
Investigating another, deeply troubling facet of rugged American individualism, James Benning gives us four landscape shots containing a painstakingly constructed replica of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning himself reads extracts from Kaczynski’s journals from the early 1970s, recording his progress at hunting and gathering, and his connection to the Montana wilderness; a hand-written folded sheet of paper detailing his acts of “monkey wrenching” and first attempts at planting bombs; two notebooks written in numerical code in 1985 and decoded by Benning in 2011; two excepts from Industrial Society and Its Future by "FC" (aka the Unabomber Manifesto) as published in its entirety (35,000 words) in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995; and a 2001 interview with Kaczynski by J. Alienus Rychalski, special correspondent for the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch.
'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 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.
A short film by Gary Mairs written by James Benning. Stars Amy Seimetz.
Lengthy static shots of various backroads, smaller interstates, quieter roads, and lonely highways.
Director James Benning turned his attention to phenomena of the digital world such as Web 2.0 in YouTube Trilogy, organising found material around three thematic clusters which apparently have little in common.
Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, TWENTY CIGARETTES. Referencing Warhol’s screen tests, 1930s Hollywood glamour, and the disappearing cigarette break, the film captures 20 of Benning’s friends (including filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, and book editor Janet Jenkins) satiating their smoke cravings. Each shot’s length is determined by the time it takes each subject to smoke a cigarette, and over the course of the film a dynamic range of personalities emerges out of an array of physical characteristics, distinctive settings, and personal relationships to the camera. (Amy Beste and Jessica Bardsley)
James Benning’s "remake" of John Cassavetes’s Faces (1968) is an unexpected venture into the world of found footage filmmaking. As Benning explains, he’s reconstructed Cassavetes’s Faces in such a way that it’s comprised entirely of shots of single faces, each actor and actress is on screen as long as he or she is in the original and each scene is exactly as long as it is in the original. This reconstruction, he notes, remains steadfastly true to its title
The Fitzgerald classic as you've never seen it, transposed to a Los Angeles of sleek modern architecture and strip-mall foot clinics.
Between July, 2007 and June, 2008, veteran independent film-maker,James Benning built replicas of two iconic American Cabins in a remote part of the High Sierras- Henry David Thoreau’s hut from Walden Pond and the one-room plywood shack in rural Montana from which Theodore John Kaczynski (the ‘Unabomber’) conducted his 16-year bombing campaign via the U.S. mail. The juxtaposition of these two simple structures invokes and implicates deeply conflicted and enduring foundational American myths concerning the scope and meaning of personal liberty, civic responsibility and the rule of law; individual conscience, democracy and civil disobedience; the transcendental value of nature, wilderness and the god-given right to exploit natural resources; American exceptionalism, environmental conservationism and faith in technological progress; the imperative to make oneself (anew), to ’succeed’ and, if necessary, to secede.
For his performance Reforming the Past, James Benning turns towards his own film North on Evers, shot in 1991. After seeing Andy Warhol's Screen Tests again, Benning re-filmed all of the 59 portraits that occur in North on Evers with his HD camera, reframed them and slowed them down 8 times. This silent film, his most recent work, will be accompanied by a live reading by Benning of the handwritten text that ran through the bottom of the frame in the original film, comprised of his travel diary from a road trip through the USA. It is an exploration of the relationship between image, text and sound paying special attention to the landscape of American life. Claudia Slana decribes this his filmic endeavors as follows: “To understand the filmic image not as a direct representation of reality but instead as an “illusion of reality”, as a “pattern of meaning” that is subject to continious transformation through the involvement of the viewer.”
One of the films I remade was a film that used two faces in it from a short little three-minute film that I made for the Henry Mancini television program back in 1973. The two main characters in that film were a prostitute and a junkie, and because of that, it was never shown on television. So I thought I would rework that film, copied those two faces and took the last two seconds of the film of the two faces and stretched them each to 12 ½ minutes. I made a 25 minute film out of two faces. - James Benning
Created at the Viennale's invitation, James Benning's short film is both a simple and subtle piece of cinema. Benning shot the work process in a steelworks in the Ruhr area. On a kind of conveyor belt, a glowing piece of steel flits across the screen and disappears only to reappear again as a blazing, shining material. Finally, artificial rain falls onto the glowing metal, shrouding the whole image in a cloud of steam and making it disappear. The finished film is a fascinating cinematic poem about time and motion, and it would not be James Benning had he not taken the name of an old hippie song by James Taylor for his title: Fire and Rain.
Looping, chugging and barreling by, the trains in Benning's latest monumental film map a stunning topography and a history of American development. RR comes three decades after Benning and Bette Gordon made The United States of America (1975), a cinematic journey along the country’s interstates that is keenly aware “of superhighways and railroad tracks as American public symbols.” A political essay responding to the economic histories of trains as instruments in a culture of hyper-consumption, RR articulates its concern most explicitly when Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech is heard as a mile long coal train passes through eastern Wyoming. Benning spent two and a half years collecting two hundred and sixteen shots of trains, forty-three of which appear in RR. The locomotives' varying colors, speeds, vectors, and reverberations are charged with visual thrills, romance and a nostalgia heightened by Benning's declaration that this will be his last work in 16mm film.
Casting a Glance is a tribute to the American artist Robert Smithson. Between May 15 2005 and January 14 2007, I made 16 trips to the Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, salt and red algae.
One half filmed in 1977, one half filmed 27 years later.
The American filmmaker James Benning has been one of the outstanding exponents of the structural film since the mid-1970s. Bennings artistic position has been strongly influenced by mathematics and by the creativity of mathematical thinking. With his new project 13 Lakes, James Benning goes one step further towards reducing things to a minimum. The film focuses on thirteen large American lakes (including Salton Sea, Lake Powell, and Lake Michigan) along with their geographical and historical relationship to the landscape. This documentary film was occasioned by 13 Lakes, and was shot in California, Arizona, and Utah. It accompanies the artist for a week as he searches for locations and as he films the first two shots for his own film.
Many films by this master of landscape cinema are cinematic studies of specific landscapes, as is the case with SOGOBI – the Shoshonean word for "Earth" –, Benning's approach to the Californian wilderness in 35 carefully composed scenes with a great depth of field and devoid of humans. "I spent a year in the middle of nowhere and perhaps this is the closest I've come to portraying a true sense of place." (James Benning)
Master experimental filmmaker James Benning returns with this abstract documentary about California's Central Valley. Consisting of 35 shots, each over two minutes long, the film quietly portrays nature's subjugation to encroaching commercial interests. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival
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.
James Benning's "Four Corners" uses a specific geographical location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and wholly imaginary place Four Corners, that favorite tourist destination where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet, becomes a kind of theoretical ground zero, the site from which Benning can give voice to other, pointedly unofficial American stories.
This is multifaceted look at the landscape and history of Utah (or Deseret, as the Mormon Church prefers to call it). Benning condenses 93 news stories from the New York Times from 1852 to 1992 (read offscreen by Fred Gardner) and sets them against contemporary Utah landscapes, the shots changing with each sentence.
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.
Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia Bembenek, aka "Bambi", former "Playboy bunny" turned cop, turned accused and convicted killer who disappeared after a daring escape from prison. The film shows the evolution of Benning's and Bembenek's relationship presented through their actual letters read in voice over which depict the filmmaker's curiosity with the subject as it evolves from intrigue to a love obsession.
Benning continues his examination of Americana in this film through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Protti was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984.
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.
Scrolling excerpts from the diary of George Wallace's would-be assassin Arthur Bremer at screen bottom, Hank Aaron cards and ephemera from his entire career up top, and alternating audio clips of popular songs and highlights from the news throughout Aaron's career.
Presented on a computer, "Pascal's Lemma" features mathematics (diagrams, equations, questions), biographical information about Blaise Pascal, and scrolling text sourced from the news.
"Him And Me" has Benning's hallmarks: pristine cinematography, a quasi-autobiographical stance, and a minimalist structure that juxtaposes concrete realities with off-screen mysteries. This is one man's journey through the American landscape as he has experienced it since the 1950's: a richly hued vision punctuated by the sexual, musical, and political mores of three decades.
Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.
Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual contrast but is also felt as a dialectic between permanence and impermanence.
In three virtuosic sequences created entirely in-camera, Benning alternates contrary camera movements in a trio of Chicago locations with increasing rapidity to a point where they first fracture and then merge in the viewer’s eye.
A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from NY to Los Angeles.
"Benning's landscape works, with their meticulous, reverential compositions, have been located in the history of American realist painting and photography, and also belong to the tradition of American nature writing...The formal elegance of the compositions somehow becomes surreal over time, as we look into, instead of at, the place. This tendency locates Benning in the history of experimental filmmakers concerned with interrogating visual perception." - Danni Zuvela
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.
Maintenance is filmmaker Adele Horne’s exploration and meditation on house cleaning. Cleaning is one of the most private things we do in our homes, other than sex and arguments. We often feel shameful about clutter and dirt, so there is something particularly intimate and meticulous about the act of cleaning it up. Although a clean home is socially valued, the work required to achieve it is not. House cleaning exists on the shadow side of the economy, on the margins or outside of paid employment. It is an additional, uncounted form of labour that enables our roles as paid workers and consumers. This film invites viewers to meditate on the ongoing maintenance work that makes other, more highly valued labour possible.
