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'Over the past thirty-five years James Benning (b. 1942) has played a central role in the history of American independent cinema by offering his rigorously structured yet wonderfully graceful films as extended meditations on the American landscape and its social and environmental histories. Benning’s life and work have been shaped by his passionate wanderlust—born in Milwaukee, he lived for intervals in Colorado, the Missouri Ozarks, Illinois and Oklahoma before settling in Val Verde, California in 1987, with car and motorcycle journeys around the country generating such films as I-94 (1975) and Four Corners (1997). His career has been equally restless, ranging from his early experimentation with an avant-garde aesthetic to his embrace, during the 1980s and 90s, of explicitly autobiographical elements and increased human content. With his “California Trilogy” (2000-2001) Benning entered a new phase, refining his formalist style and political concerns while distilling his abiding interest in place and exacting organizational structures. The different phases of Benning’s career inform his more recent work, presented in this program, which looks at and listens to the world with an acuity grounded in Benning’s firm convictions that duration and a rigorous formal aesthetic can give way to films that allow us to see differently and to read the inscription of the political into the places that surround us.'-- Harvard Film Archive
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Stills
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Further
James Benning @ IMDb
Cabin Project
James Benning inteviewed @ Senses of Cinema
'James Benning’s Art of Landscape: Ontological, Pedagogical, Sacrilegious'
'First Look: James Benning
'Life in Film: James Benning' @ Frieze
'Decoding the Unabomber: Stemple Pass by James Benning'
'James Benning: 500 Words' @ Artforum
'FilmBuff to Release Richard Linklater and James Benning Doc Next Year'
Book: 'James Benning'
“I am very impatient. That’s why I make these patient films.”
'Smoking a Cigarette, Making a Film'
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Extras
James Benning interviewed by Richard Linklater
James Benning: Nightfall Post Screening Q and A
Twenty Cigarettes. Introduction and Q&A with James Benning
Table ronde James Benning au Jeu de Paume
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Interview
from Smells Like Screen Spirit
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You love trains and empty roads, don’t you? According to Erik Erikson, the American psychoanalyst, the most important events in life take place in between two certain points.
James Benning: My obsession with trains and roads comes from my childhood. By the time I made the film RR in 2008, what interested me the most about trains was the way they cut through the landscape. I like the concept of scenery defined by the trains. Trains and lands develop sort of symbiotic relationship. One needs the other. While shooting film I found myself having the similar kind of relationship with trains. They were actually collaborating with me. The shoot had to be as long as the train was. Its dynamics was dependent on trains’ speed. Yet, what I found most curious after I had finished the film, for which I had been standing around the railroads for over two years, was the weight of over-consumption and amounts of the commodity transported back and forth. It made me feel the false sense of need we have nowadays. Transport is like a cog in the machine that makes capitalism work. My relationship with trains has been evolving ever since. As I got older, I have learned more about trains and the politics of lands. I found out to what extent corruption was involved in transport and what kind of money certain families in America have made. The basics for my romance with trains became very down-to-earth.
What is hidden in between your movies’ frames? What could be lost when we try to translate the language of images and emotions into words?
JB: It is interesting, because if you ask what’s hidden in between frames, you need to remember that my movies are shot on 16mm — which means you have 24 frames for each second, that gives you 23 gaps between those frames! That, what is missing, blurs in the blackness… What is this? It’s a mystery of all films; perhaps my films in particular, because I allow audience to fill in those blank spots with their own memories, fantasies and doubts, bring their own lives into it. Therefore, I hope what my films do is engage the audience to be more proactive. I like when they search around the frames. Some films allow you to wander within your own mind. To be focused directly for one hundred and fifty minutes is difficult, so I do not mind if sometimes, during the screening, you think about the laundry you should do in the evening [laughs]. While doing that kind of stuff the viewers hopefully come to some conclusions, they become focused on their own history. What you carry with you is the collection of the prejudices that were formed from what you have experienced; yet, I use the word “prejudice” not necessarily in a bad way. Having lots of experience may be good too, because it makes you think in a particular way; however, you may always reevaluate your value systems while watching my films by judging what you see. Reevaluating one’s position is important part of living. I give my films a lot of credit by believing they could push the viewer to do it; yet, I strongly believe that by giving the viewer a totally different cinematic experience than what they are accustomed to, I can count on unconventional responses.
While speaking about time and space in your movies, you mention two very interesting phrases: the spacialization of time and the temporalization of space.
JB: I have been thinking a lot about the time and its functionality lately. If you draw a timeline, beginning in the past and going towards the future, you see us at that certain middle point which is the present. We are always there. We do not move on the timeline because we cannot go into the future and back into the past. Although people claim that they are able to do that, I do not believe it is possible. Present is just one point, timeless in itself, because it does not have any dimension. It is not any time at all, it is instantaneous. The present appears to us instantaneously and then immediately becomes the past. For that reason everything that we experience can only be a memory. Moreover, any kind of movement lives in the memory only. There is no movement in the present. All is nothing more than a frozen frame… Where am I in time, then?
You seem to be a man who is in love with places that he has never been to and people he has never met…
JB: What sort of a romantic am I, is that what you are asking? [laughs] I like to wander with my eyes wide open, I like to look and listen and learn from my experiences. That is actually a good definition of love. It excites me to see new things and to check what is under the surface.
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9 films
Stemple Pass (2012)
'Since switching from celluloid to digital, noted avant-gardist James Benning has been as prolific as ever, and Stemple Pass may mark his highest achievement as of yet with the medium. Composed of four identical static shots of a cabin nestled in the forest that are distinguishable only by which season they were shot in, the film’s compelling power may surprise. Accompanying these lengthy takes are narrated diary entries and letters written by Ted Kaczynski (otherwise known as the “Unabomber”) while he lived in isolation in the woods—in fact, the aforementioned cabin is a replica of Kaczynski’s own, built by Benning. What ensues is a complex meditation on a disturbed yet brilliant man’s state of mind while living a life completely alienated from other people. The texts are all spoken aloud by Benning himself, who imbues his voice with calm, allowing the words to breathe without judgment. Kaczynski’s thoughts are alternately confounding and insightful, and both of these sides are allowed to come through without bias.
'More provocative and stimulating than any sort of conventional approach to portraying Kaczynski could be, Stemple Pass looks to the spaces in between drama, trapping the viewer in a simulated state of this isolation, suspended and left to confront ideas that may have more relevance to how we live our own lives than we’d like to admit.'-- viff.org
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Easy Rider (2012)
'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
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small roads (2011)
'As modest and self-explanatory as its lower-case title suggests, small roads is James Benning's latest contemplation of American landscape as an awesome man-made sculpture. In contrast to RR, which was focused on moving railway vehicles, small roads examines the ways in which paths—firmly asserted in asphalt and only occasionally traversed—shape the visible world.
'Shot with digital camera over the course of two years (even as Benning was working on other projects), the movie arrives barely annotated, so that you need the director himself to point out its underlying geographical journey—starting in California and headed first to the South, then to the Midwest. What we see are 47 immobile shots of roads in a roughly organized order that follows the succession of the seasons. At first, the structuring principle seems to be that each shot has one moving car in it before the image peters out. It comes as a minor shock, then, when shot number eight ends with no vehicle appearance whatsoever. From then on, all bets are off—in a manner of speaking.' -- Slant Magazine
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Two Cabins (2011)
'What makes society herald one cabin-bound hermit as a genius and cast out another as demonic scum? A nearly 20-year-long string of pipe bombings seems to do the trick. But James Benning halts such reductionist thinking in Two Cabins, 2011, pitting the aforementioned duo—Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Kaczynski (better known as the Unabomber)—against each other. The installation includes a two-channel video documenting the views from the windows of models of those cabins and a couple of ready-mades—an antique desk with a pencil and a Corona typewriter—placed on spotlit pedestals.
'From 2007 to ’08, Benning endeavored to build replicas of the two men’s refuges in the woods near his home in California. The videos on view consist merely of stationary shots looking out of the cabins’ windows. One window is a portrait-oriented glass of American hardware-store variety, whereas the other is a square wooden cutout, more medieval than modern. A meditative quality pervades the work, tying it squarely to Benning’s other films. Yet the work is saturated with ambiguity. Modern noises (never mind modern fixtures) emanate from Thoreau’s cabin, while Kaczynski’s view and soundscape suggest a Walden-like calm.'-- BLOUIN Art Info
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Nightfall (2011)
'Nightfall (2011, digital, color, sound, 98 min.) consists of a single 98-minute shot made at a high elevation in the woods in the west Sierras that begins in late afternoon as the sun is going down and ends in near blackness. Widely acclaimed for his great 16mm durational films about the American landscape, James Benning has been making new work in digital HD since 2009. One of the possibilities of digital filming that Benning has reveled in is the extreme duration possible, an extension of his earlier film work in which shots were one minute or ten minutes long. Now With Nightfall, he invites the audience to slow down and observe the most basic elements of nature in a way that very few of us do.
'Benning's use of duration reflects his accord with Henry David Thoreau's passage from Walden, "No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?"'-- Brown Paper Tickets
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Twenty Cigarettes (2011)
'Twenty Cigarettes is a game with its own rules and a game with film history: In Benning’s “Screentests” we watch 20 individuals, each of them smoking a cigarette. Some of them are familiar, like Sharon Lockhart. Others we’ve never seen before. But they all give us time to read their body language. We embark on a journey across foreign facial landscapes, through long inhalations into the inside of their bodies, and into the invisible world of their thoughts as we imagine them to be. James Benning is well-known as the structuralist and documentarist who introduced the dimension of cinematic time into the landscape. One take lasts exactly three minutes, or the time it takes for a train to pass through a Californian landscape. This time round it’s people who determine the length of the takes by smoking a cigarette. They stand among walls and shelves and only their movements, which they try to control, and the movement of the smoke, which they can’t control, stipulate the coordinates of the filmic space. Benning makes a screenplay out of this and surprises us by once again creating something entirely new out of little more than smoke.'-- Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
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Faces (2010)
'James Benning's "remake" of John Cassavetes's Faces (1968) will see its world premiere at the Film Museum in Vienna on November 19. In its notes on the series James Benning: New Work, the Museum calls his Faces an "unexpected venture into the world of 'found footage' filmmaking." As Benning explains, albeit in German at the Museum's site, he's reconstructed Cassavetes's Faces in such a way that 1) it's comprised entirely of shots of single faces, 2) each actor and actress is on screen as long as he or she is in the original and 3) each scene is exactly as long as it is in the original. So, to take Benning's example, if a scene lasts half an hour and Gena Rowlands is in that scene half the time, then we will see Rowlands for 15 minutes and then the other two characters in that scene. This reconstruction, he notes, remains steadfastly true to its title.'-- mubi
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casting a glance (2007)
'In 1970 Robert Smithson built his iconic Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot long sculpture of mud, salt crystals, and rocks jutting into Utah's Great Salt Lake, embodying elemental and philosophical principles essential to the artist's aesthetic. Smithson's film of the same name intercuts footage documenting the Jetty's construction with sequences in a natural history museum and his own poetic voiceover, the camerawork recapitulating the Jetty’s form in swirling aerial shots, dazzled by the sun’s reflections in the water. Benning first focused his camera on the Jetty when he searched for its remains during the cross-country motorcycle journey at the heart of his 1991 film North on Evers. At the time Benning supposed that "in a way [his] trip [had] ended there at the end of the spiral," however the coil's pull persisted – as an important reference in his 1995 film Deseret and then as the subject of casting a glance. Simulating the Jetty's thirty-seven year history, casting a glance records the shifting ecology of the Great Salt Lake's north-eastern shore, finding the earthwork "a barometer for a variety of cycles." Benning has created a work "that [Smithson's] film begs for, which pays attention to the Jetty over time."– James Benning
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Ten Skies (2004)
'After such intent peering eventually the actual angle of the camera becomes discernible, but for the most part a large degree of Ten Skies’ abstraction is the visual discombobulation; without spatial points of reference one often has the almost dizzying effect of being unable to account for the position from which we are looking at the sky. Some shots seem pointed obliquely upwards while others seem level with the horizon (as if shot horizontally from a mountain or hill), and some of the later shots, including the gorgeous centerpiece shot #5, seem as if the camera were pointed down at the sky, looking from above. Benning includes direct sound recorded during the shoot, including passing airplanes both visible and off-screen, as well as Spanish and English voices, traffic, and in shot #8, which was one of the rare segments I actually thought I saw a discernable shape in the clouds (a massive one looked like an old Spanish galleon or warship), features what sounds like gun shots fired sporadically through the duration. These sounds help link the shots to the earthly, if only to suggest that the camera is resting on the ground in the real world rather than floating abstractly through space.
'In fact, one of the greatest ironies of the film, for this viewer at least, is that shot #7, which features an unending gaseous plume of some sort of industrial venting cutting vertically through the frame and therefore not only provides more agitation and movement in the frame than any of the other shots but also firmly grounds the angle of the camera, is almost certainly the least appealing and interesting because it removes the previous lugubrious mysteries of the photographed sky. These natural mysteries and their entwinement with the mechanical cinematic recording, selection, and editing of Benning’s film are what is most intriguing and even sensorially affecting about Ten Skies, the refinement of a view one may take for granted and an appreciation for the metaphysical subtleties of cinema through such a simple focus."'-- mubi
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p.s. Hey. ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. Oh, sure, no problem, of course, on the posts. Yeah, we should all be rich, or, rather, no one should be rich, I guess. No problem on mentions of your clothing attachment. I mean, when we were Tokyo, we spent more time seeing out tiny underground experimental fashion design and clothing stores than we did anything else, I think. ** David Ehrenstein, I'm curious to see 'SBTL'. It opened here ages ago, just post-Cannes, so I guess I'll have to wait for the DVD or do something illegal. 'Looking' is that new gay-themed American TV show? I keep seeing all this blah-blah about something called 'Looking' on my FB feed, and I didn't have a clue. Ha ha, see, I think there's everything beyond homosexuality. ** Steevee, Hi. Very interesting interview with Guiraudie. It made me more keen to see the film than I had been. It seems more up my alley than I had thought. ** Tosh, Hi Tosh. Yes, I remembered that you stay in Meguro when you're in Tokyo. In fact, I meant to email you while I was there to ask you where that ... was it a design store or a book store (?) ... was located since I think you said it was nearish the Claska, but I never found the chance. Next time. Oh, if you'd like to have a really good meal when there, there's this tiny but great organic Japanese restaurant right next to the Gagkugei-Daigaku station called Midori. We ate there a bunch. ** Rudyd, Hey. Fantastic thoughts and memory call-ups re: Sonic Youth. Thanks, it was a real pleasure. ** White Tiger, It's Antonio's birthday? Oh, a so very sad and so very great occasion. It's my pal Joel Westendorf's birthday too. Yeah, I'm going to Antarctica, believe it or not, and I can hardly believe it. How did that happen? Well, my dear friend Zac told me that going there has been his lifelong dream. I said, 'Let's see if we can do it.' So, we looked into it, and there are a limited number of ways to get there, but only one way via ship that actually lets you spend a lot of time on Antarctica itself, including "camp" there for a couple of nights, and not just cruise around it looking for penguins and that kind of blah stuff. So, we made the leap, and it's a 14 day trip, leaving from the south of Argentina. And we decided to check out Patagonia beforehand, since we'll be near there and because life is short. It's going to be amazing. I'm kind of really excited and a bit scared too, especially of the voyage to get there since I get really bad seasickness, and the path is through "the roughest seas on earth." Crazy, right? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ah, an SY naysayer. Warm hugs anyway, buddy. ** Martin Bladh, Hi. Michael can't find the scans, so I think we'll have to do the book without them. Advertising, cool. Well, keep me up on everything that's going on, so I can know whas what t'd also do my part. Thanks so much! ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul! Gravel Samwidge is such a hilarious name. Yeah, wow, that's good. Sweet that the band still exists, not to mention opening for Mudhoney. Do they have albums or whatever out? Do you recommend them? Ha ha, yes, the first meeting of the Shibuya experimental writing collective! Exactly! May there be many more. Cool, thanks for linking me up to the Shinjuku high-speed growth video. That's nice, and the visual brown fuzziness is even kind of charming. Oh, blurb, right. I'll get on that today since I seem to have at least a few more brain cells at my disposal than I did yesterday. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. I'm doing your music mix today. Yesterday was a lost cause in my brain pan. The last time I got back from Tokyo, I had unbelievably severe jet lag that lasted for over a month and occasioned my falling onto train tracks at a local metro station. Hopefully, this time will be a ton easier. It's weird because both times I've gone to Tokyo, I've gotten zero jet lag on that end of the trip. Next trip begins on February 11th. To Buenos Aires and then to Patagonia and finally to Antarctica. A month total. Oh, shit, about the Red Chamber thing. Weird about Robert Wilson's project. Hopefully that won't come to fruition for a year or two, right? So, it'll seem like he ripped you off or something. Man, best of luck getting through that spooky bit of news. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Naturally, the experimental SY stuff is the hit part for me. What a cornucopia we humans are, right? Okay, that does sound like a most unpleasant cold. You win. I suspect that after my Antarctica trip, I'll be way over my tendency to romanticize things that are bone chilling, 'No gymtimidation', ha ha, who comes up with that stuff? Probably rolling in dough, whoever it is. Stupid and no doubt effective blurb right there, I guess. That alarm thing is ridiculous. How does that place make a profit on $10 a month membership? Do they sell $50 bottles of Evian or smoothies or something? ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Yeah, 'Pacific Rim' was all right, but it just seemed like one of those 'better than usual' blockbuster deals. Still, in a world where high-tech malarky like 'Gravity' is considered to be a great film or something, all bets seem to be off. Both of those projects look incredibly interesting. What is the first one about? I couldn't quite understand, but I was very intrigued. I'm very interested by the description of your piece in 'All Possible Futures'. Huh. Totally different but tangentially, one of the art house projects we saw on Naoshima was this this tiny house on a remote beach created by Christian Boltanski wherein visitors' heartbeats are recorded and put into this system that randomly plays excerpts of the heartbeats of all visitors in this kind of nice long dark hallway/installation through both massive speakers and the filament of a lightbulb, which probably makes no sense. This is a thing about it. Anyway, I'm definitely looking forward to more info on both of those works of yours. ** Gary gray, Hi. I still haven't creased the cleverbot transcripts. Yesterday was too much of a haze. Strange indeed. Definitely will investigate. Imagining what baroque would mean in lit. is kind of why it's so exciting to imagine. I sure do try/go for that, I think. I hear you on the love for that limitation. I'm very simpatico, as you can imagine. Japan was spectacular. There'll be a bunch of pix and stuff to fill in the blank here on Monday. ** Rewritedept, Hey! Oh, yes, I think it went very well, and thank you again gigantically, man. I know that Thurston and Lee have been known to check out my blog, so maybe they've seen it or will. I'm tired today too. Not as zonked as yesterday, though. Small favors and all of that. I can't say that I'm having fun being home due to said jet last, but it's okay, and there've been some moments that have qualified as fun, even if my appreciation of the fun was pretty off-world. I'm off to Antarctica via Buenos Aires and Patagonia on February 11th. Your mix had to wait until today due to my hampered brain, which, trust me, would not have given your mix the going through that it deserves. Barring an unexpected set-back, today's the day. ** Okay. James Benning is one of my very favorite filmmakers ever. His work is very hard to see because he has not wanted his films to be online but, rather, only projected. However, for reasons I do not know, someone has uploaded a trove of his recent films, at least for the moment, and today I direct you to a selection of them, and I recommend that you give one or more of them a watch while you can because I have a feeling this boon of Benning availability will not last very long. See you tomorrow.