One half filmed in 1977, one half filmed 27 years later. Director combined the structural analysis of image and sound with fragments of a narrative interspersed with autobiographical traces and an almost "classical" interest in image composition, color, light and landscape.
Four landscape shots containing a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning 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...
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...
"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful...
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...
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.
I just a did a film with my ‘Acting Bad’ class called After Warhol, where we watched a few of the Warhol screen tests and then mimicked them. It’s not what he does but a manipulation; I got them to act as they thought a screen test would be in a Warhol sense, and then I recontextualised it so...
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...
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...
At Northwestern University, where he teaches at the time, Benning gives a short interview to some student filmmakers. He then uses this material to once again engage the optical printer.
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...
"On November 28, 2023 I woke up early and drove down to the Upper Kern River. I came to film a tree. It's leaves were orange. The shot would be 87 minutes, the exact length of Godard's Breathless. My film would be non-narrative, but stuff happened" - J.B
It centers on Allensworth, the first self-administered African-American municipality in California, showcasing the buildings of the now-abandoned town and looking for the traces of a Black cultural history.
