Movies: James Benning

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...

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 bra...

Ten shots of skies....

Lengthy static shots of various backroads, smaller interstates, quieter roads, and lonely highways....

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 cine...

Experimental filmmaker James Benning returns with this abstract documentary about California's Central Valley, part 1 of his "California Trilogy". Consisting of 35 shots, each over two minutes long, the film quietly portrays nature's subjugation to e...

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....

A three hour shot containing light, dark, and a BNSF train in the desert....

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" –, part 3 of Benning's "California Trilogy" and his approach to the Californian wilderness in 35 ...

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 Ben...

The Fitzgerald classic as you've never seen it, transposed to a Los Angeles of sleek modern architecture and strip-mall foot clinics....

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...

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...

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....

Director James Benning turned his attention to the digital world in YouTube Trilogy, organizing found material around three thematic clusters....

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...

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 c...

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 disapp...

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 f...

James Benning watches tv with a young girl....