James Benning Archives - OpenloadMovies

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6.7

Los

Los Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2 1/2 minutes long, in this non-narrative film.

6.7

2001 Documentary 86 min Play

6.9

11 x 14

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair.

6.9

1977 Documentary 81 min Play

7.4

American Dreams (Lost and Found)

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.

7.4

1984 Documentary 55 min Play

8.2

One Way Boogie Woogie

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.

8.2

2012 90 min Play

5.8

One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later

One half filmed in 1977, one half filmed 27 years later.

5.8

2005 121 min Play

7.6

casting a glance

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.

7.6

2007 Documentary 80 min Play

7.3

Sogobi

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)

7.3

2002 Documentary 90 min Play

Deseret

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.

1995 Documentary 82 min Play

7.1

El Valley Centro

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.

7.1

1999 Documentary 87 min Play

6.6

RR

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 ...

6.6

2007 Documentary 115 min Play

Landscape Suicide

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.

1987 Crime 91 min Play

Four Corners

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.

1997 Documentary 80 min Play

Ruhr

Seven entirely static shots make up James Benning's quiet reflection on existence in the Ruhr Valley.

2009 Documentary 122 min Play