Movies: James Benning

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...

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 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 res...

Presented on a computer, "Pascal's Lemma" features mathematics (diagrams, equations, questions), biographical information about Blaise Pascal, and scrolling text sourced from the news....

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 investiga...

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, col...

James Benning returns to the location of his 2012 film Nightfall, this time at daybreak....

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 o...

James Benning, USA, 1988, 3m....

signs is a sobering continuation of Benning’s career-long interest with the written word as image, text as vision: a silent parade of stills showing dozens of cardboard signs asking for money, food, and kindness....

Exploring the Panama Canal is a fascinating journey through the land of mystery and adventure and the Canal that divides it. Through rare archival footage, you'll experience the history of the Canal, from its failed beginnings to the Herculean effort...

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....

"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 ...

Video essay providing a brief introduction to the work of James Benning for his exhibition at neugerriemschneider....

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...

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...

A view of an Oregon farm field, observing a solar eclipse and incorporating a Leonard Cohen song....

Filmed in Sierra Nevada, California over one day. Static and still shots of the actual landscape and environments in the area....

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

An experimental film portraying different skies in very long takes....