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Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.
Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these “little films” form a unique anthology of cinematic moments. 20 Little Films collects a selection of these works, premiering together for the Viennale’s 50th anniversary at the Locarno Film Festival.
O Panama features a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man's sickness and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O Panama conveys the workings of the subconscious.
Director James Benning turned his attention to the digital world in YouTube Trilogy, organizing found material around three thematic clusters.
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 Benning’s earlier films which are characterized, at times, by extremely long, carefully planned takes and a minimal narrative approach. In NORTH ON EVERS, the shots are kept short with a narrative that is direct and detailed, like a diary or a long series of postcards to a friend. What this work shares with the other films is a dry wit and a deep interest in the American social landscape.
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.
An experimental film portraying different skies in very long takes.
Shots of 8 bridges from the continental United States - the Golden Gate Bridge from Sausalito, California; the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge from Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico; the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma, Alabama; the Seven Mile Bridge from Little Duck Key, Florida; the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey; the Dubuque-Wisconsin Bridge from Dubuque, Iowa; the High Bridge from Valley City, North Dakota; the Astoria-Megler Bridge from Astoria, Oregon.
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 faces, each actor and actress is on screen as long as he or she is in the original and each scene is exactly as long as it is in the original. This reconstruction, he notes, remains steadfastly true to its title
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 encroaching commercial interests. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.