The Present Doesn't Have Any Time
Four Corners (1998)
directed by James Benning
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
El Valley Centro (1999)
directed by James Benning
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
Ten Skies (2004)
directed by James Benning
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
casting a glance (2007)
directed by James Benning
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
RR (2007)
directed by James Benning
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (2013)
directed by Gabe Klinger
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
all on DVD from University of New Mexico Interlibrary Loan, except "Ten Skies," available here, and "Double Play," watched on the Criterion Channel
(most of Benning's movies are on YouTube)
My own interest in what James Benning shows me in the landscapes of the American West varies a lot from film to film. In "Deseret," I don't think he ever succesfully connects the history of Mormonism to the physical spaces of Utah. The Mormon violence he traces through decades of "New York Times" articles (is it significant that he relies exclusively on the "Times" instead of local newspapers?) seems separate from the images. Maybe the point is that places doesn't remember, but as in "Los," if you want to say something about people, you really need to include some.
My favorite of these (admittedly only a part of his filmography) are "Four Corners," "RR," and "Ten Skies." These three, to me, attempt to grapple with man's relation to the West in interesting ways—by demonstrating our impermanence ("Ten Skies") and that our greatest accomplishments, relative to that impermanence, are when we work at scale. I would like to see a James Benning film about a skyscraper.
He's good engaging with discrete works of land art (in "casting a glance") but even there, what he's really interested in is light and weather (time, too, as another way of considering those natural phenomena). But I return to Lucy Lippard's contention that land art is indistinguishable from strip mining. So, to me, the Spiral Jetty in "casting a glance" is far less beautiful or contemplative than the freight trains in "RR," as complex in their precision as clouds. Benning doesn't seem interested in the function of freight trains—trafficking the materials of commerce and construction—but he likes how they move and how they sound. But how can you talk about trains without crews, mechanics, and engineers?
Benning's goals, in terms of the moving image, don't seem entirely removed from that of many more commercial filmmakers: give the audience what they might not ever be able to see in person, whether that's Lauren Bacall or, for Benning, the Great Salt Lake on a May morning in 1973. That's a plus, to me, and maybe part of why Richard Linklater is his friend.
Are Benning's films necessarily museum pieces? I don't think so. He has a sense of humor (braying like a donkey in "casting a glance"), and Linklater and Benning both strike me as warm men with ideas of responsibility and justice—but something in Benning feels misanthropic. In the end, it's telling that James Benning used his property in the Sierra Nevadas to build a replica of Ted Kaczynski's cabin and Richard Linklater used his property in Bastrop, Texas, to build a baseball field.
posted by NPK at 11:49 AM
