James Benning - Favorites and Ranked Filmography
Ongoing project / first eight are equal no. 1, the rest are ranked.
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- DirectorJames BenningStarsRhonda BellElion SucherIn "Landscape Suicide" Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning's distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. The two monologues are embedded in Benning's characteristic meditations of landscape: long shots of the Wisconsin farmlands, general stores, dirt roads and pick-up trucks, and the carefully tended lawns, swimming pools, sprawling bungalows and malls of the middle-class California suburb. These images are offered in the classically spare mise-en-scene which Benning has perfected in his work as a cinematic poet of the contemporary American environment. Here, in his most accessible film so far, the beautiful, open vistas are dense with the significance of the catastrophes they engendered
- DirectorJames BenningAmerican trains, known to the director from trips across the country, are seen in motion in 43 shots from a fixed perspective.
- DirectorJames BenningImages of Hank Aaron memorabilia are displayed over the handwritten diaries of would be assassin Arthur Bremer, set to a soundtrack of alternating political news clips and popular songs from Aaron's career.
- DirectorJames BenningLines from the diary of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, during his stay in a cabin outside the city of Lincoln in Montana. The film is shot from the same angle trough the four seasons and featuring a voiceover from James Benning.
- DirectorJames BenningStarsFred GardnerLandscape shots of Utah with narration chronicling its history by way of The New York Times excerpts from the 1850s to the 1990s.
- DirectorJames Benning47 roads across the United States.
- DirectorJames Benning
- DirectorJames Benning
- DirectorJames BenningShots of 13 great lakes in the USA, with each shot containing half water and half sky or land.
- DirectorJames BenningBette GordonStarsJames BenningBette GordonA camera mounted in the backseat of the car of Benning and Gordon traveling across the US east to west, takes in the passing terrain as framed by the windshield.
- DirectorJames BenningStarsJames BenningA view of an Oregon farm field, observing a solar eclipse and incorporating a Leonard Cohen song.
- DirectorJames BenningStarsWillem Dafoe
- DirectorJames BenningLos Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2 1/2 minutes long, in this non-narrative film.
- DirectorJames BenningSixty 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.
- DirectorJames BenningEmploying natural sound and contemplative proscenium shots, Benning skillfully composes a series of pure and majestic images that at once evoke a sense of nostalgic splendor as well as deliver a subtle, yet penetrating, political commentary. Benning tells the story of how water irrigates this valley and how the produce is carted away in boxcars for the nation's consumption. He shows the lifestyle of a modest and growing rural community, whose concerns are often drowned out by the powerful railroads, oil companies and insurance conglomerates which own the farms and ranches and benefit from undocumented immigrant labor while insisting on imprisoning an American population of color.
- DirectorJames BenningAn experimental film portraying different skies in very long takes.
- DirectorJames BenningStarsSerafina BathrickTed BradyBarbara FrankelOne of most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning's 1977 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences.
- DirectorJames BenningA static shot of a desert train track.
- DirectorJames BenningA document of one of the most famous 66 miles of railroad track in the world including the Tehachapi Loop.
- DirectorJames BenningA sunset filmed through a forest until the fall of the night.
- DirectorJames Benning
- DirectorJames BenningA time laps filming of Milwaukee's industrial valley. shot firstly in 1977 and then again in 2004, documenting the changes to the area after 27 years.
- DirectorJames BenningJames Benning's worrying and also reassuring vision of the Ruhr Valley, shot in 7 fascinating takes of a tunnel, a factory, a forest near an airport, inside a mosque, a graffiti wall, a street and an industrial chimney.
- DirectorJames Benning
- DirectorJames BenningThe opening trailer for the Viennale 2009.
- DirectorJames BenningBette GordonIntercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.
- DirectorJames Benning
- DirectorJames Benning