James Benning: A Cinema of Our Times

In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry

David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown at
summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight. The shot lingers for sixty
minutes while the sun gently sets. Next we see the same cabin at winter solstice,
from time to time under gently falling snowflakes. Again the shot lasts for sixty
minutes, but this time the daylight does not give way to darkness. Over the first
shot Benning’s voice reads from Thoreau’s ‘A Plea for John Brown’ (1859), an
abolitionist who led an insurrection against slavery and was later hanged for his
violent act of civil disobedience. Over the next frame he reads from Economy
(1847-1854), the opening section to the same author’s Walden.
Concord Woods points back to the equally picturesque cabin in Benning’s
Stemple Pass (2012). This film begins in spring, where the cabin almost
disappears in the lush green forests of the Sierra Nevada. The image becomes
more disturbing once Benning’s voice begins to recite tales of survival, freshly
killed animals and gum infections. The words that Benning is reading now come
from the journal of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, for a while
American’s most feared terrorist. Through these two lovers of nature, one
worshipped, one reviled, the landscape is presented as the locus of various forms
of violence. In so doing the constellation of cabin projects (which includes other
filmworks and installations too) subtly explodes the stories we tell each other
about each other, our environments and our actions.

Originally trained in mathematics and converted to art by a chance encounter

with John Cage at the University of Wisconsin, James Benning has been making
films since the early 1970s. Over the years, Benning has developed a highly
original language, which, together with his privilege for uncommon landscapes,
make him a unique filmmaker in contemporary moving images. Benning’s
language is marked by durational static shots and natural sound. At times
duration takes over and, in BNSF (2013) and Nightfall (2012) for example, the
film is simply one single extended shot (BNSF lasts for 3 hours and 13 minutes).
Even in those films that do not push duration to such extremes, Benning creates
exacting, compositionally rigorous frames that leave the audience to confront the
natural choreography of the world for periods of two up to sixty minutes. The
director has described his films as ‘found paintings’: not only do they offer
striking pictorial qualities, but they also toy with the idea of returning the
moving image to its original stillness. The films also offer a systematic
investigation of the relations between man, landscape, and the filmic medium.
During the last decades it has become increasingly clear how much these
investigations have to offer to key contemporary debates about ecology, the age
of the anthropocene and the development of digital technologies.
It is fair to say that Benning stands today as an important precursor to the non-
pastoral attitude to environmental thought required by the Anthropocene, in the
sense that what we could (once) call the “natural environment” in Benning is a
complex, ambiguous, politically charged field, which is both always entangled
with man and technology and capable of resisting and reversing man’s designs.
As the opening examples demonstrated rather than being conciliatory and
aesthetically appeasing Benning’s films are – whether subtly or explicitly – often
concerned with the murderous, the destructive and the ruinous. The entire
California trilogy for instance (El Valley Centro (1999), LOS (2000), SOGOBI
(2001)) is a geovisual investigation of the many consequences of water politics
in southern California. Over the six hours of the trilogy agro-industrial processes
are observed in relation to the intense desertification they cause. Whether he is
reminding us that unequal access to resources is one of the main sources of war
or showing nature as the locus of social antagonism - from civil disobedience to
terrorism - Benning’s durational shots keep us waiting just long enough to see
how much violence is stored in our landscapes.