Movies: James Benning

James Benning watches tv with a young girl....

"On November 28, 2023 I woke up early and drove down to the Upper Kern River. I came to film a tree. It's leaves were orange. The shot would be 87 minutes, the exact length of Godard's Breathless. My film would be non-narrative, but stuff happened" -...

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 co...

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...

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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 f...

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...

Filmed at Benning's home in Val Verde during the first month of the pandemic, the film is a portrait of that time....

A film by James Benning...

Between July, 2007 and June, 2008, veteran independent film-maker,James Benning built replicas of two iconic American Cabins in a remote part of the High Sierras- Henry David Thoreau’s hut from Walden Pond and the one-room plywood shack in rural Mont...

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair....

As we ascend a mountain, we move backwards in time. Like most of Benning's films, Spring Equinox is at once direct and mystical. Simple images and landscapes become charged with meaning. As the film develops, changes in altitude and time give way to ...

James Benning appropriates a 14-second excerpt from his own film Time and a Half (second entry in his filmography), dissects the scene into its constituent images and extrapolates them into fluctuating superpositions, generating a 71-minute reflectio...

For his performance Reforming the Past, James Benning turns towards his own film North on Evers, shot in 1991. After seeing Andy Warhol's Screen Tests again, Benning re-filmed all of the 59 portraits that occur in North on Evers with his HD camera, r...

Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities....

Casting a Glance is a tribute to the American artist Robert Smithson. Between May 15 2005 and January 14 2007, I made 16 trips to the Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake...

"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This i...

A found footage remake of Michael Snow's Wavelength...

One-hour-documentation of James Benning's participation in the Moving Billboard project....

Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard....