Movies: James Benning

Composed of just four shots in which Clara McHale-Ribot, Rachel Kushner, Richard Hebdige, and Simone Forti read quietly to themselves, the film offers portraits of its subjects while simultaneously serving as a mirror for the viewers, who perform a p...

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 Micha...

In 54 static shots, Benning provides a picture of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. With the exception of the first three shots, he chooses areas that are normally closed to the public: offices, store rooms and empty corridors. A characteristical...

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in res...

Iron ore is super heated in a blast furnace to make pig iron, which in turn is used to produce steel. The making of steel is a continuous process. Pig iron is moved from the blast furnace to the steel plant by railroad. The trains are operated by rem...

61. La Verdad Interior reveals the creative process behind TELEMUNDO [screened in the New Visions section], a collaborative film directed by James Benning and starring himself and Sofía Brito. It is a journey, an interview. The connection between a f...

James Benning returns to the location of his 2012 film Nightfall, this time at daybreak....

After having shared a common experience in Cuba, twelve filmmakers say goodbye to return to their countries and make a pact: to make a collective film that answers the questions: what does it mean to plagiarize images and how to do it in the distance...

A short film by Gary Mairs written by James Benning. Stars Amy Seimetz....

The owner of a failing inn and his roadkill collector friend devise a Bigfoot hoax to draw in tourists, but a Miccosukee Hunter is set to make sure that doesn’t happen....

One of the films I remade was a film that used two faces in it from a short little three-minute film that I made for the Henry Mancini television program back in 1973. The two main characters in that film were a prostitute and a junkie, and because o...

Last week I made a film of 49 of my T-shirts called Fresh Air. It was to be purely structural. For sound I recorded (in sync) the quiet ambience of my Val Verde neighborhood. Then I decided to add the sounds of a radio playing. I set up my Sound Devi...

A film by James Benning...

A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative....

A stretch of highway blanketed by snow becomes the stage for one accident after another in US 41, perhaps Benning’s first disaster movie, or a comedy of (automotive and meteorological) errors. Returning Benning to his favorite subject of the American...

Filmed on November 21 and 22, 2018 in Valencia, California. A gibbous and full moon rising....

It centers on Allensworth, the first self-administered African-American municipality in California, showcasing the buildings of the now-abandoned town and looking for the traces of a Black cultural history....

glory is a film about the present, about America and its history of abuse....

an excerpt of a conversation between James and I during the Fall of 2019 - Santa Clarita, CA...

Text by Theodore J. Kaczynski, made of scans of a document from an FBI Laboratory, about the danger of experiments with accelerated particles....