James Benning – MRQE

Los

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2 1/2 minutes long, in this non-narrative film.

Eight Bridges

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Shots of 8 bridges from the continental United States – the Golden Gate Bridge from Sausalito, California; the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge from Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico; the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma, Alabama; the Seven Mile Bridge from Little Duck Key, Florida; the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey; the Dubuque-Wisconsin Bridge from Dubuque, Iowa; the High Bridge from Valley City, North Dakota; the Astoria-Megler Bridge from Astoria, Oregon.

Four Corners (1998/III)

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

James Benning’s “Four Corners” uses a specific geographical location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and wholly imaginary place Four Corners, that favorite tourist destination where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet, becomes a kind of theoretical ground zero, the site from which Benning can give voice to other, pointedly unofficial American stories.

Utopia

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian Journal. A film by Richard Dindo. The images were found in the desert landscape from Death Valley south to, and crossing, the Mexican border.

Stemple Pass

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Four landscape shots containing a replica of Ted Kaczynskis cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning reads extracts from Kaczynskis journals from the early 1970s, recording his progress at hunting and gathering, and his connection to the Montana wilderness; a hand-written folded sheet of paper detailing his acts of monkey wrenching and first attempts at planting bombs; two notebooks written in numerical code in 1985 and decoded by Benning in 2011; two excepts from Industrial Society and Its Future by “FC” (aka the Unabomber Manifesto) as published in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995; and a 2001 interview with Kaczynski by J. Alienus Rychalski, special correspondent for the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch.

Small Roads

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Lengthy static shots of various backroads, smaller interstates, quieter roads, and lonely highways.

RR

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Looping, chugging and barreling by, the trains in Benning’s latest monumental film map a stunning topography and a history of American development. RR comes three decades after Benning and Bette Gordon made The United States of America (1975), a cinematic journey along the countrys interstates that is keenly aware of superhighways and railroad tracks as American public symbols. A political essay responding to the economic histories of trains as instruments in a culture of hyper-consumption, RR articulates its concern most explicitly when Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech is heard as a mile long coal train passes through eastern Wyoming. Benning spent two and a half years collecting two hundred and sixteen shots of trains, forty-three of which appear in RR. The locomotives’ varying colors, speeds, vectors, and reverberations are charged with visual thrills, romance and a nostalgia heightened by Benning’s declaration that this will be his last work in 16mm film.

Casting a Glance

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

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 in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, salt and red algae.

One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000

One half filmed in 1977, one half filmed 27 years later.

13 Lakes

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Shots of 13 great lakes in the USA, with each shot containing half water and half sky or land.