Happy 78th Birthday, James Benning! Born today in 1942, this American independent filmmaker, over the course of his forty-year career, has made over twenty-five feature-length films that have shown in many different venues across the world.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Benning and his family lived in a German working-class community.
Growing up in a blue-collar state capital, the community had torn itself apart in the race battles of the 1960s; Benning recalls being beaten up by former neighbors when he became a civil rights organizer.
Benning played baseball for the first two decades of his life. He later earned an undergraduate and an MFA in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, which he attended on a baseball scholarship.
Post-graduation, Benning experienced a political awakening and racial consciousness during the late 1960s, participating in civil rights protests led by Milwaukee-based Roman Catholic priest and noted civil rights activist Father James Groppi in segregated city.
Benning eventually dropped out of graduate school to forfeit his military deferment since his friends, who were mostly not in school, were being drafted or being killed in Vietnam.
Benning instead joined the War on Poverty, teaching children of migrant workers in Colorado how to read and write, and helping to start a commodities food program that fed people living in poverty in the Missouri Ozarks. Benning often uses this background as part of his film work.
At the age of thirty-three, Benning received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he had studied with American film theorist and film historian David Bordwell.
For the next four years, Benning taught filmmaking at Northwestern University, CalArts, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of California San Diego.
Benning later won note in the 1970s American experimental film scene with his early contributions to the structuralist movement of the decade.
He was hailed as cinema's voice of the Midwest, grabbing the attention of the avant-garde film world.
These included his thirty-two-minute 1977 American short film '8 1/2 x 11,' the 1977 American drama/independent film '11 x 14' and the 1977 American independent/experimental documentary film 'One Way Boogie Woogie'.
These were made in Chicago, Milwaukee and the surrounding rural region during 1976-1978.
In 1980, Benning moved to lower Manhattan, where, with the aid of grants and funding from German Television, continued to make films.
These included, most notably 'American Dreams: Lost and Found' (1984), 'Landscape Suicide'(1987) and 'Used Innocence' (1989).
It was all three of these films that provided glimpses into the minds of violent criminals through their own words, and are made all the more chilling by Benning's decision to place their crimes in their historical and political and contexts rather than pass judgment on them.
Leaving New York after eight years, Benning moved west to teach film/video at California Institute of the Arts, and has taught there ever since.
In the early 1990s, Benning made a series of text/image films. Each invoked histories of how antagonistic cultural and economic agendas over land use shape landscapes and configure social environments.
These included the 'North on Evers' (1992), 'Deseret' (1995), 'Four Corners'(1997), and 'UTOPIA' (1998).
It was this series of experimental documentaries that investigated the effects of history and politics on the American West.
They are composed almost entirely of landscapes, recalling his earlier experiments with cinematic time and offscreen space. The films are now considered by many to be among his best works.
Of the documentaries mentioned above, Benning is best known for shooting, writing, producing and directing the 1995 American black and white/color documentary film 'Deseret'. This was his eighth feature-length film.
Its title refers to the name the territory of Utah originally proposed for itself when campaigning for statehood in the 1860s (it joined the union as Utah on January 4, 1896).
Narrated by Fred Gardner, Benning had collected ninety-three stories about Utah and boiled them down to a few lines from The New York Times from 1852-1992, using a different shot for each sentence to 'illustrate' the one being spoken.
Benning unfolds the sentences being read into magnificent landscapes captured with a stationary camera during a dozen-odd trips throughout the calendar year - deserts, plains of snow, lonely trails, trees in bloom, cemeteries, ruins, unfriendly rocks, empty settlers' houses, roads that seem to be leading nowhere, a few isolated human figures.
It is not until we reach the year 1900 in where Benning's black and white footage spectacularly turns to color.
Post three years of filming 'Deseret' in the Utah desert, the film's multifaceted look at the surroundings and starkly composed images suggests a space haunted by the official history written back east in The New York Times.
In March 1996, American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote of 'Deseret' in The Chicago Reader.
He said: "At first one might assume that Benning is simply showing us the sites today where the events being described took place, but it soon becomes apparent that he’s doing no such thing.
He’s noted that each segment contains at least one shot that refers in some fashion to the news story, but how is frequently unclear; indeed, the relevance of image to text is often so tenuous that a rift between them is created — a rift each viewer is obliged to fill.
If the space of the written text is historical and the space of the audiovisual text is, broadly speaking, painterly, the space of the rift between the two is, oddly enough, novelistic — a story of Utah each viewer winds up constructing, using his or her own imagination as well as the historical and painterly elements.
From this point of view the writer-director of the experience of Deseret becomes each spectator in collaboration with Benning."
French author and California Institute of the Arts professor Bérénice Reynaud writes: "The landscapes resist the inscription of official history, yet they are haunted by its imperfect traces.
Never have Benning's images been so beautiful, so starkly composed, and so sad. Their deceptively still surface hides troubled waters, but the emotion is kept at bay."
Benning has employed diverse methods, themes, structures, and aesthetics into his films, investigating narrative and anti-narrative modes, personal history, race, collective memory, place, industry, and landscape.
His philosophy of "landscape as a function of time," and "Looking and Listening" (which is also the name of a course taught by Benning) is particularly evident in his films since 1999 in the form of fixed, stable shots.
Benning's use of duration reflects his accord with Henry David Thoreau's passage from his 1854 autobiographical book Walden; or: Life in the Woods.
It reads: "No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.
What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?"
According to Benning's personal life, his only child is American visual artist Sadie T. Benning (b. April 11, 1973). She works in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound.
She also explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. Sadie is a lesbian.
Benning's early films fused the "structuralist" investigations into sound-image relationships of a couple of filmmakers with an interest in narrative and a deep sensitivity to color, light, and landscape.
These include Canadian installation artist, filmmaker, and painter Michael Snow ('Wavelength') and American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer, theoretician, and pioneer of digital art Hollis Frampton.
Benning's central innovation -- the use of narrative to explore cinema's formal possibilities -- has proven to be enormously influential on a number of experimental and independent filmmakers.
Echoes of his style and compositional sense have popped up in television commercials since the 1970s, and can be found in the work of such other filmmakers.
These include Jim Jarmusch ('Stranger Than Paradise', 'Down by Law' 'Dead Man'), Chantal Akerman ('Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles', 'La Captive') and North American cinematographer, film director, and producer Rob Tregenza.
Benning has been active from 1971–present.
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