Skip to content
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025

James Benning

James BENNING (1942, USA) has been making films and installations for over 40 years and has made a considerable contribution to American experimental cinema. His concerns about American culture have acquired a consistent and distinct place in films such as 11 x 14 (1976), One-Way Boogie Woogie (1977), Landscape Suicide (1986) and North On Evers (1991). He mostly worked with 16mm film, but with the growing obsolescence of this medium, he gradually shifted to digital technologies in his later career, with Ruhr (2009) being the first film he made digitally. He received grants for his work from, among others, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. Benning also teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and at Bard College.

Filmografie

(selection) Did You Ever Hear That Cricket Sound? (1971, short), Ode to Muzak (1972, short), Art Hist. 101 (1972, short), Time & A Half (1972, short), Michigan Avenue (1973, short), Honeyland Road (1973, short), 57 (1973, short), I-94 (1974, short), 8 1/2 x 11 (1974, short), The United States of America (1975, short), Saturday Night (1975, short), An Erotic Film (1975, short), 3 Minutes on the Dangers of Film Recording (1975, short), Chicago Loop (1976, short), A to B (1976, short), 11 x 14 (1976), One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), Grand Opera (1979), Four Oil Wells (1978), Oklahoma (1979), Double Yodel (1980), Last Dance (1981), Him & Me (1981), American Dreams (1983, short), O Panama (1985, short), Landscape Suicide (1986), Used Innocence (1988, doc), North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995, doc), Four Corners (1996, doc), Utopia (1998, doc), El valley centro (2000, doc), Sogobi (2001, doc), Los (2002, doc), California Trilogy (2003), 13 Lakes (2004, doc), Ten Skies (2005, doc), One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later (2006, doc), Casting a Glance (2007, doc), RR (2007, doc), Ruhr (2009), Fire & Rain (2009, short), Reforming the Past (2010), Pascal’s Lemma (short), Pig Iron (2010, short), John Krieg Exiting the Falk Corporation in 1971 (2010), Nightfall (2011), After Warhol (2011), Faces (2011), Twenty Cigarettes (2011, doc), Small Roads (2011, doc), Easy Rider (2012, doc), Stemple Pass (2012, doc) One Way Boogie Woogie 2012 (2012, doc), Bnsf (2012, doc), natural history (2014, doc), Spring Equinox (2016, doc), Measuring Change (2016, doc), Fall Equinox (2016, doc), Readers (2017, doc) Telemundo (2018), Two Moons (2018, doc)

More info: Wikipedia, James Benning

James Benning at IFFR

  • Ten Skies

    Anyone who hasn’t enjoyed lying on their back on the grass staring at clouds floating by maybe doesn’t need to see this film. For the rest of humanity

  • One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 years later

    Two structuralist masterpieces for the price of one. 27 years ago, the filmmaker recorded changes in his birthplace Milwaukee in 60 taut shots each la

  • Casting a Glance

    The master of the American landscape film focuses his unique cinematographic eye on the famous landscape work of art Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smi

  • Pixelvision

  • Easy Rider

    A contemplative excursion through Monument Valley in the year 2012. Lens-based landscape artist Benning went to the locations of the famous road movie

  • Faces

    A Cassavetes remake that pushes the original title to its ultimate consequence: strictly faces, each shot lasting as long as in the 1968 film. What’s

  • Coming to Terms

    Meditation on death and its psychological impact on a broken family – a subject that has kept Jost (1943) very busy recently and which in this case he

  • Chicago Loop

  • two moons

    Typical for Benning, in Two Moons the title is an exact description of the film’s content – and its governing principle, structure and concept.

  • natural history

    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