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James Benning

An extract from Bruce Hodsdon's essay on James Benning

Motivation

James Benning was born during World War II into a German working-class community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attributes the genesis of his filmmaking career to a chance encounter as a teenager with experimental films by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. He came across them while surfing television one afternoon in the early 1960s and, according to Benning, ‘they changed [his] way of seeing and thinking'. Benning completed a degree in mathematics while on a baseball scholarship. After dropping out of graduate school to work on a literacy program for migrant workers and, subsequently, a food program for the poor in the Ozarks, he returned to college and completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University 0f Wisconsin. Four years of teaching filmmaking ended when he moved to New York in 1980 and began to make films with the aid of grants and German television money. In the late 1980s, Benning settled in Val Verde, California, and has since taught film/video at California Institute of the Arts.

In a filmmaking career spanning 30 years, he has completed at least 36 films, including 14 of feature length (around 60 minutes or more) and several video installations.

If Benning has one primary motivation for making films, it is his drive towards greater self-awareness, for, he says, ‘I've really made films to define my own self better, to understand myself better. I thought [that] by making films I could look at things that affect my life… Dealing with the personal is the thing I try to do'.

Method

‘I teach a class called ‘Looking and Listening' and that's all we do—taking them to different places and they look and listen in very concentrated ways—which is exactly the way I work.

‘I'm in the habit of going back to a place… to re-experience it. This becomes a kind of storehouse of knowledge.

‘I use a small electric Bolex with a built-in motor. And I do everything myself from buying the film at Kodak to cutting my own negative. I don't have a crew—I shoot all [with] sync sound but I also take additional sound at the location so I can also post-sync if I want to remove some sounds that I don't like.

‘I want to keep making films cheaply—three recent films were completed for less than $15,000. I kind of find it criminal when it costs more than that because there are better plans [in which] to put money.'

Benning has continued to work on 16mm film in preference to video because, he says, the latter ‘is still a different kind of image—it doesn't have grain in it'. He nevertheless acknowledges that 16mm is ‘near the end' and contemplates high-definition digital video as an option.

Mode

Benning's approach is resistant to labels, although his work has variously been described as structuralist (or structural), formalist, and minimalist. So-called structural films foreground the film's materiality (awareness of the film as object and process) and its construct (the film's shape becomes the primary subject). Of the films included in this brief retrospective, 11 x 14 (1977) and American Dreams (1983) are most clearly ‘structural'; however, the primacy given to form is a constant feature of Benning's film practice. But to relate his work to ‘structural films' is not to imply that he makes a fetish of form in films like 11 x 14, American Dreams, Landscape Suicide (1988), and Four Corners (1997). It is to imply that Benning challenges the viewer who is conditioned by conventional film practice in which form is at the service of interpreting ‘the meaning of plots that the characters enact', to quote Scott McDonald. Conversely, in 11 x 14, for example, Benning ‘uses character as a means of maintaining our interest in formal elements'.

If 11 x 14 hovers tantalisingly, and with a certain playfulness, between narrative and non-narrative, Landscape Suicide moves more decisively and darkly into the realm of documentary reconstruction and characterisation. This is a prime example of what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls ‘a shotgun marriage', in which Benning weds his distinctive formal talents and interests with a more apparent social dimension. Through the relentless formalism of American Dreams, Benning confronts the issues of race and gender. Four Corners, one in his recent series of ‘landscape' films, is a complex meditation on place, American history, and painting.

Like filmmakers as disparate as Rossellini, Tati, Straub-Huillet, Snow, Akerman, and van Sant, Benning offers the viewer an invaluable gift—the room to move from perception to a form of contemplation that sometimes approaches a meditative state. If his images often seem anchored, waiting for something to happen, there is also implicit the underlying restlessness of the quest, a theme he made explicit in his early films on the road. Through what he describes as ‘hard work', Benning seeks the fortuitous with the precise logic of a mathematician. The role of mathematics in his film practice is not so much in the arithmetic serial cutting but in something Benning sees as more abstract. For him, mathematical thinking is ‘very creative' and produces ‘elegant solutions—the way artists think'.

Benning indicates that he will apply ‘two criteria to make films from now on'. The first is ‘to define place as having meaning'. The second is ‘to look at [places] that will tell me something about myself'.

Bruce Hodsdon

Bruce Hodsdon placed work by James Benning more or less permanently in the Australian landscape when he acquired prints of Grand Opera (1982) and later Landscape Suicide (1988) for the National Film and Video Lending Collection after the former had been screened by then Director Geoff Gardner (now BIFF program consultant) in the Melbourne Film Festival.

View the full Benning programme here