Allensworth was “the first self-administered African-American municipality in California.” Each shot represents a month, per title cards – it’s mostly shots of structures that date from the era. Static scenes broken up by trains (I counted three, one of them visible), or by Nina Simone (June) or Leadbelly (November) songs,
In the post-film Q&A Benning remarked that with this film, he simply wanted to get people interested in this town … Much more revealing was his stated interest in the fact that, since Allensworth collapsed within a decade of its founding, we are seeing not original buildings but reconstructions built when the town was memorialized as a state park in 1974.
I’ve been reading Erika Balsom’s Ten Skies, and instead of watching the degraded youtube rip of that film (which the book tolerates, if not endorses) I watched a couple of nicer video releases.
Balsom on Benning:
Those familiar mostly with the filmmaker’s most recent output will venture that his is a cinema concerned above all with the investigation of form and the contemplation of beauty. Such perspectives are not entirely wrong – L. Cohen (2017), for instance, is a gorgeous 45-minute single-shot observation of a solar eclipse – but they are certainly incomplete. From his earliest works in the seventies, Benning has explored histories of settlement, the problem of political community, and the various ways that human actions mark the land in the United States. Probe his entirely sui generis filmography and you will find personal chronicles, accounts of murder, indictments of whiteness, and an attention to the particularities of the Midwest. We are, in other words, a very long way from formalism.
