Title card says city/state, we see a two-minute shot of a location in that sate, and on to the next one. I knew the gimmick ahead of time – that each shot was actually made in California – but it didn’t harm the viewing experience at all. Movie says you’re in the future, you imagine the future. Movie says the past, you picture the past. Movie says Omaha Nebraska, who am I to argue? It’s well-researched, because Katy looked at the Minnesota shot and said that must be Hibbing, which is what the title card told us. Possible references to previous Benning films (there’s a train and a sky). Usually ambient sound but every eighth or tenth state there’s a voiceover about oppressed people. Aside from the game-playing and real/imagined locations, it’s a very relaxing movie to watch, even more so than the slower-paced Allensworth, but my imagination ran wild on Allensworth while this mostly felt picturesque.

Hibbing MN:

A remake of sorts, per Film Comment.

Benning:

“My main idea for this film was to set up a problem that is almost insolvable, which is what America is at this particular time … it’s not a film I made to fool anybody. I think it’s an important statement about how we can create what we think the U.S. is, and take it as real, even when it’s completely false. I think any construction of meaning for the U.S. can only be false, because how can you include everything? There’s always a contradiction.

Ajo AZ:

A James Benning history lesson from Erika Balsom in Ten Skies:

Benning’s interest in structure is of no recent vintage: his Grand Opera (1978) pays explicit homage to Snow and Frampton … [yet] the bulk of his production comes definitively after [structural film’s] heyday and breaks with some of its key features. As the seventies wore on, many came to see the purging of content characteristic of structural film as a dead end and began to re-engage with narrative. Formal rigour was not so much abandoned as it was increasingly complemented by concerns with subjectivity and the social. Benning’s practice, particularly as it developed through the eighties and nineties, is best understood as part of this multifaceted response to avant-garde cinema’s high modernist moment.

By Ten Skies (2004), Benning had left behind the discursivity of earlier works … to adopt a metric form almost entirely free of written or spoken language. From the new talkies to the newer silents. The film is, in some sense, a resurrection of the reductionist, phenomenological impulse that Sitney saw as being at the heart of structural film. In the early twenty-first century, as cinema migrated and mutated under the pressures of technological change, such ontological inquiries assumed a renewed relevance.

If, for structural film, the screen was primarily a surface, for Benning it is both surface and window. His interest in structure is not a matter of making content subsidiary to outline but in exploring the tension that exists between the two … As Benning describes Ten Skies, ‘The structure itself is rigid, and then what it’s containing is fluid. It’s almost like a sieve.’

Durkee OR:

Benning in Film Comment again:

Artists are often afraid of humor. And then when people write about my films, they want to shy away from it, too, because somehow [they think] humor demeans the work. But I don’t believe that at all. I think things are funny. And sometimes you don’t make them up. Like the shot of the horses in the film that are staring at the camera. They’re motionless except for their ears, which move a little bit. They’re completely hilarious, but in a very sad way. Or the racetrack shot, with just five cars in the race, and one car getting further and further behind. It’s kind of a pathetic race, even though the audience really seems to be enjoying it. I think that’s hilarious.

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,

Lawrence Garcia:

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.

We’re in structural a-g territory here, a tennis player woking on his serve, over and over with precise editing. But then it’s twin true-crime re-enactments, actors playing murderers in interrogation.

A California teen girl is stabbed to death in 1984. The sound of typing throughout, cuts to black between her responses, ties to the novel Devil House, landscapes and artifacts. We have to listen to an entire song from Cats while watching a girl with perfect 80s hair talk on the phone. I don’t wanna have to think about the cost of music royalties when watching a movie, but putting a song from Thriller in your experimental documentary is okay?

Another girl is found dead at a Wisconsin farm in 1957. Static composition takes from around town, same as we just did in other town, listening to a radio preacher. Woman dancing alone to the worst version I’ve ever heard of “Tennessee Waltz.” This time no typing on the interview scenes, some ambient industrial sound.

It’s some pretty cool work by Benning, but I feel like I was tricked into watching a serial-killer movie, and I should’ve put on that four-hour George Harrison documentary instead. As far as my relative interest in musicians/murders go, I’ve skimmed the wiki on Ed Gein and though “oh no, that pretty much sucks” then moved on and never thought about him again. But I’ve considered George Harrison every day this year, and maybe that’s because I think I could pretty easily be a serial killer, but could never play guitar in a good group.

A selection of screenshots, with some notes I took, not necessarily going together…

Rough edits, film flares out at the end of each shot.

Mostly motor vehicle themed except for some especially long takes: a train ride, washing dishes, nude cuddling to an endless Dylan song.

The camera moved!

Not the best audio in the world, wind and transit sounds.

One editing trick at the hour mark to make sure you’re still paying attention.

Smokestack song is same as cuddling song, Black Diamond Bay by Dylan.

Staged-looking scenes and some natural street life.
(note photo in the above shot)

Good weekend afternoon movie.

The filmmuseum DVD comes with a great director interview:

What I am talking about is a general feeling that I believe people get when they watch a film. This feeling may be shared among members of the audience, and it may vary from one individual to another. What I am trying to do is to design films that are seductive, that leave gaps in the narrative that people will be able to fill with their own lives. I want the audience to help piece the shots together. I want them to have to work a little when they watch a film, to make watching a film more of an active experience. I think that when this happens, when people help tie a film together with their own personal experiences, the images in the film become what I am calling a metaphor. It is a pattern of meaning rather than a direct translation. You don’t say, well, this is what happened in the film, but rather this is how I relate the images, the events that occur on the screen. This kind of general pattern of meaning that you come away with is not really in the film, nor in the events that are photographed. There is no objective reality; there is only this metaphor.

I’ve finally watched a James Benning movie. I knew I’d either love it, or not get it, which would be frustrating since I have about 15 Benning movies on my must-see list based on critic recommendations. Whew, loved it. Felt like Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind meets Hollis Frampton. I noticed he was cutting the picture on every new spoken sentence, but later I discovered it gets more Framptony yet: there’s one literal/relevant shot per segment, the long between-segment shots get gradually shorter, movie switches to color when Utah becomes a state and there are precisely as many b/w frames as color.

All spoken text is from historical New York Times articles, which don’t seem overly fond of Utah or the Mormons, so it’s interesting to get a history lesson told by a suspicious narrator – from early reports on Brigham Young, U.S. military expeditions to quell the Mormon rebellion, fights against polygamy, the cross-country railroad, and the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which Mormon militia killed 100+ non-Mormon settlers. Things get somewhat less extreme once statehood is achieved – standouts include the U.S. army’s nerve gas tests killing thousands of sheep and Robert Smithson’s great Spiral Jetty.

Amazing quote from 1880s: “Mormonism is a good deal as slavery seemed once to those of the north who had never seen, but only read one-sided unreliable representations of it: not half as bad when you come to see it.”

Rosenbaum: “Benning’s eye for evocative beauty is as sharp as ever, and his complex invitation to the viewer to create a narrative space between his separate elements keeps this 1995 film continually fascinating.”