{"id":16557,"date":"2024-06-28T21:00:10","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T01:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=16557"},"modified":"2024-06-27T09:13:40","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T13:13:40","slug":"the-united-states-of-america-2022-james-benning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/16557","title":{"rendered":"The United States of America (2022, James Benning)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a><\/em>, but my imagination ran wild on Allensworth<\/em> while this mostly felt picturesque.<\/p>\n

Hibbing MN:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

A remake of sorts, per Film Comment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Benning:<\/p>\n

“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\u2019s not a film I made to fool anybody. I think it\u2019s an important statement about how we can create what we think the U.S. is, and take it as real, even when it\u2019s completely false. I think any construction of meaning for the U.S. can only be false, because how can you include everything? There\u2019s always a contradiction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ajo AZ:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

A James Benning history lesson from Erika Balsom in Ten Skies<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Benning’s interest in structure is of no recent vintage: his Grand Opera<\/em> (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.
\n…
\nBy Ten Skies<\/em> (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.
\n…
\nIf, 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<\/em>, ‘The structure itself is rigid, and then what it’s containing is fluid. It’s almost like a sieve.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Durkee OR:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Benning in Film Comment again:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t believe that at all. I think things are funny. And sometimes you don\u2019t make them up. Like the shot of the horses in the film that are staring at the camera. They\u2019re motionless except for their ears, which move a little bit. They\u2019re 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\u2019s kind of a pathetic race, even though the audience really seems to be enjoying it. I think that\u2019s hilarious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2643,1860,276],"class_list":["post-16557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2020s","tag-james-benning","tag-structuralism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16557"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16596,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16557\/revisions\/16596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}