{"id":9308,"date":"2014-10-07T20:00:14","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T01:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=9308"},"modified":"2014-10-05T22:35:29","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T03:35:29","slug":"deseret-1995-james-benning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/9308","title":{"rendered":"Deseret (1995, James Benning)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve finally watched a James Benning movie.  I knew I&#8217;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 <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/545\">Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind<\/a><\/em> 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/deseret1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/deseret5.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>All spoken text is from historical New York Times articles, which don&#8217;t seem overly fond of Utah or the Mormons, so it&#8217;s interesting to get a history lesson told by a suspicious narrator &#8211; 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 &#8211; standouts include the U.S. army&#8217;s nerve gas tests killing thousands of sheep and Robert Smithson&#8217;s great Spiral Jetty.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/deseret2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/deseret3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Amazing quote from 1880s: &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image14\/deseret4.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Rosenbaum: &#8220;Benning&#8217;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve finally watched a James Benning movie. I knew I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/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":[451,1860,1449,294,1861],"class_list":["post-9308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1990s","tag-james-benning","tag-mormons","tag-trains","tag-utah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308","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=9308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9396,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308\/revisions\/9396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}