James Benning Movies

Filmed on November 21 and 22, 2018 in Valencia, California. A gibbous and full moon rising.

Looping, chugging and barreling by, the trains in Benning's latest monumental film map a stunning topography and a history of American development....

O Panama features a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the...

Between July, 2007 and June, 2008, veteran independent film-maker,James Benning built replicas of two iconic American Cabins in a remote part of the...

The owner of a failing inn and his roadkill collector friend devise a Bigfoot hoax to draw in tourists, but a Miccosukee Hunter is set to make sure...

Benning shot Tulare Road on a highway in California’s Central Valley, an area that the director had previously explored in his film El Valley...

Towards the end of 2015, James Benning made one of his occasional expeditions to Utah, to the place where Robert Smithson's colossal land-sculpture...

The portrait of an art institution: James Benning explores the building and grounds of the California Institute of Art. Each image creates a tension,...

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists...

Los Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2½ minutes long, in this non-narrative film, part 2 of Benning's "California Trilogy".

an excerpt of a conversation between James and I during the Fall of 2019 - Santa Clarita, CA

Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual...

Text by Theodore J. Kaczynski, made of scans of a document from an FBI Laboratory, about the danger of experiments with accelerated particles.

[...] And then there’s the largest and fastest growing archive of all time, the Internet, and in particular YouTube. I started here playfully...

This is multifaceted look at the landscape and history of Utah (or Deseret, as the Mormon Church prefers to call it). Benning condenses 93 news...

In this short black and white study Benning uses dissolves, shifting camera angles and cross-fades to experiment with narrative structure.

A new video work by American avant-garde filmmaker James Benning explores the videos of Russian activist/activist-art group Voina (“war”).

61. La Verdad Interior reveals the creative process behind TELEMUNDO [screened in the New Visions section], a collaborative film directed by James...

A filmic paean to artist Robert Smithson's legendary "earthwork" sculpture, the Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot long...

Benning's 18-minute study of moonfall in the morning sky-- A close cousin to his film "two moons". A lovely rendition of 'Moon River' accompanies the...