James Benning Movies

Seven entirely static shots make up James Benning's quiet reflection on existence in the Ruhr Valley.

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

"Benning's landscape works, with their meticulous, reverential compositions, have been located in the history of American realist painting and...

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...

"On November 28, 2023 I woke up early and drove down to the Upper Kern River. I came to film a tree. It's leaves were orange. The shot would be 87...

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

For his performance Reforming the Past, James Benning turns towards his own film North on Evers, shot in 1991. After seeing Andy Warhol's Screen...

It centers on Allensworth, the first self-administered African-American municipality in California, showcasing the buildings of the now-abandoned...

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

One-hour-documentation of James Benning's participation in the Moving Billboard project.

Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian...

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

A view of an Oregon farm field, observing a solar eclipse and incorporating a Leonard Cohen song.

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

glory is a film about the present, about America and its history of abuse.

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

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...

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...

A stretch of highway blanketed by snow becomes the stage for one accident after another in US 41, perhaps Benning’s first disaster movie, or a...

Composed of just four shots in which Clara McHale-Ribot, Rachel Kushner, Richard Hebdige, and Simone Forti read quietly to themselves, the film...