Curator’s Notes

Fresh from its world premiere at Documenta (September 23), James Benning’s new film is dedicated to the Spiral Jetty, a giant earthwork realised by the artist Robert Smithson in 1970 at the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Born in 1942 in Milwaukee, James Benning first studied mathematics, then switched to filmmaking after seeing Maya Deren’s landmark experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). “With a mathematician's love of formalism, a painter's eye, and an inimitable wit, Benning has been making structurally elegant, visually eloquent films exploring the psychic and material histories of American landscapes for three decades.” (Irina Leimbacher, San Francisco Cinematheque).

His work has been shown in a number of international venues, such as the Ann Arbor, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Cannes, Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Sundance, Tribeca, Vancouver and Vienna film festivals, and various museums/media centers around the world (Albright-Knox Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Cinematheque Ontario, Cornell Cinema, Hallwalls, Harvard Film Archive, Los Angeles FilmForum, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Pacific film Archive, San Francisco Cinematheque, Stedijk Museum, Tate Modern Gallery, Walker Art Center, Whitechapel Callery, Whitney Museum of American Art – to name only a few). He’s received many awards and grants, including two Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts awards, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

In November, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna will present a complete retrospective of his films, including the world premiere of RR (Nov 22). The Museum will also publish James Benning, the first book devoted to the filmmaker (in English), available through the Museum or, after February 2008, through Columbia University Press.

Since 1987, James Benning has been teaching film and mathematics at CalArts.

“It always pleased me when people would tell me they’d almost left my film but instead had stayed and felt that the experience had taught them to look differently, to become more proactive as a viewer.” – James Benning (from in interview with Scott McDonald, Artforum, September 2007)

“While he is obviously enamored of the beauty and diversity of the American landscape, Benning’s explorations, far from being a macho celebration of the mythology of the frontier, are often a voyage into darkness… His mourning for America's "used innocence" is two sided–part romantic (pitting the transcendental, yet ironical, self of the filmmaker against the vastness that surrounds him), part materialist (mapping out a space through history).... Like Ozu's films, Benning's poetic explorations of the American space bring us to a moment of pure contemplation, in which a fleeting absolute may be glanced at behind the cool seduction of appearances.” – Film Comment

Selected Filmography

RR (2007)
One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later (2005)
Ten Skies (2004)
>13 Lakes (2004)
Sogobi (2001)
Los (2000)
El Valley Centro (1999)
Four Corners (1997)
Deseret (1995)
North on Evers (1991)
Used Innocence (1988)
Landscape Suicide (1986)
American Dreams (1983)
Him & Me (1981)
Grand Opera(1979)
One Way Boogie Woogie (1977)
Chicago Loop (1976)
11 X 14 (1976)
8 1/2 X 11 (1974)
Time & Half (1972)