James Benning Movies

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

A document of one of the most famous 66 miles of railroad track in the world including the Tehachapi Loop.

Last week I made a film of 49 of my T-shirts called Fresh Air. It was to be purely structural. For sound I recorded (in sync) the quiet ambience of...

Maintenance is filmmaker Adele Horne’s exploration and meditation on house cleaning. Cleaning is one of the most private things we do in our...

A filmed homage to Sam Shepard, in a single fixed frame where the treetops sway under a moving cloud cover. Orchestrated by the camera in this forest...

James Benning appropriates a 14-second excerpt from his own film Time and a Half (second entry in his filmography), dissects the scene into its...

The 16mm test roll for James Benning's feature-length film TEN SKIES. 74.78 is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made...

James Benning's "Four Corners" uses a specific geographical location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and...

Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, TWENTY CIGARETTES....

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

In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line...

Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard.

Four landscape shots containing a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning reads extracts from...

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...

Shots of 13 great lakes in the USA, with each shot containing half water and half sky or land.

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

Experimental filmmaker James Benning returns with this abstract documentary about California's Central Valley, part 1 of his "California Trilogy"....

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

Filmed in Sierra Nevada, just like Benning's Spring Equinox, but this time during a different season. Consists of static shots of the actual...