Over the course of his 40-year career, experimental director James Benning has made more than 25 feature films, shown in different venues across the world.
Benning, born in 1942 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, played baseball for the first 20 years of his life. He then earned an undergraduate and master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, which he attended on baseball scholarship.
He experienced political awakening during the late 1960s, participating in civil rights protests led by Father James Groppi in segregated Milwaukee.
Benning dropped out of graduate school to forfeit his military deferment since his friends were being drafted and dying in Vietnam. Instead he joined the war on poverty, teaching children of migrant workers in Colorado how to read and write, and helping to start a commodities food program that fed people living in poverty in the Missouri Ozarks.
At age 33, Benning received MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He taught filmmaking at Northwestern University and then switched to CalArts in 1988.
Benning got recognition for his 1976/1978 films, 11 x 14 and One Way Boogie Woogie, made in Chicago and Milwaukee and their rural regions.
In 1980, Benning moved to lower Manhattan, where, with funding from German TV, he continued to make films, American Dreams (1984) and Landscape Suicide (1986).
After eight years, Benning moved west to teach film/video at California Institute of the Arts, and has taught there ever since.
In the early 1990s Benning made a series of text/image films: North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995), Four Corners (1997), and UTOPIA (1998), invoking histories of how antagonistic cultural and economic agendas over land use shape landscapes and configure social environments.
Benning has employed diverse methods, structures, and aesthetics, narrative and anti-narrative modes, personal history, race, collective memory, place, industry, and landscape. His philosophy of “landscape as a function of time,” and “Looking and Listening” is evident in his films after 1999, defined by fixed and stable shots.
Each of El Valley Centro, Los, and Sogobi—The California Trilogy (2000-2001) is composed of 35 2½ minute shots.
Nightfall (2012) consists of a single 98-minute shot, made at high elevation in the woods of west Sierras that begins as the sun goes down and ends in near blackness.
Benning was inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s passage from “Walden”: “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?”
Benning divides his time between Val Verde, California, and small town in the Sierra Nevada north of Bakersfield.
In 2007, Benning built a replica of the cabin Thoreau constructed in 1845 on Walden Pond.
The following year he mounted a copy of the cabin Ted Kaczynski had built in 1971 in Montana. Inside he has installed copies he made of paintings by artists that have inspired him, Bill Traylor, Henry Darger, and Mose Tolliver.
Benning published a book of poems titled Thirty Years to Life in 1973, and Fifty Years to Life, Texts from Eight Films by James Benning in 2000, both with Two Pants Press in Madison, Wisconsin.
Reinhard Wulf’s feature documentary, James Benning: Circling the Image, was released in 2003.
In 2007, the Austrian Film Museum published the first substantial monograph on the filmmaker, James Benning, edited by Barbara Pichler and Claudia Slanar.
Benning worked exclusively in 16mm until 2009, when he converted to the new digital technology.
His first digital film was Ruhr (2009), commissioned by Werner Ruzicka for the Duisburger Filmwoche. Digital filmmaking allowed him to re-make Faces (2011) and Easy Rider (2012), as well as the two-hour one shot film Nightfall (2011).
Benning’s work has traversed the film and art worlds. He made 16mm installations at Art Park (1977), the Walker Art Center (1978), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1980), and has created digital installations at Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles, (2011), 21er Haus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2012), and Argos, Centrum Voor Kunst en Media, Brussels (2012).
Benning continues to distribute his own films, as he has for his entire career.
The Austrian Film Museum in Vienna is restoring and archiving all of Benning’s 16mm films as well as producing DVDs of the works.
Filmography
1971 Did You Ever Hear That Cricket Sound? 16mm, black/white 1 minute
1972 Time and a Half 16mm, black and white 17 minutes
1972 Ode to Muzak 16mm, color 3 minutes
1972 Art Hist. 101 16mm, black and white 17 minutes
1973 Michigan Avenue 16mm, color 6 minutes co-created with Bette Gordon.
1973 Honeylane Road
1973 57
1974 I-94 16mm, color 3 minutes co-created with Bette Gordon.
1974 Gleem
1974 8½ × 11 16mm, color 32 minutes
1975 The United States of America 16mm, color 27 minutes, co-created with Bette Gordon.
1975 Saturday Night 16mm, color 3 minutes
1975 An Erotic Film
1975 9-1-75 16mm, color 22 minutes
1975 3 Minutes on the Dangers of Film Recording 16mm, black and white with tint 3 minutes
1976 Chicago Loop 16mm, color 8 minutes
1976 A to B 16mm, color 2 minutes
1977 One Way Boogie Woogie 16mm, color 60 minutes
1977 11 × 14 16mm, color 80 minutes 65-shot narrative featuring a man’s affair, a young hitchhiker and a lesbian couple traveling the Midwestern United States.
1978 Grand Opera 16mm, color 81 minutes
1978 Four Oil Wells 16mm, color, installation continuous has been lost.
1979 Oklahoma 16mm, color, installation continuous was on a 4 screen installation, has been lost.
1980 Double Yodel 16mm, color, installation continuous has been lost.
1981 Last Dance 16mm, color, installation continuous has been lost.
1982 Him and Me 16mm, color 88 minutes
1984 American Dreams: Lost and Found 16mm, color 55 minutes Benning’s Hank Aaron memorabilia with excerpts from Arthur Bremer’s diary
1985 O Panama 16mm, color 28 minutes co-created with Burt Barr.
1986 Landscape Suicide 16mm, color 95 minutes
1989 Used Innocence 16mm, color 95 minutes
1991 North on Evers 16mm, color 87 minutes
1995 Deseret 16mm, color 82 minutes
1997 Four Corners 16mm, color 80 minutes
1998 Utopia 16mm, color 93 minutes
2000 El Valley Centro (California Trilogy part 1) 16mm, color 90 minutes
2001 Los (California Trilogy part 2) 16mm, color 90 minutes
2001 Sogobi (California Trilogy part 3) 16mm, color 90 minutes
2001 B-52 (sound only)
2004 13 Lakes 16mm, color 133 minutes, added to National Registry in 2014.
2004 Ten Skies 16mm, color 101 minutes
2005 One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later 16mm, color 121 minutes
2007 Casting a Glance 16mm, color 80 minutes
2007 RR 16mm, color 110 minutes
2009 Ruhr digital, color 122 minutes
2010 John Krieg Exiting the Falk Corporation in 1971 digital, black and white, installation 71 minutes 2 screen installation, with 2 objects.
2010 Pig Iron digital, color, installation 31 minutes 2 screen installation.
2010 Faces digital, black and white, silent 130 minutes
2011 Twenty Cigarettes digital, color, single channel installation, 98 minutes
2011 Nightfall digital, color 98 minutes
2011 Two Cabins digital, color, installation 31 minutes 2 screen installation.
2011 small roads digital, color 104 minutes
2012 Easy Rider digital, color 96 minutes
2012 The War digital, color 56 minutes
2012 Stemple Pass digital, color 123 minutes
2013 BNSF digital, color 193 minutes
2013 Natural History digital, color 77 minutes
2014 Farocki digital, color, silent 77 minutes
2016 Spring Equinox digital, color
2016 Measuring Change digital, color
2017 L. Cohen digital, color 45 minutes, film centered around time and change on Oregon farm field, with Leonard Cohen song.
2020 Maggie’s Farm digital, color 84 minutes, Shot at California Institute of Arts
2022 The United States of America digital, color 97 minutes, Berlin Film Fest
2022 Allensworth digital, color 65 minutes
2024 Breathless digital, color 87 minutes World Premiere at Cinema du Réel
2025 little boy World Premiere, Berlin Film Fest
