James Benning Movies

After having shared a common experience in Cuba, twelve filmmakers say goodbye to return to their countries and make a pact: to make a collective...

"scorched earth is a film that is part of the Untitled Fragments Project. It's 60 minutes at dusk, just one shot of the burned over forest (from this...

A short film about masculinity

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

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

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

The 3-channel video installation brings together four histories: the 1860s scorched earth policy of Kit Carson used to drive out the Navajos from...

Three-channel HD video (color/sound), 18 minutes

"Ash 01 is a declassified recording made from a B-52 bomber on December 26, 1972 during the Christmas carpet bombing of Hanoi." - James Benning. This...

In three virtuosic sequences created entirely in-camera, Benning alternates contrary camera movements in a trio of Chicago locations with increasing...

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

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

Presented on a computer, "Pascal's Lemma" features mathematics (diagrams, equations, questions), biographical information about Blaise Pascal, and...

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

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

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

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

James Benning returns to the location of his 2012 film Nightfall, this time at daybreak.

One of the films I remade was a film that used two faces in it from a short little three-minute film that I made for the Henry Mancini television...

In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first...