James Benning Movies

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...

Los Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2 1/2 minutes long, in this non-narrative film, part 2 of Benning's "California Trilogy".

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

A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and...

Scrolling excerpts from the diary of George Wallace's would-be assassin Arthur Bremer at screen bottom, Hank Aaron cards and ephemera from his entire...

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...

A three hour shot containing light, dark, and a BNSF train in the desert.

Many films by this master of landscape cinema are cinematic studies of specific landscapes, as is the case with SOGOBI – the Shoshonean word...

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of...

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

Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia...

"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...

Exploring the Panama Canal is a fascinating journey through the land of mystery and adventure and the Canal that divides it. Through rare archival...

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...

A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.

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

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

A short film about femininity

The American filmmaker James Benning has been one of the outstanding exponents of the structural film since the mid-1970s. Bennings artistic position...