James Benning Movies

A filmic paean to artist Robert Smithson's legendary "earthwork" sculpture, the Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot long...

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

This three-channel video installation by James Benning shows three scenes from David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The...

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

HF is Benning’s tribute in miniature to legendary filmmaker Hollis Frampton, known for his materialist dissection of the cinema apparatus and...

Los Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2½ minutes long, in this non-narrative film, part 2 of Benning's "California Trilogy".

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...

Towards the end of 2015, James Benning made one of his occasional expeditions to Utah, to the place where Robert Smithson's colossal land-sculpture...

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...

At Northwestern University, where he teaches at the time, Benning gives a short interview to some student filmmakers. He then uses this material to...

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

A stunning study of real-time light changing from day to night which was filmed in a forest high up in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains

Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian...

Short by James Benning.

A stretch of highway blanketed by snow becomes the stage for one accident after another in US 41, perhaps Benning’s first disaster movie, or a...

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

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

Twenty-two minute tracking shot through campgrounds in Southern Wisconsin

signs is a sobering continuation of Benning’s career-long interest with the written word as image, text as vision: a silent parade of stills...

James Benning’s PLACE is a multi-part work that deepens the artist’s longstanding engagement with marginalized artists and creators. Over...