James Benning Movies

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who...

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

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

Casting a Glance is a tribute to the American artist Robert Smithson. Between May 15 2005 and January 14 2007, I made 16 trips to the Spiral Jetty....

Lengthy static shots of various backroads, smaller interstates, quieter roads, and lonely highways.

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

Filmed in Sierra Nevada, California over one day. Static and still shots of the actual landscape and environments in the area.

A new video work by American avant-garde filmmaker James Benning explores the videos of Russian activist/activist-art group Voina (“war”).

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...

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

One day, father makes a shocking decision in a family gathering. The family disagrees with it and against him in the very beginning. However, they...

A crisscross through the USA, carving it up into a series of static shots of just under two minutes, one for each state, presented alphabetically,...

A found footage remake of Michael Snow's Wavelength

"Him And Me" has Benning's hallmarks: pristine cinematography, a quasi-autobiographical stance, and a minimalist structure that juxtaposes concrete...

"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...

Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual...

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

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...

One half filmed in 1977, one half filmed 27 years later.