James Benning Movies

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...

Filmed at Benning's home in Val Verde during the first month of the pandemic, the film is a portrait of that time.

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...

Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.

Shots of 13 great lakes in the USA, with each shot containing half water and half sky or land.

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

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

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

A found footage remake of Michael Snow's Wavelength

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...

A document of one of the most famous 66 miles of railroad track in the world including the Tehachapi Loop.

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

Twenty-two minute tracking shot through campgrounds in Southern Wisconsin

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

One half filmed in 1977, one half filmed 27 years later. Director combined the structural analysis of image and sound with fragments of a narrative...

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

Named after the Shoshonean word for "Earth", this is the third and final part of Benning's "California Trilogy" and his approach to the Californian...

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...

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...