Landscape to be Experienced and to be Read: Time, Ecology, Politics. James Benning’s Film Programme
2019.02.14-17
CAC Cinema Hall
Curated by Lukas Brašiškis
A piece of landscape that looks beautiful can become the opposite of beauty
For over forty years now, American filmmaker James Benning has been investigating how a landscape generates social, political and ecological meanings under the influence of different styles and formats. Benning’s films reveal not only the beauty of landscapes, but also contexts in which they exist. Using off-screen narration, formal composition and long takes, Benning channels historical layers of environments (“North on Evers”, 1991), ecological (“Deseret”, 1995) or human (“Landscape Suicide”, 1987) tragedies, social problems, personal memories (“One Way Boogie Woogie”, 1977), or specific biographies (“L. Cohen”, 2018), (“Stemple Pass”, 2012).
In one of his interviews, Benning says: “I like to look into the landscape, I like the aesthetic within it. But I also like to see the history written into landscapes, to understand historical events that took – or could have taken – place there…”. By combining text with image, the artist empowers landscapes to speak for themselves. To paraphrase his own words: “Landscape images can say just as much as textual information, but it is precisely in their confrontation with text that they channel their actual origin”.
How do mechanisms of power destine to what – and by whom – the gaze is directed, and what is understood? Why are the cinematographic experience of time and the viewing perspective political? How can aesthetically pleasing landscapes indicate socially and ecologically tragic situations? What possibilities of storytelling are not used fully by conventional documentary cinema? Is ecological landscape cinema possible? The search for answers to these questions is an inseparable part of viewing Benning’s films. This programme invites the spectator to experience the unique rhythm of the artist’s films, to encounter invisible everyday phenomena and the implications of noticing them, and… read landscapes creatively.
Programme:
Thursday, 14 February
6 pm. Screening and presentation: Landscape Suicide, 1987, 95 min.
8 pm. Screening and presentation: Deseret, 1995, 82 min.
Saturday, 16 February
6 pm. Screening and presentation: Los, 2001, 90 min.
Sunday, 17 February
5 pm. Discussion: The ABCs of Landscape: Aesthetic Experience, Ecology and Politics. Moderated by Lukas Brašiškis
6.30 pm. Screening and presentation: Stemple Pass, 2012, 121 min.
About the curator:
Lukas Brašiškis is a researcher of cinema, filmmaker and curator of film and media, currently studying and teaching in the PhD program at the Faculty of Cinema Studies, NYU. Brašiškis has contributed to a number of publications on cinema and is a co-author of several books. He has curated and moderated a multitude of events dedicated to cinema, including a retrospective of films by Nathaniel Dorsky, the “Man, Machine, Matter” programme of experimental films (together with Leo Goldsmith), a presentation of Baltic poetic documentary as ethnographic cinema in New York, Cinema Camp and others.
