James Benning Movies

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

The Fitzgerald classic as you've never seen it, transposed to a Los Angeles of sleek modern architecture and strip-mall foot clinics.

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists...

Iron ore is super heated in a blast furnace to make pig iron, which in turn is used to produce steel. The making of steel is a continuous process....

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

"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...

A film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy's point of view. A companion to ‘American Dreams (lost and found)’...

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

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,...

Maintenance is filmmaker Adele Horne’s exploration and meditation on house cleaning. Cleaning is one of the most private things we do in our...

"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me,...

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

Director James Benning turned his attention to the digital world in YouTube Trilogy, organizing found material around three thematic clusters.

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

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...

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 filmed homage to Sam Shepard, in a single fixed frame where the treetops sway under a moving cloud cover. Orchestrated by the camera in this forest...

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...

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...