James Benning Movies

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....

A view of an Oregon farm field, observing a solar eclipse and incorporating a Leonard Cohen song.

One of the films I remade was a film that used two faces in it from a short little three-minute film that I made for the Henry Mancini television...

A short film about femininity

Seven entirely static shots make up James Benning's quiet reflection on existence in the Ruhr Valley.

"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,...

Scrolling excerpts from the diary of George Wallace's would-be assassin Arthur Bremer at screen bottom, Hank Aaron cards and ephemera from his entire...

Many films by this master of landscape cinema are cinematic studies of specific landscapes, as is the case with SOGOBI – the Shoshonean word...

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

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

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

Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia...

"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...

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

James Benning watches tv with a young girl.

O Panama features a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the...

Last week I made a film of 49 of my T-shirts called Fresh Air. It was to be purely structural. For sound I recorded (in sync) the quiet ambience of...

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

A film by James Benning