My hope is always that if I have an audience of 30 people, they see 30 different films. I ask the audience to participate with the film and you can only participate through your own self, through your own beliefs.
—James Benning
I met up with James Benning when he was in Chicago a couple months ago and talked with him about growing up in Milwaukee, his experiences with organizing, pedagogical strategies, and numerous films from throughout his career including…
Until now, I’ve always felt I really, really had to offer a clear-cut explanation for a film so that the audience could have no mistake in understanding the issue. I felt I had to give them impactful scenes and a detailed explanation until it became too much. Now I feel like as long as you offer some basic important information, the rest you can edit quite a bit. As long as you have some essential information in it you can…
A bonkers structural-ish film filled with gas stations, satellite images, maps, a demolition derby, repeated yells about asphalt being up someone’s ass, and women posing like they’re in a video game’s character select screen. The structural gambit (the director travels along the 13 gas stations along Finland’s longest road) and the commitment to repetition aims for a sort of cumulative numbing effect. There’s perhaps a shallow commentary here about what’s on display—it’s sleek! it’s thrilling! it’s mindless garbage!—that is heightened…
A sort of proto-Malena Szlam in its dramatic superimpositions of varying, colorful landscapes, though the fourth-world score places this firmly in the '90s. I'd be annoyed by it if I didn't find it and the editing to be so firmly in sync aesthetically. I appreciate how gauche the canted angles feel, and how they provide a disembodied understanding of these massive structures in a way that contrasts the footage that's clearly shot while someone is driving a car. You can sense Behrens' desire to capture the mystery of these spaces.
Has a painful hour-long setup with poorly timed jokes, and then a second hour of “reveals” that are wholly the result of withholding information. There’s no real surprise when a mystery operates in this way, nor is there any opportunity to find satisfaction in noticing and following specific clues. So really we’re just led through everything one step at a time, with flashbacks shaking up the structure to provide a shallow sense of complexity. No one’s acting is noteworthy, and…
I don't think I've seen a film with such on-point millennial representation that my primary reaction was secondhand embarrassment, albeit in a good way. The Impact-font memes, the way this particular age group talks about race (and talks about how people talk about race), the unironic crypto art bro, and so much of the soundtrack, which ranges from Objekt's "Porcupine" to Jai Paul's "Jasmine" (that these aren't timely songs ensures their inclusions aren't trendy; they're just reminders of how generation-specific…
