James Benning Trailers
Benning's Dream TrailerOn Paradise Road TrailerShe Dies Tomorrow Trailer
Over the past thirty-five years James Benning (b. 1942) has played a central role in the history of American independent cinema by offering his rigorously structured yet wonderfully graceful films as extended meditations on the American landscape and its social and environmental histories. Benning’s life and work have been shaped by his passionate wanderlust—born in Milwaukee, he lived for intervals in Colorado, the Missouri Ozarks, Illinois and Oklahoma before settling in Val Verde, California in 1987, with car and motorcycle journeys around the country generating such films as I-94 (1975) and Four Corners (1997). His career has been equally restless, ranging from his early experimentation with an avant-garde aesthetic to his embrace, during the 1980s and 90s, of explicitly autobiographical elements and increased human content. With his “California Trilogy” (2000-2001) Benning entered a new phase, refining his formalist style and political concerns while distilling his abiding interest in place and exacting organizational structures.
Most Popular James Benning Trailers
Total trailers found: 111
28 October 2020
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 film that answers the questions: what does it mean to plagiarize images and how to do it in the distance? The mechanism is unusual: a director makes a short and sends it to the next director, who in turn makes his own short for the purpose of plagiarizing the one he received.
28 December 2016
"scorched earth is a film that is part of the Untitled Fragments Project. It's 60 minutes at dusk, just one shot of the burned over forest (from this summer's fire) near my Two Cabins in the Sierra Nevada.
08 February 2017
The 3-channel video installation brings together four histories: the 1860s scorched earth policy of Kit Carson used to drive out the Navajos from their homeland in Canyon de Chelly, the 1967 execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the 1972 carpet bombing of Hanoi, and the 2016 Cedar Fire in the California Sierras.
04 October 2018
One-hour-documentation of James Benning's participation in the Moving Billboard project.
04 May 2018
This three-channel video installation by James Benning shows three scenes from David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
14 January 2018
A view of an Oregon farm field, observing a solar eclipse and incorporating a Leonard Cohen song.
01 October 1974
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.
02 October 2020
Filmed at Benning's home in Val Verde during the first month of the pandemic, the film is a portrait of that time.
01 January 2010
James Benning appropriates a 14-second excerpt from his own film Time and a Half (second entry in his filmography), dissects the scene into its constituent images and extrapolates them into fluctuating superpositions, generating a 71-minute reflection on time, work and storytelling.
08 February 2026
Made over 15 years, Adulthood is a feature composed of six short films, each chapter following a couple as they grow older without necessarily growing up.
03 September 2013
In 1985, former oil rig worker Richard Linklater began a film screening society in Austin, Texas, that aimed to show classic art-house and experimental films to a budding community of cinephiles.
11 July 2022
James Benning returns to the location of his 2012 film Nightfall, this time at daybreak.
01 January 1984
Presented on a computer, "Pascal's Lemma" features mathematics (diagrams, equations, questions), biographical information about Blaise Pascal, and scrolling text sourced from the news.
02 December 2015
In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work.
17 January 1975
At Northwestern University, where he teaches at the time, Benning gives a short interview to some student filmmakers.
01 January 1988
James Benning, USA, 1988, 3m.
09 May 2022
The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter.
27 April 2014
signs is a sobering continuation of Benning’s career-long interest with the written word as image, text as vision: a silent parade of stills showing dozens of cardboard signs asking for money, food, and kindness.
12 February 2010
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 program back in 1973.
20 June 1995
Exploring the Panama Canal is a fascinating journey through the land of mystery and adventure and the Canal that divides it.
06 November 2022
It centers on Allensworth, the first self-administered African-American municipality in California, showcasing the buildings of the now-abandoned town and looking for the traces of a Black cultural history.
21 November 2008
Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard.
12 January 2002
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 wilderness in 35 static scenes.
17 November 2011
Between July, 2007 and June, 2008, veteran independent film-maker,James Benning built replicas of two iconic American Cabins in a remote part of the High Sierras- Henry David Thoreau’s hut from Walden Pond and the one-room plywood shack in rural Montana from which Theodore John Kaczynski (the ‘Unabomber’) conducted his 16-year bombing campaign via the U.
28 December 2016
"Ash 01 is a declassified recording made from a B-52 bomber on December 26, 1972 during the Christmas carpet bombing of Hanoi.
27 April 2014
HF is Benning’s tribute in miniature to legendary filmmaker Hollis Frampton, known for his materialist dissection of the cinema apparatus and adventurous considerations of memory and time.
11 March 2015
[...] And then there’s the largest and fastest growing archive of all time, the Internet, and in particular YouTube.
15 March 1979
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 events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.
01 January 2018
A filmed homage to Sam Shepard, in a single fixed frame where the treetops sway under a moving cloud cover.
02 November 2007
Looping, chugging and barreling by, the trains in Benning's latest monumental film map a stunning topography and a history of American development.
01 January 1976
In three virtuosic sequences created entirely in-camera, Benning alternates contrary camera movements in a trio of Chicago locations with increasing rapidity to a point where they first fracture and then merge in the viewer’s eye.
27 April 2014
A stretch of highway blanketed by snow becomes the stage for one accident after another in US 41, perhaps Benning’s first disaster movie, or a comedy of (automotive and meteorological) errors.
10 November 2016
A found footage remake of Michael Snow's Wavelength
29 August 2012
Text by Theodore J. Kaczynski, made of scans of a document from an FBI Laboratory, about the danger of experiments with accelerated particles.
15 February 2025
A film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy's point of view. A companion )
21 November 2004
An experimental film portraying different skies in very long takes.
18 November 2011
Lengthy static shots of various backroads, smaller interstates, quieter roads, and lonely highways.
31 July 2020
Amy is ravaged by the notion that she is going to die tomorrow, which sends her down a dizzying emotional spiral.
29 April 2019
Filmed on November 21 and 22, 2018 in Valencia, California. A gibbous and full moon rising.
01 May 2013
A three hour shot containing light, dark, and a BNSF train in the desert.
29 October 2012
'After doing a re-make of John Cassevetes’ "Faces" [1968], I decided to re-make another American classic, Dennis Hopper’s "Easy Rider" [1969].
01 January 2011
The Fitzgerald classic as you've never seen it, transposed to a Los Angeles of sleek modern architecture and strip-mall foot clinics.
01 October 2020
James Benning’s PLACE is a multi-part work that deepens the artist’s longstanding engagement with marginalized artists and creators.
01 January 1977
Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual contrast but is also felt as a dialectic between permanence and impermanence.
02 March 2019
The owner of a failing inn and his roadkill collector friend devise a Bigfoot hoax to draw in tourists, but a Miccosukee Hunter is set to make sure that doesn’t happen.
02 August 2015
Short by James Benning.
10 November 2016
A film by James Benning
01 January 2016
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 my Val Verde neighborhood.
01 January 2010
Six soldiers wandering in search of enemies in the forest where they can't see an inch ahead. While gathering on the island to prepare Shakespeare's play, Luisa finds out that other actors are stalking her.
15 February 2010
For his performance Reforming the Past, James Benning turns towards his own film North on Evers, shot in 1991.
23 May 2021
an excerpt of a conversation between James and I during the Fall of 2019 - Santa Clarita, CA
11 March 1972
Twenty-four hours in the life of a factory worker.
01 January 2012
A short film by Gary Mairs written by James Benning. Stars Amy Seimetz.
09 December 2014
In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond.
01 January 2014
A short film about femininity
01 January 2014
A short film about masculinity
12 October 2019
61. La Verdad Interior reveals the creative process behind TELEMUNDO [screened in the New Visions section], a collaborative film directed by James Benning and starring himself and Sofía Brito.
10 February 2022
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, from Heron Bay, Alabama to Kelly, Wyoming.
18 February 2026
Shots of 8 bridges from the continental United States - the Golden Gate Bridge from Sausalito, California; the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge from Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico; the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma, Alabama; the Seven Mile Bridge from Little Duck Key, Florida; the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey; the Dubuque-Wisconsin Bridge from Dubuque, Iowa; the High Bridge from Valley City, North Dakota; the Astoria-Megler Bridge from Astoria, Oregon.
