James Benning Movies

It centers on Allensworth, the first self-administered African-American municipality in California, showcasing the buildings of the now-abandoned...

Filmed on November 21 and 22, 2018 in Valencia, California. A gibbous and full moon rising.

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

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...

an excerpt of a conversation between James and I during the Fall of 2019 - Santa Clarita, CA

Text by Theodore J. Kaczynski, made of scans of a document from an FBI Laboratory, about the danger of experiments with accelerated particles.

"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...

James Benning returns to the location of his 2012 film Nightfall, this time at daybreak.

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...

In three virtuosic sequences created entirely in-camera, Benning alternates contrary camera movements in a trio of Chicago locations with increasing...

The American filmmaker James Benning has been one of the outstanding exponents of the structural film since the mid-1970s. Bennings artistic position...

James Benning’s PLACE is a multi-part work that deepens the artist’s longstanding engagement with marginalized artists and creators. Over...

Three-channel HD video (color/sound), 18 minutes

[...] And then there’s the largest and fastest growing archive of all time, the Internet, and in particular YouTube. I started here playfully...

A short film about masculinity

In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first...

Short by James Benning.

Stills from a trip in Cuba.

At Northwestern University, where he teaches at the time, Benning gives a short interview to some student filmmakers. He then uses this material to...

Twenty-four hours in the life of a factory worker.