O PANAMA (1985) and GRAND OPERA. AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE (1979) represent the 7th digital edition of the films of James Benning released by GME. Altogether, GME now offers a total of 16 feature length films (and one short form work) by this renowned independent American auteur. We make all of these films available (either as DVDs or DVD/DSL bundles) exclusively to North American academic institutions so as to afford professors, librarians, students and researchers an in-depth study of the arc of this noteworthy artist’s career, from 11x14 (1977) to NATURAL HISTORY (2014). About his filmmaking oeuvre, Benning has observed, that “since I started making films, I’ve always tried to open a new narrative space from the juxtaposition of sound and image, or text and image — how the spectator experiences them, how they quote each other.” Benning’s films are carefully planned in terms of the placement of the camera, the duration of the individual extended takes, and the juxtaposition of shots, creating mesmerizing contemplations of both the natural and manmade world.

In James Benning's GRAND OPERA. AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE (1979) the static landscapes and cityscapes that made his name — including (in this film) billboard walls, industrial zones, oil drilling rigs, streets and traffic signs — by the late 1970s are augmented with a number of experiments with techniques, forms and conventions and homage to four icons of the avant-garde: Hollis Frampton, George Landow, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow. What distinguishes GRAND OPERA and sets it apart from Benning's previous work is the film's engagement with history – both the filmmaker's personal biography as well as that of cinema. And, in a reversal of Stan Brakhage’s dictum that sound holds films back, his voice sounding from off screen is heard over black frames, driving Benning’s film forward and at the same time giving it a title: “I’m not against sound films though I rather think of them as grand opera.” Grounding Benning’s film firmly in the American avant-garde tradition also occurs when his own daughter Sadie Benning (herself also a filmmaker) recites the alphabet and concludes her performance with the words “This is for P. Adams Sitney” (the great theorist of the avant-garde).

GRAND OPERA is also replete with Benning’s autobiography in other ways — the history of pi is told in excerpts, underscoring the filmmaker’s training as a mathematician. The most impressive example of his personal biography is conveyed by a series of 33 circular pans which include every house in which he has lived since the time of his birth. These abodes are anchored in time through the use of songs, beginning with one by Billie Holiday from 1942, the year of Benning’s birth.

Although GRAND OPERA marked the beginning of Benning’s big experiment along his path of developing his own filmic language, in another sense it can be seen as an end point. It represents the final stage in Benning’s life and work in the Midwest. This film can also be understood, according to film historian Scott MacDonald, as a requiem for structural filmmaking; as if to signal the end of that movement, Benning’s film concludes with an image of a building — a structure — being demolished.

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O PANAMA (1985) is Benning's only film based on fictional material (a collage of three short stories written by Burt Barr). This episodic narrative opens spaces in the film where the audience can enter into the story with its own experiences. The film 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 tedious reality of the man’s sickness and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O PANAMA conveys the workings of the subconscious. The film resembles a sick man's (Willem Dafoe) fever dream, deftly blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. The film’s elegant montage denotes a subject that is always on the verge of collapse.

This DVD publication contains a 20-page booklet with two conversations between James Benning and Neil Young in English ("James Benning's Life (Of pi). Grand Opera. An Historical Romance" and "A Man, a Plan. O Panama") and an essay by Barbara Pichler ("Grand Opera - An Iconography of the Midwest") in German and English.

A Complete List of James Benning's Films Distributed by GME

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