James Benning's LANDSCAPE SUICIDE Screens at Anthology Film Archives Later This Month

STILL: JAMES BENNING’S LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (1986). SOURCE: IMDB.

On July 24th, at 9pm, and August 2nd, at 6:30pm, James Benning’s LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (1986) — which GME distributes to North American universities as both a DVD and DVD/DSL bundle — screens at Anthology Film Archives in the series Verbatim. This lineup “focuses on a very particular technique that filmmakers and screenwriters have adopted on rare but almost inevitably indelible occasions: drawing the dialogue or onscreen text verbatim from various written documentary materials… By incorporating these preexisting, documentary transcripts into fictionalized or re-staged contexts… [these works] blur the lines between documentary and dramatization, and call into question the nature of performance and representation.”

A preeminent formalist filmmaker whose lengthy and distinguished career dates back to the early 1970s, GME is proud to be the sole distributor of Benning’s films to the North American institutional market. In addition to LANDSCAPE SUICIDE, GME distributes the following Benning titles as both DVDs and DVD/DSL bundles: 11 X 14, ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE, 27 YEARS LATER (1977—2012), GRAND OPERA (1979), AMERICAN DREAMS (LOST & FOUND) (1984), O PANAMA (1985), DESERET (1995), FOUR CORNERS (1997), his CALIFORNIA TRILOGY (1999—2001), CASTING A GLANCE (2007), RR (2007), NATURAL HISTORY (2009), and RUHR (2014).

STILL: JAMES BENNING’S LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (1986). SOURCE: FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER.

LANDSCAPE SUICIDE grapples with two major homicide cases in 20th-century America: the 1984 fatal stabbing of a teenage girl by Bernadette Protti, and serial killer Ed Gein’s infamous 1950s murder spree that would inspire classic horror films like Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) and Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974). In his film, Benning employs actors to recite Protti’s and Gein’s courtroom testimonies verbatim. In the words of critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, by juxtaposing these reenactments “with the commonplace settings where these crimes took place” and “eschewing the specious psychological rhetoric that usually accompanies accounts of such crimes,” Benning creates “an open forum for the spectator to contemplate the mysterious vacancy of these people and these places, and their relationships to each other.”

GME’s publication of LANDSCAPE SUICIDE is accompanied by AMERICAN DREAMS (LOST & FOUND) and a bilingual German/English booklet featuring contributions from Benning, Barbara Pichler, Alexander Howarth, and Michael Loebenstein.