11x14 (1977) was James Benning’s first feature length film, which attracted the immediate attention of curators and critics. This movie situated the filmmaker in the history of American realist painting and photography, and established him as a proponent of the “New Narrative” movement. An extension in duration from his short film 8 ½ x 11 (1974), Benning employs approximately 60 shots in 11x14. He focuses upon landscapes of the Midwest, and captures the iconography of this region through repeated images and sounds of trucks and interstate highways, billboards and elevated trains, and silos and bales of hay. Protagonists frequently interact in the background of the image and their dialogue is deliberately muffled so that their motivations are obscured.

Benning wrote that “I wanted to make a narrative film concerned first with the elements of form and structure; that is, to make composition, color, texture and onscreen and offscreen space the real narrative, putting the story in the background.” Underscoring his interest in formal concerns, ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE (1978) is titled after Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. In his similarly titled work, Benning combines the structural analysis of image, sound and narrative with autobiographical traces from around his hometown of Milwaukee. Benning’s remake of this film is represented in two additional versions on this DVD/DSL bundle, one from 2005, in which he attempts to replicate the shots from his earlier film, and the other from 2012, in which he locates and films buildings that resemble those that appeared in his first version. Both these later films reveal the inevitability of progress, and the demise of the Midwestern industrial landscape.

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

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