In the mid seventies James Benning was making films that combine elements of 'structural' cinemalong single-shot takes; highly formalized compositionswith elements of conventional narrative. A period of intense activity from 1974 to 1976 saw the completion of three collaborations with Bette Gordon
(1974),
(1975), and
(1975)as well as Benning's
(1974),
(1976), and
(1975). All six films introduce characters, or at least human situations, but handle them in unconventional ways.
is a short, sensuous triptych: one woman walks on a busy city street; she and a second woman pose for a portrait; and the two women lie naked together on a bed. All three moments are manipulated on an optical printer; each is a meditation on the miraculous seam between stillness and motion that recalls Muybridge.
alternates individual frames of a naked woman (Gordon) walking away from the camera and a naked man (Benning) walking toward the camera, creating a thaumatrope-in-motion. On the soundtrack Gordon and Benning talk simultaneously: the volume of Gordon's comments about her frustration at not being taken seriously is progressively lowered, as the volume of Benning's comments about changes he's been going through is raised. For
Benning and Gordon mounted a camera in the back of a car, then traveled from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Pacific Ocean, periodically recording imagery and sound. The windshield becomes a movie screen within the movie.
and
seem to have been a major breakthrough for
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Benning. In
a series of twenty-eight vignettes intercut between two narratives: two women drive along interstate highways, pick up two male hitchhikers, go to a motel with them to have sex, then continue their trip; a farmworker hitchhikes to a job, works, rests, then hitchhikes on. The two narratives intersect only in the final shot: as the farmworker takes a bath in a creek, we see the women's car pass over the bridge that spans the creek. This unusual narrative structure and Benning's seemingly detached attitude toward his material are reminiscent of such John Dos Passos novels as
and
where characters the reader has grown to know pass each other without making any contact other than to have been in the same place at the same time.
For
Benning expanded
using some of the skeletal plot elementsmand some of the actual shotsof the earlier film in a longer (eighty- three minutes), more complex structure.
develops at least three plot strandsa middle-aged man apparently involved in an affair; two lesbians traveling; a farm worker hitchhiking to jobsbut as the film develops, the original coherence of these plot strands begins to disperse, and at times the characters even seem to change identities. In fact, though
may seem at first to reveal a decision to make a more conventional kind of film, the balance between narrative and formal elements remains the reverse of what we normally find in commercial movies. While conventional films use formal elements to help us interpret the meaning of the plots the characters enact,
uses character/plot primarily as a means for maintaining our interest in formal elements. The fifty-eight sections of
provide visually elegant compositions memorable for their frequently playful, formally reflexive explorations of composition and perspective and of relationships between sound and image.
(1977) is Benning's most fully formal film to date. Within a system of rigorous spatial/temporal parameterseach of the sixty sections of the film is a single, frontally-composed shot, exactly sixty seconds longBenning explores composition, perspective, and sound/image relationships, without developing narrative continuity from one shot to the next. Generally, the film allows us to become accustomed to a particular composition, then supplies an event that forces us to see the composition in a new way. Benning's particular focus on depopulated industrial landscapes creates a mood reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings.
In his next three features
(1978),
(1982), and
(1984)Benning attempted to find ways of adding human content back into his films without using conventional approaches to character and narrative. In
he develops vari-
