James Benning Movies

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

The 16mm test roll for James Benning's feature-length film TEN SKIES. 74.78 is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made...

Lengthy static shots of various backroads, smaller interstates, quieter roads, and lonely highways.

The 3-channel video installation brings together four histories: the 1860s scorched earth policy of Kit Carson used to drive out the Navajos from...

A filmed homage to Sam Shepard, in a single fixed frame where the treetops sway under a moving cloud cover. Orchestrated by the camera in this forest...

Filmed in Sierra Nevada, California over one day. Static and still shots of the actual landscape and environments in the area.

The portrait of an art institution: James Benning explores the building and grounds of the California Institute of Art. Each image creates a tension,...

One man's journey through the American landscape as he has experienced it since the 1950s.

Last week I made a film of 49 of my T-shirts called Fresh Air. It was to be purely structural. For sound I recorded (in sync) the quiet ambience of...

Towards the end of 2015, James Benning made one of his occasional expeditions to Utah, to the place where Robert Smithson's colossal land-sculpture...

A film by James Benning

A short film about femininity

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...

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

"On November 28, 2023 I woke up early and drove down to the Upper Kern River. I came to film a tree. It's leaves were orange. The shot would be 87...

A view of an Oregon farm field, observing a solar eclipse and incorporating a Leonard Cohen song.

glory is a film about the present, about America and its history of abuse.

HF is Benning’s tribute in miniature to legendary filmmaker Hollis Frampton, known for his materialist dissection of the cinema apparatus and...

I just a did a film with my ‘Acting Bad’ class called After Warhol, where we watched a few of the Warhol screen tests and then mimicked...

A short film about masculinity