James Benning Movies

This three-channel video installation by James Benning shows three scenes from David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The...

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

A filmic paean to artist Robert Smithson's legendary "earthwork" sculpture, the Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot long...

In 54 static shots, Benning provides a picture of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. With the exception of the first three shots, he chooses areas...

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...

Iron ore is super heated in a blast furnace to make pig iron, which in turn is used to produce steel. The making of steel is a continuous process....

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

James Benning appropriates a 14-second excerpt from his own film Time and a Half (second entry in his filmography), dissects the scene into its...

A film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy's point of view. A companion to ‘American Dreams (lost and found)’...

One of the films I remade was a film that used two faces in it from a short little three-minute film that I made for the Henry Mancini television...

Four landscape shots containing a replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning reads extracts from...

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...

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

Data Entry (2014) extends Benning’s interest in the complex cipher systems Kaczynski developed to encrypt his journals. The video focuses on...

One-hour-documentation of James Benning's participation in the Moving Billboard project.

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists...

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

A stretch of highway blanketed by snow becomes the stage for one accident after another in US 41, perhaps Benning’s first disaster movie, or a...

"Benning's landscape works, with their meticulous, reverential compositions, have been located in the history of American realist painting and...

Short by James Benning.