23-465: James Benning may refer to: James Benning (film director) (born 1942), American filmmaker James Benning (cricketer) (born 1983), English cricketer Jim Benning (born 1963), Canadian ice hockey player and executive [REDACTED] Topics referred to by the same term This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change
46-404: A function of time," and "Looking and Listening" (which is also the name of a course taught by Benning) is particularly evident in his films since 1999 in the form of fixed, stable shots. For instance, each of El Valley Centro , Los , and Sogobi — The California Trilogy (2000-2001) is composed of 35 2½ minute shots. Nightfall (2012) consists of a single 98-minute shot made at a high elevation in
69-523: Is an American independent filmmaker and educator. Over the course of his 40-year career Benning has made over twenty-five feature-length films that have shown in many different venues across the world. Since 1987, he has taught at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). He is known as a minimalist filmmaker . James Benning was born in 1942 in Milwaukee , Wisconsin . Benning played baseball for
92-411: Is in black and white for the part of the film which corresponds to the 1800s and then switches to color for the 1900s. Only a handful of shots contain human beings. One of the shots accompanying each story shows where it occurred, either literally or figuratively. Out of the 93 news stories, more than half are from the first two decades or the last two, with 31 from the 1850s and 1860s and 26 from
115-841: Is represented by neugerriemschneider, Berlin. He continues to distribute his own films, as he has for his entire career. Benning has been supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation , the National Endowment for the Arts , the Guggenheim Foundation , the American Film Institute , New York State Council on the Arts , the Wisconsin Arts Board , and the University Film Association. From
138-399: Is the artist Sadie Benning , born in 1973. Deseret (film) Deseret is a 1995 experimental documentary film written and directed by James Benning and narrated by Fred Gardner . It chronicles the history of Utah from 1852 to 1992 by having the narrator read 93 news stories from The New York Times in chronological order over static shots of Utah. The title refers to
161-629: The War on Poverty , teaching children of migrant workers in Colorado how to read and write, and helping to start a commodities food program that fed people living in poverty in the Missouri Ozarks . Benning often uses this background as part of his film work. At the age of 33, Benning received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he had studied with David Bordwell . For
184-517: The 1980s and 1990s; this was a decision made by Benning to invite comparison between the eras. The first 24 news stories are about the establishment of Mormonism in Utah . Stories about the Native Americans in Utah are a recurring subject in the pre-1900 part of the film, and stories about radiation—both naturally-occurring and fallout —are a recurring theme in the post-1900 portion. In
207-570: The Arts , and has taught there ever since. In the early 1990s Benning made a series of text/image films: North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995), Four Corners (1997), and UTOPIA (1998), often invoking histories of how antagonistic cultural and economic agendas over land use shape landscapes and configure social environments. Benning has employed diverse methods, themes, structures, and aesthetics, investigating narrative and anti-narrative modes, personal history, race, collective memory , place, industry, and landscape. His philosophy of "landscape as
230-526: The Image, was released in 2003. In 2007, the Austrian Film Museum also published the first substantial monograph on the filmmaker, James Benning , edited by Barbara Pichler and Claudia Slanar. In 2011, Julie Ault (ed.) collaborated with Benning on the book (FC) Two Cabins by JB , published with A.R.T. Press. Scores of reviews, articles, and essays on Benning's work, as well as interviews with
253-617: The cabins Benning has installed a number of copies he made of paintings by artists that have deeply inspired him, including Bill Traylor , Henry Darger , and Mose Tolliver . These locations are near to California Institute of the Arts where he is teaching in the film department. Benning published a book of poems titled Thirty Years to Life in 1973, and Fifty Years to Life, Texts from Eight Films by James Benning in 2000, both with Two Pants Press in Madison, Wisconsin . Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary, James Benning: Circling
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#1732787207217276-471: The date the article was published superimposed. The shots without narration separate one news story from the next, and these unnarrated shots get shorter and shorter as the film progresses, representing shorter delays between the events happening and being reported in the news. In addition, the evolution of journalistic language over the time period means that the length of the sentences also decreases, which results in an accelerating pace. The cinematography
299-497: The filmmaker have appeared in publications worldwide. Benning worked exclusively in 16mm until the increasing obsolescence of the medium necessitated he convert to digital . His first digital film was Ruhr (2009), commissioned by Werner Ruzicka for the Duisburger Filmwoche . Digital filmmaking allowed him to branch out in different directions including re-makes of Faces (2011) and Easy Rider (2012), as well as
322-619: The first twenty years of his life. He earned an undergraduate and master's degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee , which he attended on a baseball scholarship . Benning experienced a political awakening and racial consciousness during the late 1960s, participating in civil rights protests led by Father James Groppi in segregated Milwaukee. Benning dropped out of graduate school to forfeit his military deferment since his friends, who were mostly not in school, were being drafted and dying in Vietnam. Benning instead joined
345-413: The founding of the newspaper in 1852 to 1992. After choosing which ones to use in the film, he spent another three months condensing the news stories to a length of eight to ten sentences each, while retaining the original language. Benning chose Fred Gardner as narrator because he could read the text in a monotone voice, making the words rather than the voice convey the drama. Recording the narration took
368-424: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Benning&oldid=1158240388 " Category : Human name disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages James Benning (film director) James Benning (born 1942 )
391-569: The mid-1990s to the mid-2000s Werner Deutsch and Cologne -based WDR-TV supported Benning's work with commissions and the purchase of broadcast rights. The Austrian Film Museum in Vienna is restoring and archiving all of Benning's 16mm films as well as, over time, producing DVDs of the works. The Academy Film Archive , in conjunction with the Austrian Film Museum, preserved Benning's film Chicago Loop in 2013. Benning's only child
414-660: The most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?" Benning divides his time between Val Verde, California , and a small town in the Sierra Nevada north of Bakersfield . There, in 2007, Benning built a replica of the cabin Thoreau constructed in 1845 on Walden Pond . The following year Benning erected a copy of the cabin Ted Kaczynski built in 1971 in Montana. Inside
437-703: The next four years he taught filmmaking at Northwestern University and CalArts (1988—present). Benning was hailed cinema's voice of the Midwest with his 1976/1978 films, 11 x 14 and One Way Boogie Woogie , made in Chicago and Milwaukee and the surrounding rural region. In 1980, Benning moved to lower Manhattan, where, with the aid of grants and funding from German Television, he continued to make films, most notably, American Dreams (1984) and Landscape Suicide (1986). Leaving New York after eight years, Benning moved west to teach film/video at California Institute of
460-521: The original proposed name for the state of Utah, the Jaredite word for "honeybee" in the Book of Mormon . The film was shown at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival , receiving critical acclaim. The film alternates between showing a series of consecutive shots with voice-over —one shot for each sentence of the news story—and a single shot without voice-over. The first narrated shot of each news story has
483-432: The second half of the film, the news stories increasingly focus on environmental issues including toxic waste management, the chemical and biological weapons facility Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City , and the indirect consequences of nuclear weapons testing in neighboring Nevada . In preparation for the film, Benning spent six months reading every New York Times article about Utah he could find from
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#1732787207217506-624: The two-hour one shot film Nightfall (2011). Benning's work has always traversed the film sphere and the art field, finding constituencies in both. He made 16mm installations at Art Park (1977), the Walker Art Center (1978), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1980), and has recently created digital installations at Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles, (2011), 21er Haus , Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2012), and Argos, Centrum Voor Kunst en Media, Brussels (2012). Benning
529-407: The woods in the west Sierras that begins in late afternoon as the sun is going down and ends in near blackness. Benning's use of duration reflects his accord with Henry David Thoreau 's passage from Walden , "No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or
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