James Benning Movies

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...

After having shared a common experience in Cuba, twelve filmmakers say goodbye to return to their countries and make a pact: to make a collective...

James Benning watches tv with a young girl.

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

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....

A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.

A document of one of the most famous 66 miles of railroad track in the world including the Tehachapi Loop.

A stunning study of real-time light changing from day to night which was filmed in a forest high up in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains

This is multifaceted look at the landscape and history of Utah (or Deseret, as the Mormon Church prefers to call it). Benning condenses 93 news...

In this short black and white study Benning uses dissolves, shifting camera angles and cross-fades to experiment with narrative structure.

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

Filmed on November 21 and 22, 2018 in Valencia, California. A gibbous and full moon rising.

Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual...

Twenty-four hours in the life of a factory worker.

At Northwestern University, where he teaches at the time, Benning gives a short interview to some student filmmakers. He then uses this material to...

A three hour shot containing light, dark, and a BNSF train in the desert.

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

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)’...

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

Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia...