The next batch of newsletters are going to be discussions about films I’ve seen during New Horizons Film Festival, Wroclaw, which I attended for some six days between the 21 and 26 July. I’m back, and am relying on a mess of pencilled notes and fading impressions. My eyes feel stuck together and I’m tired and trying very hard to disentangle all of the films I’ve seen so closely together. Film by film. This will keep me going for some twenty or so newsletters, which is a scary prospect. Naturally, these notes are going to be quite fragmentary and full of lapses and potentially dud interpretation. That’s fine.
— James Benning has returned with a ‘remake’ (loosely conceived) of his United States of America, the original dating to 1975. In that earlier film, we’re experiencing a kind of structural road movie — a tour of America’s mostly illegible landscapes shot from the back seat of a car, silhouetting two (unspeaking) figures in the front seats. This is the pastoral as mediated by motor transport, by infrastructure.
— His latest ‘remake’ or reconfiguration of the first film utilizes a similar-but-different structural conceit. It features 52 scenes, all of which have a duration of around two minutes. Each shot is deeply framed, a static shot a particular slice of landscape. An preceding intertitle points us toward the place (Gary, Indiana, for example). We watch the shot unfold, and it is much like watching Peter Hutton or even a moving Ansel Adams photograph. This is Benning’s metier. There’s an anxiety of influence when it comes to the American landscape, its hugeness — and how vastly it has been overdetermined by the archive of images that precede it. These images are not only received through arthouse cinema or experimental cinema, but through TV and advertising and the detritus (the ‘poor image’) of social media and postcards and magazine adverts.
— The structural conceit itself is procedural, the invitation to contemplate a sequence of framed ‘slices’ of American landscape. Both like and unlike Snow (La Region Centrale), the unexpected is accounted for — not through the programming of the camera’s movements, but through the interruption/disruption of the static shot by events and processes that unfold within and across it. A pair of figures who make their way across the landscape (reeds, tall grass), from left to right, just as a plane (high above) arches across the sky. A truck that pulls into the frame and performs a turn, exiting the same way it came. A woman passing by on a bicycle. Often these things mirror or reflect processes in other scenes. The American flag paralleled scenes later by a more diminutive American flag fluttering on a boat’s mast. Etc. These interruptions are also ironic, because they create certain contradictions and ironies – like a pair of figures who sit on other sides of a river bank (with no obvious way to cross – they appear to be together), or through the framing: like a river that flows down the very centre of the screen (is this New Mexico? I can’t remember), before bending ever so slightly at its vanishing point. Formal, Kubrickian harmonies are disrupted — by Benning himself, but also by the processes that (however temporarily) interrupt the frame, reorienting its surface of tension.
— There is also a great deal of humour to Benning’s poetics of the American non-place (these are mostly backwaters and non-signifying spaces – even slabs of sky). Sunflower heads that mostly block out the horizon, except for a slip of mountain (the flowers are geological, Benning implies). The humour is also aural. In one (farmland) scene, we hear the approaching groan and whine of a farm machine. We expect it to pass before our eyes, to cross into the scene. No. It passes behind us, roaring away. Expectations — in this way — get upended. We’re reminded that any ‘frame’ implies a Deleuzian ‘out of frame’, and that the structuring condition of film (shot choice, shot duration) cannot authorize the world, and is subject to very many countervailing decisions and processes. When birds flutter across the horizon (a beautiful moment), we’re reminded that Benning must have had to wait precisely for this moment. The ‘structure’ is not omnipotent, and it cannot contain the world – it can merely attempt to frame the cinematic experience of it. Structure is always a structure. Film stands apart from the world, even as it mediates it (for us, the viewer).
— Sound. We hear interjections of sound clips that are edited in such a way as to seem diegetic (a little fizz and fuzz). Naturally, they are not. The ‘beyond the frame’ (the memories and references that escape the structure of the frame) consists of all the cultural and social and linguistic experience we bring to the cinematic experience. Looking at Ronald Regan’s governor’s mansion, we hear Dwight Eisenhower’s speech on the military industrial complex – a clip taken from his January 17, 1961 farewell address. We’re reminded of unheeded warnings, the dissonance between the manicured lawns of the property and the threat contained (for Eisenhower) in “society’s future” of “plundering and risk”. We realize that this warning has come to pass. We realize that the American landscape (the landscape invoked by Benning) is very much structured by this complex – with military bases, the sound of distant gunfire, a warship, satellite dishes pointed at the sky. Here is a landscape that – despite its illegibility, its rurality – is already complex, and always already industrialized. For Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, who has — for a long time — pioneered the study of the archaeological present, “all presents are entangled with a diversity of pasts in a percolating time”. Landscape is a kind of surface where these tensions gather, especially for seemingly rural or ‘illegible’ landscapes which — through their seeming mediocrity — signify toward the historical trajectories that structure them. We watch great, rolling clouds pass over a sublime horizon of grey-brown mountains, and yet spot a series of industrial sheds in the middle distance (flashingly silver). Do these contain weapons? Are they extracting wealth and resources from the land?
— Benning also references Stokley Carmichael (he cuts him off, mid sentence – how easily the warnings of the past are evaded). Puerto Rico is signified by a very Americanized-looking street, overdubbed with a bit of calypso music. An endless train shatters the stillness of a Texan horizon. When it ends, we anticipate a resumption of silence. No. It was only masking the sound of an unseen road and the cars that rush across it. Infrastructure bends the landscape to its will. It’s hegemonic. The ever-present criss-crossed lattice of telegraph cables and phonelines. This vast, vast landscape has all been sublimated to the instruments of modernity. The landscape (be it pretty as a picture or uneasily ugly) is always an expression of the intangible flows (of capital, of information, of people) that have structured it. A structure — beyond the filmic structure — has predetermined the landscape itself.
— Ok. If the structural film is predetermined, then the role of the filmmaker is omnipotent. They are also failing; there is a lack. He’s explained this in an interview for Film Comment: “The whole idea of defining the U.S., because it’s so vast and so different—any kind of description of it will fail”. How much of this reality have they authored? Some, not all. In one scene, we glimpse an arrangement of whirring windmills. They are beautiful and terrifying, an industrial sublime. Benning has no hand in their arrangement. Next, we watch a field of horses — arranged in a strangely composed stance, barely moving, as if they had been choreographed by the filmmaker. They are as beautiful as the windmills. They escape the authoring hand of the filmmaker. He is taking cues from the world. He is both author (active) and receiver (passive). So too are we. We intuit, but we’re confounded. Like Benning, we’re on our own journey (epistemological, ontological) through the American landscape. We abide within both passivity and interrogation. Where we look, what we anticipate, how we react. The structure has predetermined our experience of interrogating the world that Benning presents to us, but we constantly fail in our task (did Benning instruct these two figures to sit on either side of the river — are they aware of his presence?).
— Spoiler, here. A really significant spoiler. The final comedy comes with the credits. All these landscapes — we learn — were shot in California. It’s a supremely funny moment, and speaks not only to the immensity of the state, but our confrontation with our own visual apparatus. The signifier (landscape) has fooled us. The intertitles (Gary, Indiana, Etc) have duped us. Landscape escapes language. Language codifies landscape. They are in tension. So really it is a film of dissonance, because it claims – on the one hand – that film (particularly structural film) is the preconditioned organization of perception, but that it is also in tension with language (the pre- or anti-visual) and with the unexpected (those movements and processes that interrupt the frame — like people walking across it, whose movements are not pre-determined by the director, by Benning). He reminds us that film, even structural film, is a dynamic, radiant site of possible trajectories, and that predetermination itself is never settled. The film’s shape — its rhythm, its function – is a container that constantly fails and succeeds in the same moment. ‘Reality’ (the unexpected) operates independently from it. Film is a lack. It is ontologically unstable. It presents a reality to us. This ‘America’ (because it is California, because it cannot control the trajectories of people who enter its frame) escapes the possibility of being contained by film. This is California, the heartland of Hollywood — the everywhere/nowhere which wears hundreds and thousands of masks. Cinema is a perpetual duping. It is an unsettled trajectory of reality. It is not reality’s container.
— One of my group later explained how she’d hoped to fall asleep during this film, but found herself unable to. It was too compelling, too strangely activated. Benning has made something that is both pastoral and deranged.
— The title itself then is also an irony. The United States of America. Better, it is really a USA. It is a structure of reality, always held in abeyance – constantly tripping over its own laces. There are few more powerful celebrations of film and its ability to interrogate the world and the act of seeing, and there are few better or funnier structural films. Really this is a comedy about the generatively beautiful failure/success of film (its dissonance), and of its autonomy from Bazin’s ‘mummified reality’ (film as a mere reflection of ‘what is’). Film is an order of ontology. Its structure is fractal.
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