James Benning Movies

Stills from a trip in Cuba.

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

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

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

Maintenance is filmmaker Adele Horne’s exploration and meditation on house cleaning. Cleaning is one of the most private things we do in our...

A short film about femininity

Presented on a computer, "Pascal's Lemma" features mathematics (diagrams, equations, questions), biographical information about Blaise Pascal, and...

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

"scorched earth is a film that is part of the Untitled Fragments Project. It's 60 minutes at dusk, just one shot of the burned over forest (from this...

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...

"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...

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...

It centers on Allensworth, the first self-administered African-American municipality in California, showcasing the buildings of the now-abandoned...

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, just like Benning's Spring Equinox, but this time during a different season. Consists of static shots of the actual...

Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian...

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

A found footage remake of Michael Snow's Wavelength

Short by James Benning.

In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first...