James Benning Movies

Filmed at Benning's home in Val Verde during the first month of the pandemic, the film is a portrait of that time.

A short film about femininity

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

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

Twenty-two minute tracking shot through campgrounds in Southern Wisconsin

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

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...

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

Short by James Benning.

Six soldiers wandering in search of enemies in the forest where they can't see an inch ahead. While gathering on the island to prepare Shakespeare's...

"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me,...

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

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

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

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...

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

In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line...

In three virtuosic sequences created entirely in-camera, Benning alternates contrary camera movements in a trio of Chicago locations with increasing...

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...

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