James Benning's Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration

193 Pages·2018·15.654 MB·English

by  Nikolaj Lübecker (editor), Daniele Rugo (editor)

J A M E S
B E N N I N G ’ S
E N V I R O N M E N T S
P O L I T I C S , E C O L O G Y, D U R AT I O N
EDITED BY
NIKOLAJ LÜBECKER AND DANIELE RUGO
James Benning’s
Environments
Politics, Ecology, Duration
Edited by Nikolaj Lübecker and Daniele Rugo
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© editorial matter and organization Nikolaj Lübecker and
Daniele Rugo, 2018
© the chapters their several authors, 2018
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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Contents
List of Figures v
Notes on the Contributors vi
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
Nikolaj Lübecker and Daniele Rugo
Intellectual Environments
Surveying James Benning 15
Scott MacDonald
Utah and the Times: Governing Temporality in Deseret 39
John Beck
Violence and Landscape in the Films of James Benning 55
Nikolaj Lübecker
Material Environments
Constructing the Transversal Time- image: Ecosophy, Immanence, and
Corporate “Land” in James Benning’s Four Corners and California
Trilogy 75
Colin Gardner
Men in Huts in Woods: Independence, Transcendentalism, and
Technology in James Benning’s Thoreau and Kaczynski Documentaries
and Exhibition 94
Silke Panse
iv Contents
The Earth as Material Film: Benning’s Light Glance Making a Material-
Image 114
Felicity Colman
Perceptual Environments
A Lake- Event 129
Tom Conley
Defacing the Close- Up 143
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
The Adventure of Patience 160
Daniele Rugo
Filmography 177
Index 180
Figures
1 From Stemple Pass, 2012 4
2 From Easy Rider, 2012 11
3 From American Dreams, 1984 18
4 From small roads, 2011 28
5 From Deseret, 1995 (I) 44
6 From Deseret, 1995 (II) 50
7 From Landscape Suicide, 1986 (I) 58
8 From Landscape Suicide, 1986 (II) 68
9 From Four Corners, 1997 83
10 From El Valley Centro, 1999 84
11 From Concord Woods, 2014 95
12 From Architectural Rendering (Two Cabins), 2015 102
13 From casting a glance, 2007 (I) 118
14 From casting a glance, 2007 (II) 118
15 From 13 Lakes, 2004 130
16 From Faces 1973, 2010 150
17 From Faces, 1968 155
18 From Ruhr, 2009 (I) 161
19 From Ruhr, 2009 (II) 170
Notes on the Contributors
John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for
Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. He is
the author of Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American
Literature (2009) and co- editor, with Ryan Bishop, of Cold War Legacies:
Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
Felicity Colman is Professor of Film and Media Arts and Director of Research
at Kingston University, United Kingdom. She is the author of Film Theory:
Creating a Cinematic Grammar (2014), Deleuze and Cinema (2011), and
editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009). Her current
book projects are on “Digital Feminicity” and “Materialist Film.”
Tom Conley is the author of Cartographic Cinema (2007) and co- editor of the
Wiley- Blackwell Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (2014). More recently, with
Clara Rowland, he is co-e ditor of Falso movimento (2016), a book of essays
on writing and cinema. Tom Conley teaches in the Departments of Visual &
Environmental Studies and Romance Languages at Harvard University.
Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the departments
of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of Art
and Architecture. Gardner has published two books in Manchester University
Press’ “British Film Makers” series: Joseph Losey (2004) and Karel Reisz (2006)
as well as Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art, a critical
analysis of Samuel Beckett’s experimental work for film and television (2012).
His most recent books are Deleuze and the Animal (Edinburgh University
Press, 2017) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (2018), both co-edited with Patricia
MacCormack.
Notes on the Contributors vii
Nikolaj Lübecker is Professor of French and Film Studies at St John’s College,
University of Oxford. His publications focus on contemporary American and
European cinema, French literature, and critical theory. His most recent book,
The Feel-Bad Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), investigates logics of
unpleasure in films by directors such as Claire Denis, Lars von Trier, Gus Van
Sant, Bruno Dumont and Harmony Korine. His current research projects
concern the so-called “nonhuman turn” in the humanities.
Scott MacDonald is author of the series, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with
Independent Filmmakers, in five volumes from University of California Press,
and twelve other books, most recently, American Ethnographic Film and
Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (2013), Avant-Doc: Intersections
of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2014), and Binghamton Babylon:
Voices from the Cinema Department (a nonfiction novel) (2015). He was an
Anthology Film Archives Film Preservation Honoree in 1999 and was named
an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in
2012. He teaches film history at Hamilton College.
Silke Panse is Reader in Film, Art and Philosophy at the University for the
Creative Arts. She has written about James Benning’s films in “The Work
of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics” for A
Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (2015) and in “Ten Skies, 13
Lakes, 15 Pools” and “Land as Protagonist: An Interview with James Benning”
for Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (2013). She was the co-
investigator of the AHRC-funded Screening Nature Network (2013–14),
co-edited A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television (2014) and is currently
working on a monograph about documentary between realism and materialism.
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
(2001), Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (2017), and
is currently working on “Digital Uncanny.” She teaches at UC Davis in the
departments of Cinema and Digital Media and Science and Technology Studies.
Daniele Rugo is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts and Humanities
at Brunel University London. He is the author of two books, Philosophy and
the Patience of Film (2016) and Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness
(2013), and his articles have appeared in various journals including Angelaki,
Third Text, Cultural Politics, and Film-Philosophy. He is the recipient of an
Arts and Humanities Research Council Innovation Grant for the project
“Following the Wires,” which uses film to examine post-conflict scenarios in
Lebanon.
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank Gillian Leslie and her very supportive team at
Edinburgh University Press; and Maia Gianakos and Dylan Lustrin at Gallery
neugerriemschneider Berlin for their hospitality, help, and support. Special
thanks to James Benning.
All figures are courtesy of James Benning and Gallery neugerriemschneider,
Berlin and New York.
NIKOLAJ LÜBECKER AND DANIELE RUGO
Introduction
Since at least the early 1970s, James Benning has committed himself to a
systematic investigation of the relations between man, environment, and
the filmic medium. The heterogeneity of Benning’s work notwithstanding, a
sustained attention devoted to the human marks on the world defines much
of Benning’s filmmaking achievements. These investigations often (but not
always) result in medium- or feature-length films that embrace both the
experimental tradition (particularly in the form of structural filmmaking)
and the documentary form (at least in their reliance on real-life locations
and ambient sound). Benning’s films, installations and related activities test,
challenge, and prod many of the oppositions and distinctions we have come
to take for granted when discussing “landscape” and the “environment,”
showing their fragility. While Benning demonstrates awareness of the tradi-
tion of landscape painting (the Hudson River painters for example), his focus
on the environment is not a device for an elegiac consecration of nature. This
point can be easily seen in Benning’s choice of subjects. Rather than focusing
on the immediacy and innocence of nature, Benning turns to land use and
multiple social natures. A glance at Benning’s films shows a number of recur-
ring subjects: agro-industrial processes and large-scale farming, along with the
machinery and labor relations they involve; the traces of water infrastructure
in the landscape (aqueducts, spillways, pipelines), their “civilizing” effect (the
birth and expansion of Los Angeles) and the intense desertification they cause;
steelmaking and its communities (in Milwaukee and in the Ruhr); the topog-
raphies of second natures such as cities, roads and railway networks; man-made
lakes and man-made clouds; invisible boundaries and very visible ones created
by the built environment. An even more prominent example of Benning’s
attempt to complicate nature is his interest in two crucial figures in American
history, provocatively brought together as epitomizing nature as the source of
dissent and violence. The reference here is to Henry David Thoreau and Ted