Film Categories: Landscape

“James Benning took the founding of the New York Times in 1851 as a departure point for his latest film, ‘Deseret’. In the best Benning tradition, ‘Deseret’ unfolds magnificent landscapes captured with a stationary camera during a dozen-odd trips throughout the calendar year – desert, plains of snow, lonely trails, trees in bloom, cemeteries, ruins, unfriendly rocks, empty settler’s houses, roads that seem to be leading nowhere, a few isolated human figures. “‘Deseret”s starkly composed images suggest a space haunted by the official history written back East in the Times. Benning collected 93 stories about Utah, boiled them down to…

“Panni” was shot in a rain-lashed garden in central Italy, in the last week of 2004. It depicts the layers, veils and mattes created by washing on a line. A mix of interlaced, single-frame sequences and normal shooting was deployed to explore ideas about translucency, opacity and looking-through.

“Object Studies” is organised around a colour scheme based loosely on the hues of the colour temperature scale; brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white. Time-lapse, interlaced, single-frame sequences and lap-dissolves were deployed to explore density, translucency and the interactions of different kinds of cast-shadows. The space between the camera and its subject is also explored. Space is flattened, collapsed, expanded and bridged in diverse ways.

In “Penumbra” the camera strategy, and shooting scheme, are rigidly determined by the film’s subject, a grid of off-white bathroom tiles. The work is formed as a continuously evolving image. In other words it has neither cuts nor dissolves, both of which affect the transition from one shot to another, but exists as a single fixed shot made with a static camera. “Penumbra” ‘s spatio-temporal grid structure parallels the structure of the film strip, which is similarly grid-like: spatial in its actual physical form, spatio-temporal in its manner of operation.