Film Categories: Landscape

A winter landscape in a hardwood forest. Changing rhythms of camera movement and editing, shifting light qualities, zooms, and other cinematic techniques evoke a sense of a brooding, perhaps menacing, spirit animating the frozen woods.

In this film, Anderson walks down Yonge Street from Bloor Street to the waterfront, recording the shifting intensities of the cityscape. “It’s as if you had flowed down Yonge Street along with the pollution of life and in the terror of the tunnel met death, and finally felt your body emptied with the rest of the waste into the lake. As the camera peacefully scans the water there is a feeling that everything is being cleansed…” – Rick Hancox, Cinema Canada

A man facing his approaching death takes what is perhaps his last journey and ends up in “Pensao Globo” in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions throughout the city. With oversaturated colours, both sanguine and succulent, vision swims and slips away in echoing superimpositions. These overlapping exposures convey a sense of the permeable boundaries between life and death.

“‘Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.’ These words, attributed to the Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk, are the final bit of text to appear in veteran filmmaker James Benning’s ‘Four Corners,’ which uses a specific geographical location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and wholly imaginary place Four Corners, that favorite tourist destination where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet, becomes a kind of theoretical ground zero, the site from which Benning can give voice to other, pointedly unofficial of spurious conspiracy (the history of the United States), but one in which each…