It is sacrilege for me to say that digital has been waiting for James Benning? His films have always demanded maximum engagement with what’s actually in the frame, and whereas I’ve occasionally found myself distracted by the grain of his 16mm films, the crispness and precision of HD just feels blatantly more conducive to taking a long hard look at what’s impressed him (by contrast, it’s impossible to imagine Nathaniel Dorsky or Ben Rivers abandoning 16mm). As befitting his background as a mathematician, there’s a schema here; nothing but American roads, loosely following the seasonal change, with the shot length occasionally dictated by how long it takes a passing vehicle’s engine to fade in and out on the soundtrack.
Beyond that, the chaos of artistic intuition and nature organises the rest, and as ever with Benning, it amounts to a hypnotic contemplation and appraisal of the manmade and natural beauty we often take for granted. And, a possible polemic against carbon emissions, esp. in light of the punishing, hour-long shot of a billowing coke tower cloud that closed his prior digital feature Ruhr (although, Benning’s cinema does allow a viewer’s latent conspiratorial bent to go wild…)
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