ALT/KINO is covering the Experimenta strand of this year’s London Film Festival via a series of correspondences between Patrick Gamble and Sophia Satchell-Baeza. In the second of these messages, Sophia discusses her experience(s) watching James Benning’s The United States of America.
The United States of America (James Benning, 2022)
Dear Patrick,
I just read your first correspondence and will reply properly later. But just to say that I might not be able to write about the new James Benning film after all. The first hour and a bit of The United States of America flew by and I was completely engrossed, alternating between writing furiously in my notebook and getting lost in the eerie, people-less vistas and immersive drones of clanging scaffolding. Then I got a weird dizziness, a kind of centralised headache somewhere between my eyes, mixed with the nausea of not having eaten enough at the festival. I felt completely trapped in the black box. At what point could I flee the cinema: after New Hampshire or North Dakota? Anyway, I left around 20 minutes before the end. All those wide open spaces and there I was, completely claustrophobic!
Dear Sophia,
Oh no! But also...that's kind of fascinating, especially considering how the film ends. Maybe you should write about it …
Dear Patrick,
So I watched the end of the film. I can’t believe it. Very rarely have I left a screening before it’s over for exactly this reason. What if something happens that completely alters my perspective of what came before it? What if the filmmaker drops a last-minute idea, a new framework, an alternative lens for understanding the material that we’ve just seen? Surely with Benning I was safe!
I love it: at 79 years old, the legendary American experimental filmmaker drops the mother of all twists, slap bang at the end of an epic remake of sorts. I’ve been told. In The United States of America (2022), Benning revisits a 1975 short of the same name, which he shot with his then partner Bette Gordon on two road trips through New York and Los Angeles. They mounted a 16mm camera to the back of their car—the avant-garde equivalent of GoPro!—and filmed their journeys as the radio played the greatest hits of the moment. This was to be the last of their collaborations. Although I haven’t seen the short, I read Gordon in an interview with Scott MacDonald saying that it “also had to do with the credit that was going to him and not to me.” What interests me is how, when the collaboration broke up, Benning took one path (the avant-garde structural film route) and Gordon another (that of the independent narrative film). As MacDonald implies, this was already set out in the specifics of the route, which headed straight for Hollywood. Was Gordon having second thoughts about what kind of filmmaking she wanted to go into? Curiously, two of her later films, Empty Suitcases (1980) and Variety (1983), did crop up at the festival this year, in excerpts from Laura Poitras’s supreme portrait of Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).
Anyway, here we are and Gordon is gone and the premise is different. Benning’s new film is made up of 52 short landscape shots - one of every state in the U.S. (alongside Puerto Rico and Washington, D. C). The compositions are, per Benning, highly formalised: static shots of fields and junctions and bridges (and yes, clouds too). It’s a state-of-the-nation portrait captured through its freeway underpasses and detention centres, its nuclear power stations and its missile sites. It feels like it’s taking place at the end point of the American experiment, when all the people have been wiped off the planet but somebody left the radio on. Like a post-apocalypse film for the avant-garde, but it’s also reminiscent of my experience of walking through the city centre in lockdown. London opened up as a vast canvas of metallic infrastructure and nobody in it. What is the point of the sad Pret a Mangers and high-rise office blocks if there’s no-one going in them? Is a Pret still a Pret if nobody’s buying the baps? A philosophical quandary… In Benning’s film, there might be almost no people, but there are plenty of ghosts. The ghosts of presidents and activists, the spectres of the victims of police violence, the phantoms of Trump and Reagan. I imagine that the experience of watching this film (and its twist) is felt very differently by American audiences who might well recognise the spaces they are seeing and find that they don’t quite match. I’m not attached to these landscapes through nostalgia or recognition, so the twist works well. It reminds me that what I know of America is a projection anyway, a series of fantasies culled from comic books, records, and the movies. “This land was made for you and me.”
Anyway, I’ve walked out of one screening already. Two and it becomes a thing I do! Guess I’ll have to stick through the whole of De Humani Corporis Fabrica…
Looking forward to hearing from you again, and thanks for encouraging me to stick with the Benning film to the end.
Best wishes,
Sophia
You can read the other parts of the Experimenta correspondence here: #1.
The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October.
Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a writer and editor, focusing on artists' film, psychedelic art, and the 1960s counterculture.