2145517’s Film blog

“Benning stands today as an important precursor to the non-pastoral attitude to ecological and environmental thought required by the Anthropocene, the acknowledgement of man as a dominant geological and climatic force” (Lübecker and Rugo, 2018, p. 2). Through the works of James Benning, we looked into how ‘nature’ is not a pure term as we know it, because it is not entirely natural. Benning’s films present the landscape as having been devised and manipulated by humans through their history, technological impact and conflict regarding opposing views and political ideologies. Nature no longer becomes a sacred setting, but rather a documentation of the Anthropocene, enduring the mark of industrial systems. In the words of Lübecker and Rugo, the ‘natural environment’ in Benning’s films becomes “a complex, ambiguous, politically charged field, which is both always entangled with man and technology and capable of resisting and reversing man’s designs” (p.2).

Benning’s 2012 film Stemple Pass was screened in class, illustrating his work’s foundation. The film consists of four uninterrupted extended shots, each depicting a different season from spring to summer. A voiceover is applied throughout the film of Benning reading extracts from Ted Kaczynski’s The Unabomber Manifesto (1995), ‘used without permission’, Benning professes at the end of the film. The film does not conform to traditional storytelling or a plot. Rather, it relies on a prolonged still and minimal shot of a cabin in the woods, a model of Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana, USA (Koebel, 2013). These durational shots become a form of patience exercise for the audience, in which they are rewarded only once their assumption diminishes in correspondence with the film’s form. In my experience, I found the film to be incredibly boring. The beginning of Stemple Pass was intriguing as I was attempting to decipher the audio-visual relationship, anticipating a turn of events at some point, as traditional plot-driven films have. However, the longer we watched, the less optimistic I became on there being an entertaining narrative. Although I might not feel the kind of reward Benning’s films are to offer, I could still appreciate his work.

In highlighting how landscapes are manipulated, controlled, and affected by human conflicts, Benning’s environmental cinema distances itself from the visual solace of the picturesque. Although his images could be described as visually appealing, he intends to divert the audience’s thoughts to contemplate how our governments of control are mirrored onto the ‘natural’ and man-made environments. In this manner, Benning goes more in-depth, beyond a depiction of the Anthropocene, but he immerses the audience within the portrayal by compromising our entertainment, with the value in sitting through the discomfort of humanity’s influence in shaping the landscapes. Simultaneously, his take on environmental alternative cinema becomes a tool to resist conventional media’s immediate, momentary indulgence, which is a reflection of the tension of reality.

Benning’s execution of a ‘look and listen’ approach inspired our group to revisit our selected scenes when communicating trauma in correlation with the environment. In previous weeks, we were influenced by Patrick Keiller’s audio-visual reliance. However, Benning’s expression of landscape realities resonated with our theme. At first, I had only been searching for found footage of what I, before this week’s lecture, assumed were natural disasters. In preparation for the upcoming presentation, I looked more closely into the disasters I was gathering, believing them to be natural. For instance, the oil spill’s domino effect. In simple terms, oil spills cause pollution, which impacts the environment, which then cycles back to impact humans. So, it raises the question of whether any natural disasters are free from human touch.