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This essay focuses on the epistolary enunciation of recent works by two contemporary American filmmakers, Jem Cohen and James Benning, arguing for the stakes of viewing their films through an epistolary lens rather than the lenses of literary forms like the essay and the diary more commonly deployed to describe films that hug the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Looking specifically at Cohen’s Chain (2004) and Counting (2015) and Benning’s Stemple Pass (2013) and his installation Two Cabins (2011), I show how it is the epistolary enunciation of Benning’s and Cohen’s recent work that allows them to properly explore and depict the displacement of late capitalism’s subject in an increasingly globalized world. I go on to show that through epistolary enunciation both filmmakers also tap into American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist notions of individualism and selfhood that resist the homogenizing nature of late capitalism.

Ecological sabotage, or monkeywrenching, involves the destruction of property and infrastructure to defend nature from industrial development. Its emblematic tactic is tree spiking, where a ceramic spike is hammered into old-growth trees in order to disable logging equipment. This essay considers monkeywrenching to be as much an aesthetic practice as an activist one, and it examines films that utilize principles of sabotage as a formal strategy. Through an analysis of films such as Leviathan (2012), The East (2013), Night Moves (2013), and the works of James Benning, I argue that cinematic monkeywrenching entails a modernist practice that disrupts the image's mimetic representation of nature and criticizes commercial cinema's exploitation of the environment. These techniques produce an 'ugly' aesthetic, where ugliness, according to Theodor Adorno, registers the injury to nature caused by its do7mination by humanity. A monkeywrenched cinema is one that produces an aesthetic suspension or temporal delay in film's depiction of non-human nature as a means of expressing a non-interventionist ethical relation to the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Benning was an invited speaker at the International Conference on Space and Cinema held at the University of Lisbon School of Arts and Humanities between the 28th and the 30th of November 2016. On the morning of the 29th, instead of delivering the protocol one-hour lecture, he presented his latest film, time after time – a montage of shots taken from earlier films, which the director had finished the week before –, in a world premiere at the Portuguese Cinematheque. We joined him in the afternoon for the conversation that follows, which took place on a small room at the University, with a view to the empty playground in a nearby kindergarten.

Copyright of Área Abierta is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay explores the relationship between cinema and taxidermy, and some of the ways in which artists and experimental film-makers have used the moving image to engage with the ramifications of stuffing and preserving animals. It is argued that the taxidermied creature's eerie mixture of death and life has particular resonance for film-makers with an interest in slowness and stasis. James Benning's 2014 film natural history, which was shot behind the scenes at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, serves as a central focus. As with other films by Benning, natural history can be understood as both structuralist and a landscape film. The film is compared to works depicting stuffed animals by other experimental film-makers who explore stillness and slowness; it is proposed that such film-makers can be conceived of as taxidermists. Finally, the article looks at the complex relations between cinema, taxidermy and sound. The aural dimension of Benning's film, missing from many other artists' engagements with taxidermy, enables a richer exploration of its operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Fotocinema is the property of Revista Fotocinema and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article considers cinematic time in James Benning's film, casting a glance (2007), in relation to its subject, Robert Smithson's 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty, and his film of the same name. The radicalism of Smithson's thinking on time has been widely acknowledged, and his influence continues to pervade contemporary artistic practice. The relationship of Benning's films with this legacy may appear somewhat oblique, given their apparent phenomenological rendition of 'real time'. However, closer examination of Benning's formal strategies reveals a more complex temporal construction, characterized by uncertain intervals that interrupt the folding of cinematic time into the flow of consciousness. Smithson's film uses cinematic analogy to gesture towards vast reaches of geological time; Benning's film creates a simulated timescale to evoke the short history of the earthwork itself. Smithson's embrace of the entropic was a counter-cultural stance at the end of the1960s, but under the shadow of ecological disaster, this orientation has come to appear melancholy and romantic rather than radical. Benning's film returns the jetty to anthropic time, but raises questions about the ways we inhabit time. His practice of working with 'borrowed time' is particularly suited to the cultural and historical moment of his later work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]