Four Corners

Director: James Benning    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: James Benning, born in 1942 in Milwaukee, USA, began working as an independent filmmaker in 1972, even before studying film at the University of Wisconsin. From 1977 to 1980 he taught at the universities of California and Oklahoma, then moved to New York to continue his work as an independent filmmaker. In 2009 he switched from 16mm to digital filmmaking. Since then his work has included installation and site specific art with many shows in galleries and museums. Besides his current film/art work, Benning has taught at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987. Since 1977 Benning has participated in the Forum and Forum Expanded with 19 works, his latest participation being Maggie's Farm in 2018. "Benning's talent has always had more to do with form than with content—more to do with style than with "having something to say," as many people would put it, even though form and style can be as expressive as content. Leftist politics often hover in the background or around the edges of Benning's films..." (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Country: USA

Year: 1997

Synopsis: In this unusual work, the renowned avant-garde filmmaker James Benning pursues an all-embracing world view. He wants to tackle the story of his country as a whole, in terms of geography as well as history. To do this, he has chosen the four-cornered meeting point between the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, which has already inspired Jon Jost to make Uncommon Senses. This is a place shaped like a quadrant with four corners, which has been left to the coincidence of politics and geometry. In Four Corners, James Benning places more emphasis on historical breadth than geographical completeness. Images and text complement each other impressively, because there are surprising formal connections between his methods of constructing pictures and telling stories – for example, when he dwells on landscapes with different layers on top of each other while describing the process by which various ethnic groups have displaced each other, thus constructing stories composed of several historical layers. ''In the case of Four Corners, all sorts of interesting stories are being told - in the scrolled titles, in the offscreen narration, in the beautiful landscapes and precious glimpses of everyday life that Benning actually frames, and even in the music. But the most interesting story of all is the one each viewer winds up telling in the course of combining, juxtaposing, and synthesizing all these stories.'' (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Language: English

Forum participation year: 1998

Forum catalogue PDF: Download

Tags: Experimental film