James Hoberman chose 11 x 14 as one of the top ten films of the seventies (Film Comment, January 1980) and later wrote in The Village Voice:
"One of the most praised American avant-garde films of recent years, James Benning's 1976 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of sound/image pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and fractured, painterly study of the midwestern landscape, 11 x 14 points toward the creation of a new, nonliterary but populist cinema."
1976, 16mm, color/so, 83m, $300
"... A description of the form of AMERICAN DREAMS is deceptively simple: along a narrow border at the bottom of the screen a handwritten transcription of Arthur Bremer's diary crawls from right to left; a series of chronological baseball cards from the career of Hank Aaron are shown in a steady cadence, first the front (usually a photo), then the reverse side (batting statistics, etc.). Finally, overtitles indicate by year the sources of the soundtrack's fragmentary speeches and songs. ... AMERICAN DREAMS is far from unrestricted in its horizons. A clear 'sense of the ending' is limited by two inevitable acts: Bremer will shoot Wallace; Aaron will break Babe Ruth's record. As a work energized by an autobiographical impulse, Benning nonetheless hides himself in the shadows of time. It isn't necessary to know that Bremer was Benning's neighbor in Milwaukee or that the filmmaker counts among his greatest achievements pitching batting practice to the Milwaukee Braves in 1962. As externally shaped and motivated as it appears to be, AMERICAN DREAMS is marked by a dark and self-conscious meeting of personal and public desires ...." - Paul Arthur, The Appearance of History in Recent Avant-Garde Film
1983, 16mm, color/so, 56m, $200
"[T]he murderers in James Benning's LANDSCAPE SUICIDE are a paranoiac teenage girl and a taciturn Wisconsin farmer. The reconstructive narratives take the viewer through the slants of minds in disturbance, through the ambiguities that surround any act of violence. Both Bernadette Protti, who killed a more popular classmate with a kitchen knife, and Edward Gein, who shot a storekeeper's wife and then took her body home and cut it up, provide exemplars of 'I couldn't stop.' The homicides allow Benning to deal in emotion that is external to him (yet deeply felt), while imbuing his trademark 'still' images of roads, trucks, billboards, buildings and trees with newly charged meaning. ... As strong as Benning's photography is, it's the talking head sequences that prove most chilling. The power of Rhonda Bell's portrayal of Protti is such that there are moments when we're convinced she's the real killer. So, too, with Elion Sucher's Gein, who looks like he's been struck between the eyes with a heavy object, his head so caved-in by dementia. There is no actual violence here - save the disembowelment of a deer - but LANDSCAPE SUICIDE leaves you feeling like a witness nonetheless." - Katherine Dieckman, The Village Voice
1986, 16mm, color/so, 95m, $300
O PANAMA's elegant montage denotes a subject that is always on the verge of collapse. This episodic narrative "opens spaces in the film where the audience can enter into the story with its own experiences."
1986, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $125
I am not a journalist or a detective and I must admit I wouldn't have even noticed this case but for her beauty. I wrote her on June 1, 1986. I read 3,000 pages of trial transcript that summer, over 300 newspaper articles, and began to visit her in prison. Her case was very confused. Lots of people with no hard evidence. No smoking gun covered with fingerprints. She was found guilty of murder. A single mother had been shot at point-blank range. Her two sons of nine and eleven tried to stop the bleeding. Someone did this at two-thirty in the morning. In the middle of their sleep. She claimed to be innocent. I found her very complex: a self-taught Marxist/Feminist politically involved with prison reform, a hard core lifer, and at times, a naïve, southside Milwaukee Polish girl ....
1988, 16mm, color/so, 95m, $300
"... NORTH ON EVERS charts the cross country ride by master framer of landscapes and is subtitled in handwritten text that moves across the frame. Benning overturns the notion of an easily consumable product at the outset, as he forces the viewer to take in all the sounds and images .... What finally emerges is an extremely evocative picture of what's happened and is happening in this country from someone who would clearly like to feel patriotic today but finds patriotism very difficult. I would venture that Benning's filmmaking is directly connected to the sense of overload: he forces us to take in both the shots and the subtitles, the past and the present, the sounds and the images. This is a country defined by such overstimulation and excess, and one of the best things about Benning's narrative scrapbook is that it never allows us to imagine that either one of the texts is sufficient to encompass his subject's complexity. To make this film Benning had to make the same trip twice. To watch it once is to be distracted, but in an evocative and resonant manner - to be drawn away from Benning's travels and alienations and reminded of one's own." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
1991, 16mm, color/so, 87m, $300
"James Benning marks the centennial of Utah's statehood with his excellent experimental documentary, DESERET. As befits its structuralist maker, the film examines the imposition of human design, both physical and conceptual, on nature. A chain of beautiful, static shots frame details of Utah's landscapes, from windswept waters, to snowy pines, to immobile oil derricks and silent government buildings. Meanwhile, texts from the New York Times describing the state's social history, 1852 to the present, are read in voice over. Just as the terrain is contained within human constructs - Indian paints mark rocks, graffiti mark the Indian paintings, the graffiti are enclosed in the filmmaker's frame - the state's human inhabitants are circumscribed by the stringent codes of Brigham Young and his burgeoning Mormon sect - fascinatingly described in the Times pieces - and that group's resistance to outside control and interference. (DESERET was the people's original choice, rejected by Washington, for the state's name.) Benning imposes his own strictly defined filmic formula, and it's that intriguing complicity that gives DESERET the authority to transcend mere prettiness. ..." - Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, LA Weekly
1995, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 82m, $300
"Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking." These words, attributed to the Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk, are the final bit of text to appear in veteran filmmaker James Benning's FOUR CORNERS which uses a specific geographic location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and wholly imaginary place Four Corners, that favorite tourist destination where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet, becomes a kind of theoretical ground zero, the site from which Benning can give voice to other, pointedly unofficial sort of spurious conspiracy (the history of the United States), but one in which each sound and each image hints at a story not yet fully told (the histories of the United States.)." - Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly
1997, 16mm, color/so, 80m, $300
The opening credits for UTOPIA read: "Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian Journal. A film by Richard Dindo. The images were found in the desert landscape from Death Valley south to, and crossing, the Mexican border." The text at the end of the film concludes: "A sidewinder moving across the desert sand leaves in its wake an angled trail of parallel J's. A Kangaroo rat ingesting seeds produces water by extracting hydrogen and oxygen from their carbohydrates and recombines the gases into H20. Ridges in its nostrils trap the moisture it exhales. Waiting in stillness, the snake swallows the rat whole and immediately begins to absorb the water from its tissue. Hours later a circling roadrunner grabs the sidewinder behind the head and shakes it violently breaking the snake's back. The next day with several inches of snake tail still protruding from its mouth, the roadrunner continues to slowly dissolve the other end, absorbing the water from the sidewinder - and the Kangaroo rat."
1998, 16mm, color/so, 93m, $300