James Benning

James Benning is an important American formalist avant-garde filmmaker. His lengthy and distinguished career goes back to the early ‘70s and includes one-person shows, retrospectives, and screenings at innumerable international festivals and cinematheques. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin and is a lecturer there. Of his work he says: “since I started making films, I’ve always tried to open a new narrative space from the juxtaposition of sound and image, or text and image – how the spectator experiences them, how they quote each other. So if fifty people watch the film, fifty different narratives are created: if there is any consistency in my filmmaking, that would be it” (Cinematheque Ontario catalogue, 1997).