Experimental films usually attempt to rearrange our reflexes along with our expectations. James Benning’s 270-minute, 16-millimeter “California Trilogy” does that in part by obliging us to rethink the way we interpret “directed by” and “written by.” If “directing” refers to the placement of camera and microphone, then Benning—who works alone, recording image and sound by himself—directed these three films. And if “writing” means the choice and identification of subjects—including the way they’re represented in the credits—then Benning is also the trilogy’s writer.
The main thing that frustrates me about “California Trilogy” is that the credits come at the end of each feature. They function a bit like extended cast lists, consisting of 35 separate titles identifying, in order, the 35 shots one has just seen. Each title lists the subject, its owner, and its location. The first shot of El Valley Centro and the last shot of Sogobi, for instance, are both identified as “spillway/Department of Water Resources/Lake Berryessa.” (In the first case the spillway is active, swallowing up water like a sink drain; in the second it’s inactive.)
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Furthermore, Benning wants many of his shots to be cross-referenced—so that the “burnt land/Pechanga Indian Reservation/Temecula” shot in Sogobi is recognized as the same place seen in the brushfire shot in Los—which is difficult given that he’s labeling these shots long after they appear. More troubling is his decision to order his shots mainly according to formal principles—sound, color, texture, composition—rather than thematic development or continuity. (He noted last month at the Berlin film festival, where he premiered the trilogy, that the number of possible editing combinations with 35 shots is 35 factorial, or “1 with 40 zeros”; he said he generally worked with slides made with frames taken from each shot to determine the final order. He also noted that “maybe a third of the shots were chosen for the sounds themselves rather than the image.”)
The tension between impartially bearing witness and creating or finding meaning is evident throughout the trilogy. When a bird flies into the frame of shot number 18 in El Valley Centro (“dredge/Delta Dredging Co./The Delta”) and lights on top of a mast, it’s not clear whether this should be seen as an accidental intrusion or as an element that retroactively becomes part of Benning’s design. His filmmaking is full of vexing questions of this kind, which perhaps makes it only logical that his political agenda periodically slides in and out of focus.
Directed and written by James Benning.
