James Benning's Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration

by Nikolaj Lübecker (Editor), Daniele Rugo (Editor)

Overview

For more than forty years, the experimental filmmaker James Benning has been engaged in a systematic investigation of the relations between man, landscape, and the filmic medium, and during the last decade it has become increasingly clear how much these investigations have to offer to contemporary debates about ecology, the age of the anthropocene and the potentialities of new digital technologies. In James Benning’s Environments a range of international scholars highlight the thematic and formal coherence of Benning’s practice, whilst providing readers with an artistic and historical context to understand his experimental film work. The volume offers a number of interpretative frameworks drawing on film theory, environmental humanities, visual culture and philosophy, explaining why Benning has emerged as one of today’s essential filmmakers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474417945
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nikolaj Lübecker is Professor of French and Film Studies at The University of Oxford. His previous publications include Twenty—First—Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé (2022), James Benning’s Environments (co—edited with Daniele Rugo, 2019) and The Feel—Bad Film (2015).

Daniele Rugo is Professor of Film at Brunel, University of London and an award—winning filmmaker. He has held visiting positions at University of Oxford, LSE and Sciences Po.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Nikolaj Lübecker & Daniele Rugo 　Intellectual EnvironmentsSurveying James Benning, Scott MacDonaldUtah and the Times: Governing Temporality in Deseret, John BeckViolence and Landscape in the Films of James Benning, Nikolaj Lübecker

Material EnvironmentsConstructing the Transversal Time—Image: Ecosophy, Immanence and Corporate ‘Land’ in James Benning’s Four Corners and California Trilogy, Colin GardnerMen in Huts in Woods: Independence, Transcendentalism and Technology in James Benning’s Thoreau and Kaczynski Documentaries and Exhibition, Silke PanseThe Earth as Material Film: Benning’s light glance making a material—image, Felicity Colman

Perceptual EnvironmentsA Lake—Event, Tom ConleyDefacing the Close—up, Kriss Ravetto—BiagioliThe Adventure of Patience, Daniele Rugo

Index

What People are Saying About This

Professor Sean Cubitt

James Benning's film and video works are not just powerful and entrancing interventions in contemporary art. They are in most instances complex statements about the nature of the world, questions about how we know it, and challenges to the political responsibilities we have for both the world and our ways of knowing. Nikolaj Lübecker & Daniele Rugo have curated some of the best contemporary art theorists, ecocritics, film philosophers and Benning specialists to create a startling and provocative account of a body of work of immense importance to how we interpret and act in the Anthropocene.

Editorial Reviews

James Benning's film and video works are not just powerful and entrancing interventions in contemporary art. They are in most instances complex statements about the nature of the world, questions about how we know it, and challenges to the political responsibilities we have for both the world and our ways of knowing. Nikolaj Lübecker & Daniele Rugo have curated some of the best contemporary art theorists, ecocritics, film philosophers and Benning specialists to create a startling and provocative account of a body of work of immense importance to how we interpret and act in the Anthropocene.

Professor Sean Cubitt