Park City Dispatch. 7.

Because I'd been so enamored of his recent 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, I was looking forward to James Benning's New Frontier film casting a glance perhaps more eagerly than any other Sundance selection. 13 Lakes set Benning's camera on the edge of a baker's dozen of America's most ecologically fascinating lakes from Okeechobee in Florida to Lake Iliamna in Alaska, to the Great Salt Lake here in Utah, and shot a continuous ten-minute roll of 16mm film capturing each. casting a glance returns to Utah's iconic lake, where Benning perches his camera at various vantage points in view of the Spiral Jetty, a renowned piece of environmental art created by Robert Smithson in 1970. This artwork is, as its name describes, a spiral of carefully arranged stones jutting from the lakeshore into the water. Smithson made a film (which I have not seen) also called Spiral Jetty at the time of its creation.

Instead of using shots of ten minutes in length, as 13 Lakes did, the 80 minutes of casting a glance are broken up into segments of much shorter shot length, perhaps a few minutes each. Both films invite the viewer into a different mode of, borrowing the title of one of the filmmaker's CalArts classes, "looking and listening" to filmed nature. But with less time for us to contemplate how compositions, rhythms and ripples in each shot are functioning, casting a glance becomes more dependent on shot juxtapositions. For example, a particularly stunning pair of shots show chunks of ice being blown over the Jetty and tumbling into the lake, first from a high camera angle and then, in a reverse shot, apparently from atop the artwork itself. The film is organized into sections showcasing the shifting appearance of Smithson's piece at different times of year. Each seasonal variance is preluded by a title card indicating a date sometime in the life of the Spiral Jetty. Seemingly, each title card denotes the day that Benning set up his camera to record, suggesting that this is a project he has been working on for nearly his entire filmmaking career, which began with did you ever hear that cricket sound in 1971.

However, things are not quite as they seem. The program guide states that the footage we see in casting a glance was all captured between mid-2005 and early last year (when Benning had a contribution to another New Frontier film at Sundance, entitled Lunchfilm.) Are Benning's shots of the Spiral Jetty in various seasons and states of submersion over that 18-month period intended to simulate the transformations the artwork has undergone in relationship with its environment over its 37-year life-span? That's what some who have written about the film seem to have concluded from the discrepancy. But the dated title cards are not necessarily inaccurate; they might actually be labeling the soundtrack and not the image, as Benning's soundtracks are not always diegetically matched to the images they accompany. For instance, his One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later retains an older film's soundtrack while showing images of the present. I understand the entire soundtrack to Ten Skies is taken from recordings used in various previous films. One could say Benning is misleading us with these devices, but in doing so he's pointing out the how film watchers can privilege visuals over audio when processing information. I must wonder if some of the soundtrack of casting a glance might have been recorded in locations other than Utah, on the specific dates Benning is using as section markers for his film.

If Benning's images and sounds for casting a glance were not recorded at the same time and place, he was skillful in disguising the evidence from someone like me, who lacks direct experience of what a visit to the Spiral Jetty might sound like. Most of the sounds we hear are of wind blowing, or water lapping against the shore, and fit with what we see on the screen. There is even a shot accompanied by the sound of geese honking. Soon we see a "V" of birds reflected on the lake's surface, and if we look hard enough we can see them in the air above as well. Less congruous sounds that do not appear to emanate from an on-screen source are few and far between: distant gunshots accompany one vantage of the artwork, a few bizarre yelping sounds appear at another, and there is even a group of shots accompanied by a recording of the song "Love Hurts" that sounds as if it could be coming out of an off-screen boombox or car stereo. This last example is noteworthy, however. Since the music plays seamlessly on either side of a cut, it could not have been recorded while multiple images were being filmed, unless Benning was using multiple cameras, which I highly doubt. Once the door to mismatching sound and image has been cracked, it's impossible to know from the material film itself just how how wide Benning has opened it.

This dispatch has been long on speculation and short on conclusions; as you can see, I'm still in the midst of processing casting a glance, as I am always in the midst of processing Benning's films. However, I will draw two concrete conclusions. One, that I love how an apparently minimalistic film like casting a glance can become an instrument for contemplating techniques we take for granted in more "conventional" documentaries. And two, that though the other New Frontier features I watched at this year's Sundance were a mixed bag (Eat, for This Is My Body was tremendous, Half-Life rather weak, and Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part 4 somewhere in between, making me wish I'd had the time to fit in the other four parts screened this week), I really appreciate the presence of all these explicitly art-minded films at a festival where the business end of filmmaking can so often dominate the conversation.

Posted by dwhudson at January 26, 2008 2:15 PM