Where Words and Images Speak for Themselves: Landscape (Re)presentation and Word-Image Dichotomy in James Benning's Deseret (1995) - Image & ...
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Where Words and Images Speak for Themselves: Landscape (Re)presentation and Word-Image Dichotomy in James Benning’s Deseret (1995) Kornelia Boczkowska Abstract The paper analyzes various ways in which James Benning’s Deseret (1995) develops the concept of sublime and luminous landscape through its reliance on the relationship between the image as well as the spoken and written word. In particular, it seems that Deseret, which represents the peak of Benning’s text/image period and may constitute „the most sustained exploration of the American West in the annals of American independent cinema” (MacDonald, „The Ecocinema Experience” 29), tends to incorporate narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the structural film, cinéma pur and slow (eco)cinema aesthetics. Interestingly however, while paying homage to the Hudson River School tradition of sublime and luminist painting, a series of static shots is also accompanied by voice-over narration, seen as confounding or often unrelated to the imagery. Following such a peculiar structure, Deseret oscillates between mimesis and diegesis through simultaneously drawing on and challenging the cinéma pur’s notion of „pure images” and hence reinforces the traditional word-image dichotomy in an attempt to expose its audiences to often untold and deeply pessimistic exposés of American history. Résumé Cet article analyse les diverses manières dont Deseret (1995) de James Benning élabore les notions du sublime et du paysage luminieux à travers les rapports entre texte et image. Il semble en effet que Deseret, qui représente le sommet du travail intermédial de l’auteur constitue „l’exploration la plus fouillée de l’Ouest américan dans le cinéma indépendant américain” (MacDonald, „The Ecocinema Experience” 29), incorpore des conventions visuelle et narratives traditionnellement associées avec le film structuraliste, le cinéma pur et l’esthétique de l’éco-cinéma lent. Mais alors que l’oeuvre rend hommage à la tradition sublime et luministe de l’école du Hudson, une série de plans statiques est accompagnée d’une narration en voix-off que l’on IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 114
juge déviant ou peu lié aux images représentées. Cette composition particulière fait que Deseret oscille entre mimésis et diégésis dans la mesure où l’oeuvre à la fois utilise et met en question la notion d’image „pure” au cinéma, de manière à renforcer la dichotomie conventionnelle du texte et de l’image dans une tenative d’exposer son public à des discours souvent non dits et profondément pessimistes de l’histoire américaine. Keywords American avant-garde and experimental film; James Benning’s text-image films; Deseret; American landscape; word-image dichotomy IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 115
Introduction
The paper analyzes various ways in which Deseret (1995) develops the concept of sublime and luminous
landscape through its reliance on the relationship between the image as well as the spoken and written word.
In particular, it seems that Deseret, which represents the peak of James Benning’s text/image period and
may constitute “the most sustained exploration of the American West in the annals of American independent
cinema” (MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience” 29), tends to incorporate narrative and visual conventions
traditionally associated with the structural film, cinéma pur and slow (eco)cinema aesthetics. Interestingly
however, while paying homage to the Hudson River School tradition of sublime and luminist painting, a
series of static shots is also accompanied by voice-over narration, seen as confounding or often unrelated to
the imagery. Following such a peculiar structure, Deseret oscillates between mimesis and diegesis through
simultaneously drawing on and challenging the cinéma pur’s notion of “pure images” and hence reinforces the
traditional word-image dichotomy in an attempt to expose its audiences to often untold and deeply pessimistic
exposés of American history.
Hailed a veteran independent filmmaker (MacDonald, “Exploring the New West” 2) and a master
of 16mm landscape films, James Benning has made a name for himself as one of the most distinguished,
critically acclaimed and prolific figures in the post-1970s American avant-garde and experimental cinema.
This reputation has been rightly earned due to the artist’s lifelong commitment to exploring some inherent
qualities of American natural and urban landscapes, most notably those located in Midwestern and Western
United States, which often ”pose an idealistic challenge, a spur to unattainably pure observation” (Bradshaw).
The author of almost sixty experimental pieces and over twenty five feature-length films to date, Benning
has largely contributed to the evolution of eco-cinema (MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience” 2) and the
“spiritual documentary film” (Goodall et al. xix), where he confronts the idealized American landscape with
some tragic and marginalized facts from the social, political and cultural history of the depicted geographical
location. The artist’s ongoing fascination with the concept of “landscape as a function of time” and “looking
and listening” is particularly evident in many of his later works, which developed a distinctive aesthetics in
the form of fixed, stable and extended shots, inspired by both transcendentalist ideas, primarily from Henry
David Thoreau’s Walden or Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience), and Theodor Kaczynski’s
mathematical theories (Benning et al. 1-2).
Benning’s Legacy Defies Categories
While incorporating such diverse concepts as landscape, place, space and time, narrative and anti-
narrative, personal and collective history, memory, race and ethnicity, environmental degradation and industry
or neoliberal crisis and renewed colonialism (Cubitt 21), Benning’s legacy is regarded as central for both
1970s structuralism film movement and 1980s new narrative movement, the latter of which strove to achieve
honest subjectivity and authenticity by means of literary tools, including meta-text, fragmentation, identity
politics, intentionality or explicit descriptions of one’s physicality and emotional life (Pinchler and Slanar
1). Therefore, many of his works functioned as transitional, combining some structural devices and formal
qualities of an experimental form with a wide range of socio-political themes expressed in the form of
historiographical documentaries (Anderson 124). According to Skoller and Zuvela, it is specifically the use
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 116of two and a half minute 100-foot rolls and duration that renders Benning’s films generically close to some
narrative forms of long take cinema exemplified by Straub-Huillet, Ophuls, Welles and other filmmakers
(86). Meanwhile, Sitney suggests that in the context of experimental filmmaking, the artist’s works reflect the
tradition of minimalism and structuralism where “the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified,
and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film” (348).
Indeed, it appears that somewhat contrary to Benning’s objection to being classified as a structural
filmmaker due to larger philosophical and political questions that he poses by means of prolonged shots and
narration, many of his films, most prominently One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), tend to rely on a formal
elegance as well as meticulous and self-reflexive compositional logic, which serve to interrogate visual
perception. MacDonald contends that the artist’s early pictures initiated the two novel trends in the 1960s
and 1970s avant-garde filmmaking, namely the “combination of photographic realism (...) and subtly surreal
uses of composition and sound (...)” (“Toward an Eco-Cinema” 124). Particularly Benning’s unconventional
use of sound, exemplified by 11x14 and Grand Opera (1978) originally labeled “the new talkies,” stands in
opposition to many silent films of the period, which deliberately drew on the absence of dialogue seen as one
of the most prominent features of independent and alternative cinema. Zuvela also pinpoints that his landscape
works or, as put by Anderson landscape historicides (114), mirror the spirit of American transcendentalist and
nature writing in their restrained ecocriticism echoed in both visual and verbal references. Simultaneously,
however, Benning tends to avoid “essayism, or polemic, preferring instead critique by quotation, such as
in the carefully inserted shots of ravaged landscapes, livestock and abattoir and other evidence of human
despoilment that recur throughout his oeuvre” (Zuvela).
As pointed out by MacDonald, another distinguishable aspect of Benning’s works is that they have
shifted their focus from New York’s and San Francisco’s cityscape to the Midwestern countryside in an
attempt to document “the decaying industrial district of Milwaukee (in One Way Boogie Woogie), (...) the
roadscapes between Chicago and Mount Rushmore (in 11 x 14), and (...) Oklahoma landscapes (in Grand
Opera)” (“Toward an Eco-Cinema” 124). Since the late 1970s, Benning has continued to examine the concept
of Americana in such films as Landscape Suicide (1986), which utilizes a mirror-like structure to compare
and contrast the testimony of two high profile murderers, Ed Gein and Bernadette Protti, juxtaposed against
the natural, urban and social landscape of the Midwest. In his 1990s and later pictures, shot after Benning had
moved to Val Verde, California in 1987, the American West has become the core facet of the imagery evoked
in North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995), Four Corners (1997), Utopia (1998), the California Trilogy, Valley
Centro (2000), Los (2001), and Sogobi (2002), 13 Lakes (2004), Ten Skies (2004), Nightfall (2011), small
roads (2011) and more recent pieces.
In an interview with Zuvela, the filmmaker notes that, contrary to some of his earlier projects, the
post-1990s works are particularly preoccupied with developing a stronger sense of narrative: “I became more
aware of life, life and death situations, general histories and personal histories, which was in a way coming
back to people and narrative but in different ways. And I started to develop all these things I’m investigating in
relation to image making, image duration. It allows me to understand form, the long take static shot, it allowed
contemplation of the image and ideas.” Similarly, Deseret, which, along with North on Evers, Four Corners
and UTOPIA, represents the key works of Benning’s text/image film period, appears to heavily rely on the
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 117narrative structure, where a documentary content becomes intertwined with an experimental form, hence
constituting a highly contemplative hybrid. Particularly, the implementation of a rigorous formal structure,
which resulted in a highly complex interplay between the narrated story and the imagery itself, echoes the
destructive impact of human settlement on the natural landscape and indigenous peoples inhabiting Utah.
Indeed, the narrative composition is likely to offer a rich interpretative potential and, though a radically still
imagery clearly comes to the foreground, it simultaneously challenges the spectator’s visual and auditory
perception.
Reading the Screen in Deseret
There is no denying that the role of narration in Deseret brings about the question of the relationship
between text and image, which in the context of experimental cinema becomes especially evident in the
use of “visible language,” that is words that appear physically on the screen, and “screen writings” defined
by Knowles as “a literary engagement with the screen as a surface as well as a window” (46). Perhaps the
major challenge for the spectator, however, is the process of what Knowles calls “reading the screen,” which
constitutes “a complex oscillation between viewing (images) and reading (text)” brought together in Benning’s
work in the form of both visual and acoustic properties of the language (46). Interestingly, this trend seems
to oppose some key principles of the cinéma pur aesthetics, whose goal was to eliminate intertitles or any
other traces of literary contamination from a filmic art form, the former of which were seen as unsettling the
viewers and the image itself (Ghali 195). In the 1921 issue of Ciné pour tous, an avant-garde film theorist and
proponent of the purist cinematic experience Gustave Fréjaville, stated that “since looking and reading are
two different processes, the eyes and the brain cope uneasily with such barbaric gymnastics” (in Ghali 192). A
similar view was proposed by Foucault who claimed that “by resemblance we demonstrate and speak across
difference: The two systems can neither merge nor intersect. In one way or another, subordination is required.
(as in those paintings where a book, an inscription, a letter, or the name of a person are represented); or else
the image is ruled by the text” (32). Barthes also emphasized a largely parasitic and incompatible relationship
between text and image, where the former, considered a carrier of meaning, proves to be a precedent and
dominant mode of representation (25).
Futurists, on the other hand, have demonstrated a more progressive and liberal approach to “filmed
words-in-freedom-in-movement” by insisting on the merger between these two forms of cinematic expression,
as proposed in F. T. Marinetti’s concept of “words-in-freedom,” a forerunner to contemporary kinetic texts:
“We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that smash the boundaries of literature as they march towards
painting, music, noise-art, and throw a marvelous bridge between the word and the real object” (Marinetti
et al. 217-218). Interestingly, Deseret, though seeking inspiration from cinéma pur’s and futurist aesthetics,
appears to be neither strictly rooted in pure images nor the typographic revolution, as exemplified by Marcel
Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926), due to its almost complete reliance on the acoustic properties of the
featured narration. This trend places the analyzed work somewhat in opposition to many 20th century avant-
garde productions where written or kinetic texts were incorporated in the visual fabric of the film, ranging
from Sheeler’s and Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949), Brakhage’s Window Water
Baby Moving (1959), Conner’s A Movie (1959) and Cosmic Ray (1963), Marie Menken’s Notebook (1962),
Frampton’s nostalgia (1971), McCall’s and Tyndall’s Argument (1978), Snow’s So Is This (1982), Rose’s
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 118Secondary Currents (1983) and others (MacDonald, Screen Writings 4-8).
In Deseret, the only visual text takes the form of printed intertitles, which appear on the screen ninety
four times and tend to play the purely descriptive role in an attempt to “energize the experience of silent
cinema” (MacDonald, Screen Writings 2). Furthermore, although the film clearly celebrates a strict division
between text and image, simultaneously neglecting the pictorial potential of words as images or words in
movement, it also tends to embrace the possibility of their literal and figurative collision and interaction, which
occurs primarily at the acoustic level. Particularly, it can be hypothesized that it plays with the aforementioned
relationship in the tradition of Mitchell’s concept of “word and image,” defined as “basic cultural trope, replete
with connotations that go beyond merely formal or structural differences” (Mitchell 3). While occasionally
connoting a partial interconnectedness between the graphic and the verbal seen as innately impure, fluid and to
some extent prejudiced modes of representation dependent on the cultural context in which they occur, Deseret
simultaneously challenges Mitchell’s notion by juxtaposing and dichotomizing the word-image relationship
with the aim of providing the viewer with yet another narrative space to explore.
Deseret’s Organizational Complexity
Deseret, whose title stems from the Jaredite term denoting “honeybee” from the Book of Mormon,
follows a structuralist-like and highly unconventional structure. A voice-over narration, which, along with
diegetic sounds, also functions as a peculiar soundtrack, consists of a series of ninety three articles about the
history of Utah published between March 19, 1852 and December 21, 1992 in the New York Times, the voice
of U.S. dominion and imperialism. Their textual content, condensed to a maximum of eight to ten sentences
and narrated by Fred Gardner in a deadpan and authoritative voice, is arranged chronologically, with the
first article summarizing an exaggerated and rumor-based story about Mormons “despoiling” non-Mormon
settlers of their goods, and the last story about a stand of aspen trees in the Wasatch Mountain labeled “the
world’s largest organism” (Benning, Deseret). The relationship between text and image is perhaps one of the
most fascinating aspects of the film formed with an almost mathematical precision. Each continuous shot,
which presents a singular image, is accompanied by exactly one sentence, and each story, made of a sequence
of shots, is separated from the following by a single silent shot. In other words, the length of a given shot is
determined by the length of a sentence recited during its projection. The only intertitles that appear on the
screen are the news stories’ publication dates superimposed on the first shot of a sequence of shots, which
constitute the background imagery for a selected article (MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 235-240). Moreover,
Benning gradually reduces the length of the “divider” shot, which “corresponds to the historical realities of
journalism” (Benning in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 236) and symbolically refers to the modern lifestyle
and media landscape becoming increasingly hectic and fast-paced (MacDonald, The Garden 339-340).
Unsurprisingly, MacDonald emphasizes the film’s organizational complexity, which teases the
viewer’s mind by provoking them to simultaneously hear the Times report on the Mormon state and see
its geographical features, hence evoking a strong sense of word-image dichotomy (The Garden 340). What
appears to be even more challenging is that whereas some shots tend to literally and visually correspond
to the narrated story (e.g. the story about the slaughter of predatory animals from the May 2, 1970 issue of
NYT is accompanied by an image of a dead coyote), the remaining ones lack any sort of resemblance to or
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 119correlation with the auditory material. MacDonald argues that “the overall experience of Deseret (...) is a
combination of the visual pleasure of touring this remarkable region (...) and the accumulating impact on our
perception of a set of suggestive visual motifs and historical echoes” (The Garden 341). The latter, according
to MacDonald, are particularly evident in Benning’s choice of two central themes, which dominate the film’s
imagery, that is the evolution and destruction of the Mormon and Native American Indian ways of life as well
as the environmental damage of the land itself (The Garden 341-342). The former message is clearly implied
by the Times stories, the first twenty four of which are devoted to the establishment of Mormonism and make
references to numerous conflicts between the Mormons, the local Indian tribes and the U.S. government,
most notably the Mountain Meadows massacre, occasionally visualized by the shots of Indian petroglyphs or
ruins of Puebloan dwellings. As intended by Benning, it was the language of narration rather than Gardner’s
voice that was supposed to convey the drama of the featured events (in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 237).
Meanwhile, the latter motif is prevalent in the second part of Deseret, where the narrator recites a number of
stories revolving around environmental issues of the region, including the construction of the transcontinental
railroad, the slaughter of predatory animals, the nuclear testing in Nevada, the development of chemical
and biological weapons as well as some major toxic waste sites, the air force’s plans to build an electronic
battlefield in the Utah desert, etc. The presence of these themes, also visually implicit throughout the whole
film, helps build a dramatic tension as the viewers attempt to make sense of the film’s complex structure. The
ambivalence of the text/image relationship is also enhanced by Benning’s switch to color, which “gives the
second half of the film a new immediacy and sensuality, and a precariousness that is emphasized by the gradual
acceleration of the pace of Benning’s editing” (MacDonald, The Garden 343), as well as the striking contrast
between the increasing environmental damage reported by the Times and the increasing beauty of Utah’s
stunning landscapes. MacDonald concludes that in Deseret, “every place we see is felt to be simultaneously
beautiful and endangered. While ways of life in Utah may continue to come and go (...), the land itself seems,
increasingly, a casualty of American progress” (The Garden 343).
Similarly, the images of Utah accompanying the narration, shot by Benning himself and then selected
at random, follow a relatively rigorous structure. While the black-and-white imagery with the superimposed
intertitles printed in an antique typeface prevail in the first half of Deseret, the imagery in the second half
of the film, which serves as the background for the history of Utah after it achieved statehood on January 5,
1896, is in color with the intertitles printed in a modern typeface. On a more general note, whereas the picture
predominantly focuses on “an unspoiled, virgin kind of landscape” (MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 232),
its depiction of natural scenery and urban life also exposes certain traces indicative of the mutual, yet often
detrimental relationship between nature and civilization implied by, for instance, the view of a parking lot
in a suburban street at the foot of the mountains, mines with a freight train laden with ore in the foreground,
a moving track with snow-dusted hills in the background, etc. However, regardless of Benning’s choice of
a particular frame and editing, it might be hypothesized that, akin to Hutton’s works, there tend to exist
some common traits between the Lumière brothers’ motion pictures and a clearly contemplative quality of
the analyzed material, as suggested by the artist in an interview with MacDonald, where he commented on
shooting The California Trilogy: “My rolls are bigger than the ones the Lumières used, but the idea is the
same” (A Critical Cinema 249).
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 120Cinematic Conventions in Deseret: The Lumières, Slow Cinema, Sublimity and Lumi-
nism
MacDonald asserts that the Lumières’ cinematography exemplifies the tradition of filmmaking, which
employs aspects of the slow cinema aesthetics1 and Schrader’s “transcendental style,”2 particularly evident
in the use of extended shot and duration: “the goal [...] is much the same: to focus attention—an almost
meditative level of attention—on subject matter normally ignored or marginalised by mass-entertainment
film, and, by doing so, to reinvigorate our reverence for the visual world around us and develop our patience
for experiencing it fully” (Avant-Garde Film 11-12). Flanagan contributes to the discussion by suggesting
that “the primary operation of Benning’s shot is to embody an observational rather than materialist practice,”
which results in the filmmaker’s employment of a “rigorous observational realism and attention to landscape,
presented in long, still, patient takes” and, consequently, binds his work to contemporary slow and undramatic
art cinema (55). In Wulf’s 2003 documentary Circling the Image, Benning claims that he has always inclined
to “shoot as the pioneers at the dawn of cinema history” and elaborates further on the impact of the Lumières’
works on his style: “In order to film the arrival of a train or a kiss they simply put up the camera and shot
an entire reel. (...) I wanted to go back to the beginning because I thought filmmaking grew up too quickly.
Narratives got introduced and replaced the essence of the image. So I wanted to go back and do these one take
rolls” (in Flanagan 47). Having worked exclusively in 16mm until the release of Ruhr in 2009, which marked
his turn to the digital media, also enabled Benning to operate independently and proved to be a critical factor
in enhancing a contemplative quality of his experimental practice (Flanagan 186).
The observational strategy employed in Benning’s cinematography appears to have been to a large
extent influenced by a distinctively American tradition of depicting sublime and luminist qualities of grand
and largely uncivilized natural scenery, which goes back to the 19th century Hudson River School movement.
While the aforementioned concepts, also inseparably connected with the school’s strands of pastoral elegaic
and scientific exoticism, were first proposed in 18th century European aesthetics and further discussed by
Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer or Gilpin, they are also related to Turner’s Frontier Thesis and Manifest Destiny
(see e.g. Allen 27, Carmer 19-24, Driscoll 8-20, Nash 67-71). Particularly the sublime mode, expressed in a
number of Hudson River School paintings, which portrayed an overwhelming, unique and often dramatic Wild
West scenery, evoked the feeling of awe and tranquility as well as uncertainty, fear and terror brought about
by visualizing conditions, such as vastness, darkness, danger or solitude. An even more emotional response
was elicited by the mid-19th century offshoot of the movement known as Luminism and characterized by
the emphasis on the effects of light, detail, concealing visible brushstrokes and the use of aerial perspective.
Coined by John Baur in the 1940s, the term originally referred to the work of Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick
Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford or James Augustus Suydam as well as to selected paintings
1 The slow cinema aesthetics, characterized by a frequent use of “long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytell-
ing, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday” (Flanagan), is often seen as a creative evolution of Schrader’s
“transcendental style” or, more generally, neo-modernist trends in contemporary cinematography. The term slow cinema was first
coined by film critic Jonathan Romney as late as in 2010 with the aim of defining a trend within art cinema that surfaced as a dis-
tinctive genre of filmmaking during the 2000s. In the Sight and Sound article, Romney describes this tendency as a “varied strain
of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years” which “downplays event in favour of mood,
evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality” (43).
2 The concept of “transcendental style,” coined in Schrader’s landmark work Transcendental Style in Film and evident in the
cinema of Yasajiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Roberto Rossellini or Budd Boetticher, is expressed with a spiritual quality
achieved with the lack of editorial comment in editing, austere camerawork or acting devoid of self-consciousness.
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 121of the representatives of the Hudson River School, especially Cole, Church and Bierstadt. In terms of stylistic
tropes, Luminism is mostly defined as offering more meditative and spiritual qualities of the depicted
scene: “In contrast to the operatic landscape, Luminism is classic rather than baroque, contained rather than
expansive, aristocratic rather than democratic, private not public, introverted not gregarious, exploring a state
of being rather than becoming” (Novak 27). Therefore, the movement is widely believed to render, akin to
impressionism, highly atmospheric effects and create “a resonant, light-suffused atmosphere” (Miller 243)
while exposing their viewers to “the wild and great features of nature: mountainous forests that know no
man” (Noble 61, as quoted in Nash 78). Simultaneously, however, the luminist paintings, often in opposition
to Hudson River School’s, are sometimes interpreted as ideologically unrelated to the frontier myth: “Though
some artists painted luminist pictures in the West, and though we can find luminist silence there, luminist art
had little relationship to the expanding frontier myth, but maintained itself, if sometimes precariously, in a
classic state” (Novak 27).
This kind of approach was later adopted in 20th century American cinematic landscapes, which
frequently envision an infinite and immense sublime scenery, reducing the viewer to a metaphysical dissolution
as well as bringing a sudden realization of an inevitable transience of one’s own existence. According to
MacDonald, “the grand landscape epitomized by Frederic Edwin Church and the “Rocky Mountain school”
(...) became, and has remained, the literal, as well as historical, background of epic commercial films, from the
earliest attempts to interest filmgoers in natural scenes to John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948),
and The Searchers (1956) to such recent popular hits as Dances with Wolves (1990) and Legends of the Fall
(1995)” (The Garden 274). Furthermore, Natali suggests that both Hudson River School and contemporary
film depictions of American landscapes tend to share ideological and iconological scenarios associated with
“sublime imperial fantasies” as they “bear the footprints of the United States’ recurrent manifest destiny”
(100). The statement, though to some extent simplified, may also serve as a comment on many independent
and experimental productions, which attempt at, as put by MacDonald, “revivifying our sense of place in all
its complexity (...) while at the same time recognizing the problematic moral, environmental, and political
implications of five centuries of European involvement in the Western Hemisphere” (The Garden 91).
Unsurprisingly then, the focus on landscape in avant-garde and experimental cinema, often rendered with
the sublime or luminist sensibility or implying some of the aforementioned ideological messages, can be
seen as a rather persistent trend in the history of American filmmaking, exemplified by, for instance, Steiner’s
H2O (1929), Baillie’s Castro Street (1966), Dorsky’s two-part Hours for Jerome (1980), Gottheim’s Fog Line
(1970), Brakhage’s Desert (1976), Mangolte’s The Sky on Location (1982), Rudnick’s Panorama (1982),
Fenz’s Forest of Bliss (1986), Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy (1982-2002), Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991), Hutton’s
Study of a River (1997) and many others. Also Deseret, which has made a significant contribution to American
minimalist avant-garde and experimental cinematography, continuously strives to confront conventional
reception of motion pictures in an attempt to “retrain and reinvigorate viewer perception of cinematic space
and time, and in particular, the representation of place” (MacDonald, “American Avant-Garde Cinema” 255).
MacDonald refers to this tendency, epitomized by Sonbert, Huot, Benning, Lockhart and the aforementioned
artists, as “perceptual retraining,” pioneered by Rodakiewicz’s Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements
(1931) or Burckhardt’s films and credited with reenergizing “the contemplative/meditative way of experiencing
the cinematic representation of place” (“American Avant-Garde” 255). In line with this trend, Deseret revives
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 122such an experience and offers “the possibility of renewed perceptual engagement and awareness” through
their reliance on a series of extended and continuous shots (MacDonald, “American Avant-Garde” 255),
which also demonstrates “the ways in which the landscape remains unchanged in spite of technological and
political shifts” (Anderson 119). Undoubtedly, the featured array of rocks and deserts, trails, vegetation, ruined
buildings, cemeteries, plains of snow, deserted roads and settlers’ houses or a few isolated human figures,
seems to remain almost untouched by time, thus evoking a strong sense of sublimity and luminism. On the
other hand, the sequences often contrast a sublimity of natural landscapes with a mundane reality of urban life
(in no particular order), mostly in the form of urban architecture, billboards, suburban streets, cars or tracks,
old road signs and other commercial products, hence contributing to an increasing sense of ambiguity.
Where Words and Images Speak for Themselves: Landscape (Re)presentation and
Word-Image Dichotomy in Deseret
Meanwhile, the official narration of the western expansion is deliberately contrasted with the film’s
sublime and luminist imagery at the visual level, yet it appears to be compliant with the Frontier Thesis and
Manifest Destiny ideological undertones at the narrative one: “The history the film traces is a frightening one
for me. It’s a history about a Manifest Destiny (...) [and] the Times is very close to the federal government
ideologically; and Utah was the Wild West” (Benning in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 237). The use
of voice-over narration and intertitles, which both draws on and questions the cinema pur’s tendency to
dichotomize text/image relationship on the screen, also coincides with a historiographical and political trend
in the 1980s avant-garde filmmaking, “increasingly infused with a historiocizing energy” (Arthur 40) and
seen as a deliberate break from the previously persistent ahistoricism. Willemen asserts that a revitalized
orientation toward history and political relevance can be regarded as a consequence of the European avant-
garde movement’s shift from Godard to Straub and Huillet, the latter of whom succeeded in integrating the
formal and aesthetic properties of a cinematic work into a socio-political agenda (68). Arthur hypothesizes
that specifically Benning’s landmark American Dreams (1984), which combines strictly formalist practices
with historiographical concerns, may be considered emblematic of the aforementioned tendency in American
avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. Anderson notes, however, that the artist’s engagement with history,
epistemology and politics “is largely limited to individual memories of events that are of a personal rather than
a historical character” (113).
Taking this line of reasoning, it might be argued that, while following the process of historiographical
construction and conveying what appears to be a factual representation of certain events, the narration in
Deseret simultaneously tends to play with the viewer and distract them from listening through exposure to the
evocative image. This equivocal oscillation between diegesis and mimesis attempts to answer the question of
how collective and personal history is formed, which lies at “the intersection of concrete visual elements, the
glacial perseverance of the landscape and the codified human texts superimposed (both literally and figuratively)
upon them” (Anderson 115). Anderson makes an interesting statement that Benning’s representation of the
southwestern landscape “functions as both a foil and a vehicle for historical argumentation” and “reveals
the deficiencies of conventional historiography with regard to the concept of place” as the majority of
historiographical films present landscapes as a mere background for the human actions, which, in turn,
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 123constitute history (115). With landscape at the foreground, Deseret resists narrative linearity in order to let the
viewer draw their own associations between seemingly unrelated or largely disparate elements of the film’s
narrative content and visual composition. In other words, a full comprehension of Benning’s storytelling
is possible only through a careful mediation of images in relation to both spoken and written words. This
observation is also confirmed by the artist himself, who, in an interview with MacDonald, revealed his major
intention of employing Deseret’s mathematical structure, which serves to evoke a strong sense of word-image
dichotomy and engage the spectator in the process of reading the screen and completing gaps in the featured
“story”:
I was very careful when I arranged the film. I mounted one frame from each shot onto a slide and used
the slide projector as a poor man’s Avid, projecting the slides to decide which images should go next
to each other. I was able to study each slide juxtaposed with each sentence, and could be very careful
about the way each image would code each bit of language, and how each bit of language would
reinterpret the way you looked at that landscape. I wanted the texts and the images to talk to each
other. The whole point of the structure was to create a space between those two aspects of the film that
you have to complete. When you watch the film, especially the first time, it tends to wash over you,
so that you don’t really notice all that much about the juxtapositions between image and text, but I do
hope I’ve created something like a narrative space between the two and that some people will see the
film often enough to be able to explore the dimensions of that space. (MacDonald, A Critical Cinema
236)
Interestingly, the statement also relates Benning’s play with text and image to certain slow eco-cinema
conventions (Ingram, Ivakhiv, Lam), such as aesthetic and temporal estrangement as well as attentiveness
to nature on-screen achieved by means of extended takes, minimal editing and camera movement, diegetic
sounds or decentring of human action and narrative. However, while the artist’s use of “long take is one way
to mediate (...) [a landscape] experience and to highlight the subtle changes that a given site undergoes”
(Lam 210) through encouraging a practice of simple looking, the voice-over narration appears to counter
the spectator’s mere need for observation and hence requires more effort from the audience. In other words,
though clearly remaining in opposition to the mainstream visual culture of distraction, Deseret seems to draw
on word-image dichotomy to explore “the potential of text to define and control a cinematic experience”
(MacDonald, Screen Writings 8) as well as expose a complex relationship between landscape representation
and various forms of land (mis)use in Utah’s history and culture. Álvarez refers to this trend as “observational
landscaping” defined as “a blend of explicit objectivity - because the audience directly looks at the landscape
- and implicit subjectivity - because the audience is placed in the filmmaker’s position” (45).
The double reading of landscape films, which also echoes the land art-influenced structuralist practices
after the subjective turn in documentary film, allows the artist to convey a sense of place determined by a
careful choice of the proper frame that becomes subject to extended duration: “place is always a function of
time so one has to sit and look and listen over a period of time to get the feel of that place and see how that
place can be represented” (Benning in Ault 91-92). As a result, as Álvarez argues, Benning’s polysemic works
do not only create “a cinematic geography endowed with multiple meanings,” but they also serve as “a prime
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 124example of how observational landscaping can simultaneously document place and mood, architecture and
feeling, and, ultimately, urban space and passing time” (46). Particularly, Deseret’s landscape, seen through
the perspective of the melancholy fixed gaze (Cubett 1-2), signifies “the expression of history that is (...)
etched by the real suffering of the past” (Adorno 64) and the voice-over narration additionally accentuates its
underlying meaning, which is “the failure of the land to rid itself of history” (Cubett 5).
Conclusion
Despite labeled a non-narrative work by the critical protocol, Deseret juxtaposes meticulously
structured patterns of static shots of the U.S. western natural and urban landscapes with a spoken selection of
environmentally focused texts written in the style of a supposedly objective journalist account, which bears
certain ideological and discursive traits of its time and the region’s historical past. The exposure to narration
spoken over a sequence of landscape shots often results in “a continual movement between desire and frustration,
as the promise of a cohesive historical narrative and synchronization of text and image is repeatedly suggested
but never quite delivered” (Anderson 118). Undoubtedly, a rather disruptive and strenuous process of reading
the screen is additionally complicated by “the disjunctive and often trivial contents of the newspaper articles
[which] resist narrative coherence, resulting in a focus on the style rather than the contents of the writing”
(Anderson 118). This dialectical play between word and image does not only enable the spectator to “dwell
with an image of nature in an immediate, prolonged and sensuous way,” but it also “responds to an otherwise
unresolvable conflict between the desire for a knowable ‘history’ and the impossibility of unproblematic
historical representation” (Anderson 117). Meanwhile, Ivakhiv emphasizes some contemplative and meditative
qualities of the film’s imagery, which offers “a lengthy series of languidly paced landscape images, to be
viewed as they are, unadorned by music or other extra-diegetic sound, and together making up an ambiguous
narrative of environmental change” (12). Somewhat in line with the last remark, Anderson rightly argues that
“what may be considered history must be drawn gently from the landscape, unraveled as though from a matrix
of buried threads rather than excavated from a fixed site,” hence emphasizing its significance as the film’s
central mode of representation deeply embedded in the complexities of American history and culture (116).
As has been suggested, while Deseret’s imagery extensively draws on the Hudson River School
tradition of depicting sublime and luminous landscapes, the narration oscillates between mimesis and diegesis
as well as reinforces the traditional word-image dichotomy in an attempt to play with the viewer’s perception
of landscape. Specifically, whereas the film’s visual composition is constructed by means of the structural
film and slow (eco)cinema conventions, their narrative content both seeks inspiration from and challenges the
cinéma pur’s concept of pure images by its occasional departures from word-image dichotomy, partly influenced
by both Marinetti’s words-in-freedom and Mitchell’s word and image. Particularly the latter measure, which
invites the audience to draw certain literal or figurative parallels between text and imagery, shifts the viewer’s
attention to the landscape representation itself, which, though remaining virtually motionless, constitutes the
major source for (re)viewing and (re)defining some “complex personal/ethnic/national histories” (MacDonald,
The Garden 349). A remarkable interplay between word and image in Deseret and other films of Benning’s
text/image period is continuously promoting a mediated cinematic experience and active spectatorship, which
form an “ongoing resistance to Hollywood ways of depicting human experience” (MacDonald, The Garden
349). As noted by MacDonald, landscape in Benning’s works “is always changing in very subtle ways and
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 125sometimes in very dramatic ways, but is has to be experienced” (A Critical Cinema 235). Indeed, only through
looking and listening is the spectator able to absorb and negotiate the meaning of Deseret’s landscape where
the iconography of the Southwest is built upon an obscure narrative form and the autonomy of individual
shots, each offering a wealth of associations.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota
Press, 1997.
Allen, John L. “Horizons of the Sublime: The Invention of the Romantic West.” Journal of Historical
Geography, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp. 27-40.
Álvarez, Iván. Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film. Columbia UP,
2015.
Anderson, Steve F. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Dartmouth College
Press, 2011.
Arthur, Paul. “The Appearance of History in Recent Avant-Garde Film.” Framework: A Journal of Images and
Culture, vol. 2, no. 3, 1989, pp. 39-45.
Ault, Julie. “Using the Earth as Map of Himself: The Personal Conceptualism of James Benning.” James
Benning, edited by Barbara Pinchler and Claudia Slanar, Austrian Film Museum, 2008, pp. 88-112.
Benning, James, director. Deseret. USA, 1995.
Benning, James, Diedrich Diederichsen, Peter Pakesch and Bettina Steinbrügge, editors. James Benning:
Decoding Fear. Walther König, 2014.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Fontana, 1977. Print.
Bradshaw, Nick. “The Sight & Sound interview: James Benning.” Sight and Sound, 9 Feb. 2015, http://
www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/sight-sound-interview-james-benning.
Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Carmer, Carl. “The Hudson River School. The First New York School.” The Hudson River and Its Painters,
edited by John K. Howat, Viking Press, 1972, pp. 27-51.
Cubitt, Sean. “Film, Landscape and Political Aesthetics: Deseret.” Screen Studies Conference, 29 June 2014,
University of Glasgow, http://www.academia.edu/7537862/Film_Landscape_and_Political_Aesthetics.
Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Driscoll, John. All that is Glorious Around Us. Cornell UP, 1997.
Flanagan Matthew. “‘Slow Cinema’: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film.”
Diss. University of Exeter, 2012. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/4432. Accessed 24
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 126Feb. 2017.
Flanagan Matthew. “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema.” 16:9, vol. 6, no 20, 2008,
http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed 24 Feb. 2017.
Foucault, Michel. This is Not a Pipe. Translated by James Harkness, University of California Press, 1983.
Ghali, Nouredinne. L’avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt: idées, conceptions,
théories. Editions Paris Expérimental, 1995.
Goodall Mark, Good Jill and Godfrey Will. “Film and Representation: Three Readings.” Crash Cinema:
Representation in Film, edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good and Will Godfrey, Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2007, pp. xii-xxi.
Ingram, David. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. University of Exeter Press, 2004.
Ivakhiv, Adrian. “Green Film Criticism and Its Futures.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment, vol. 15, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-28.
Knowles, Kim. “Performing Language, Animating Poetry: Kinetic Text in Experimental Cinema.” Journal of
Film and Video, vol. 67, no. 1, 2015, pp. 46-59.
Lam, Stephanie. “Experimental Ecocinema and Nature Cam Videos.” Slow Cinema, edited by Tiago de Luca
and Nuno B. Jorge. Edinburgh UP, 2016, pp. 207-218.
MacDonald, Scott. A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. University of California
Press, 2006.
MacDonald, Scott. “American Avant-Garde Cinema from 1970 to the Present.” American Film History:
Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present, edited by Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon,
Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 241-258.
MacDonald, Scott. Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies. Cambridge UP, 1993.
MacDonald, Scott. “Exploring the New West: An Interview with James Benning.” Film Quarterly, vol. 58,
no. 3, 2005, pp. 2-15.
MacDonald, Scott. Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers. University of California
Press, 1995.
MacDonald, Scott. “The Ecocinema Experience.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust,
Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt, Routledge, 2013, pp. 17-42.
MacDonald, Scott. The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place. University
of California Press, 2001.
MacDonald, Scott. “Toward an Eco-Cinema.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol.
11, no. 2, 2004, pp. 107-132.
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 127Marinetti, Tommaso, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla and Remo Chiti. “The
Futurist Cinema 1916.” Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umbro Apollonio, Thames and Hudson, 1970,
pp. 207–218.
Miller, Angela L. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-
1875, Cornell UP, 1996.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of
Chicago Press, 1994.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale UP, 1982.
Natali, Maurizia. “The Course of the Empire: Sublime Landscapes in the American Cinema.” Landscape and
Film, edited by Martin Lefebvre, Routledge, 2006, pp. 91-123.
Noble, Louis L. The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1964.
Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, Oxford UP, 2007.
Pinchler, Barbara and Claudia Slanar, editors. James Benning. Austrian Film Museum, 2008.
Romney, Jonathan. “In Search of Lost Time.” Sight & Sound, vol. 20, no 2, 2010, pp. 43-44.
Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. University of California Press, 1972.
Sitney, Paul. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde, 1943-2000. Oxford UP, 2002.
Skoller, Jeffrey. Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. University of Minnesota
Press, 2005.
Willemen, Paul. “An Avant-Garde for the Eighties.” Framework, vol. 84, no. 24, 1984, pp. 53-73.
Zuvela, Danni. 2004. “Talking About Seeing: A Conversation with James Benning.” The Suspended Narrative,
vol. 33, http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/the-suspended-narrative/james_benning/. Accessed 24 Feb.
2017.
Kornelia Boczkowska is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Studies in Culture at the Faculty of En-
glish, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She holds a Ph.D. in English (2015) with a specialization in
American culture studies, and an M.A. in Russian (2010) and English (2011). She has published on Amer-
ican Cosmism, space art and avant-garde cinema in the context of visual, cultural and film studies. She is
the author of The Impact of American and Russian Cosmism on the Representation of Space Exploration in
20th century American and Soviet Space Art (2016) and the co-editor of Framing Fear, Horror and Terror
through the Visible and Invisible (2016). Her current research is on narrative and visual conventions in the
representation of natural and urban landscape in American experimental film.
Email: kornelia.boczkowska@gmail.com
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.2 (2017) 128You can also read
