美利坚合众国

James Benning’s first film called The United States of America was a 1975 trip across the country, capturing its scenery through a car windshield. This second one also crisscrosses the nation, but without a car, carving it up instead into a series of static shots of just under two minutes, one for each state, presented alphabetically, from Heron Bay, Alabama to Kelly, Wyoming. The names of the places are nondescript, but the images attached to them are anything but, immaculately composed shots of landscape, cityscape and the spaces in between. As we move from A to Z, the images coalesce into a portrait of today’s USA, tracing out its fault lines almost in passing: fenced-off facilities, a river bed running dry, factories and refineries, run-down streets and gas stations, a camp under a bridge. The past is there too, seeping up through the songs and speeches that sporadically pierce the background noise or the motifs that evoke a whole career; the clouds, trains and cabins are stand-ins

静态自杀

在这部电影中，本宁继续通过两个杀人犯的故事来审视美国文化。埃德·盖恩(Ed Gein)是威斯康星州的一名农民，他在20世纪50年代曾多次谋杀受害者。伯纳黛特·普罗蒂(Bernadette Protti)是一名加州青少年，1984年，她因朋友的侮辱行为捅死了朋友。