93

You know what James Benning does with Landscape Suicide? He makes Errol Morris look like Gore fucking Verbinski. And I *like* Errol Morris.

Benning understands that through the manipulation of image, sound and time, cinema can work to uncover truth within the mundane.
What creates violence? Is it born from our environment, or ourselves? If we live in a world in which everything that surrounds us is now man-made, is the violence which results from these surroundings man-made also? In the end, does that really matter?
Disturbing, tragic and illuminating. A revelation.

Also contained a scene which for me, seemed to completely capture the essence of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Pretty pretty pretty good.

Clinical analysis of the events surrounding a murder are replaced by almost withdrawn rememberance. I was genuinely in disbelief when i realised this wasn't a literal documentary, because there is nothing in it pointing otherwise except for the names of the actors at the end - and the timeline, of course. It's all the more haunting, the distance and how the echoes of these tragedies are disappearing amidst blindfolded normality, while never ceasing to exist somehow as a thin veil of, perhaps unconscious, acknowledgment.

“I don’t remember what words I used and stuff.”

Benning cannily zeroes in on American inarticulateness as essential to any domestic tragedy, just as he captures something fundamental in our character with his “pain” and “place” divide. The ensuing horror and heartbreak are enough to make me forgive Sucher’s mushy south Brooklyn accent not passing for a second as Wisconsonite (though I have a hunch that this disconnect is another of Benning’s calculations). So much to unpack, so much of it unpackable.

RIP

i genuinely think i could edit this film into a masterpiece

Somehow Bennings was able to turn a stationary shot of a piece of paper into a cinematic highlight. Landscape Suicide paints a powerful picture of evil and the irrational emotions and mentality behind it, to the point that this quasi-documentary could be argued to be a Christian film. It hooked me in with its experimental form and stayed with me due to its thematic strengths.

”You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
-Sherlock Holmes

A great display on the importance of arrangement in editing.  By placing the chilling interview first, the proceeding pastoral landscapes are given shape (thematically, spatially, tonally) by the interview itself and instilled with an uneasy air.  The smallest hint of narrative sharpens the process of looking.

Lenta, pretenciosa y aburrida en su busqueda de lograr un efecto a traves de imagen y montaje. 
Si no fuese por la buena critica no la hubiese terminado.

Would make for a great triple bill along with A Serbian Film and Monsters University.