1987 Directed by James Benning
Benning continues his examination of Americana in this film through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Protti was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984.
This is one of the best films I have ever seen.
On one side we are in June 23, 1984, along Bernadette Prott, a teenager from California who stabbed a friend to death over an insult.
On the other side we "remember" December 16, 1957 from the perspective of a present time and are along Ed Gein, a farmer from Wisconsin and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims.
In the middle and above it all we have James Benning applying his philosophy called "landscape as a function of time". Benning utilizes the space-time continuum not as a theoretical background to play with scientific hypotheses, but as an element of our perception of time and existence. One of the courses taught…
white walls. aren’t they beautiful?
they stand there: empty, waiting, begging. they demand my attention. they beg for it. without it they are nothing. it is true. who is there to say that it isn’t?
there is nothing upon them, yet that nothing is beautiful. it stands as a declaration of pure beauty. a masterpiece of the human hands. perhaps those very hands will have grown sore building it, but the wall had been worth it.
what would it be without me? nothing. nothing at all! my mind weeps to see its sadness when i’m not around. it’s true, it weeps! it needs me.
i’ll be back, little wall. don’t leave without me (i know that you often want to,…
From the shady suburban hills of California, to the snow-covered fields of Wisconsin and everywhere in between, America is a nation who’s humanity is consistently fractured by unspeakable, often times thoroughly puzzling acts of violence and cruelty. Monotony, hatred, confusion, narcissism, psychopathy, pain, lust, greed, hatred, jealousy, trauma, misdirection, environmental factors—these are but a small sum of the large list of possibilities for these heinous and vile acts. James Benning examines America as if it were a painting, with every frame of this masterstroke worthy of a spot on your wall.
Blending starkly impressionistic frames which magnificently capture the topography of two distinctly different geographic locations, with unembellished recreations of interviews from two real-life American murderers (Ed Gein and Bernadette Protti),…
Tennis Balls: A Symbolic Thesis
“And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run . . . the true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.” -David Foster Wallace
Landscape Suicide begins with a sequence repeatedly showing a woman serving tennis balls. At first glance, it may appear as though what we are witnessing is the same shot played over and over again, separated by choppy cuts to black before the next take. But in reality, if you look closely at the hopper, you will notice the number of balls decreasing slowly with each serve we are shown. It…
All filmmakers play within the never-ending realms of space and time, whether they are aware of it or not. Doesn't matter who you are, what you are shooting on, or anything else. Space and time make up everything around us. But when a director is aware of this while making a film and make space and time more than just concepts or ideas, magic happens and this is what James Benning does with Landscape Suicide.
Does the world revolve around us and our actions or does our actions revolve around the world? Landscape Suicide brings up this question in many different abstract and interesting ways, almost from the very first scene. Benning's unbiased and undismayed look at two different murders…
Functional representations of the American doldrums. Pictorial, but also archival; an image forms through multitudes. Melancholy seen through to the very end. There is no coming back from this destructive culmination.
“Memory, all alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again”
Dinner was ready. Just before her mother called for her to come downstairs and set the table to eat, the phone rang…
“Touch me
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with my memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me, you'll understand what happiness is
Look, a new day has begun”
They chat…
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.
Fascinating. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film like this. Utterly cold, practically fact-based with a complete non-biased look at two murders. This is my first Benning film and based on what I've read about his work in a way I expected something like this but nowhere near as chilling yet thought-provoking as Landscape Suicide ultimately is.
The film focuses on the murder of a teenage girl by her classmate Bernadette Protti, and a murder by the notorious, infamous Ed Gein. Split up into two parts, both examinations follow a very similar structure. Benning seems to want to focus on the question of nature vs nurture. The titular landscape that encompasses the two killers is a constant as his…
Anti-true crime, or the truest version of it. Cookie-cutter suburbia and remote, frostbitten patches of Midwestern flatland linked in a shared hollowness, a testament both to the death that haunts the placid environments and, perhaps, the inherent violence of America if not life itself. (The final images of a man dressing a deer carcass eerily place the grisly, senseless murders being highlighted in a sick harmony with nature. Pointedly, even factoring in the two extended bits of "dramatization" of actors reciting some of the killers' cross-examinations refuse to offer any insight into their motives, with the transcripts showing Bernadette and Gein adamantly refusing to cop to any psychological explanation for their actions, and the actors completely bleach their performances of any hint of humanity, dully recounting events as if reviewing a grocery list. A profoundly disturbing film, precisely because it avoids all the vicarious, lascivious thrill true crime typically offers.
Landscape Suicide uses the blurred line between fact and fiction to elucidate a dark undercurrent that runs through American culture. It's a look at two ostensibly unconnected murderers, Bernadette Protti (Rhonda Bell) and Ed Gein (Elion Sucher). What's so fascinating is how the film divides it's time, giving nearly equal time to the actors conveying the words of the killer and interstitial cuts of the areas where the crime happened. The technique works exceptionally well in situating us with not only explanations from the killers which are unsatisfying, but also the geographical setting which is equally unsatisfying when it comes to providing answers, positing that perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the individual and the places they spent their time in.…
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You know what James Benning does with Landscape Suicide? He makes Errol Morris look like Gore fucking Verbinski. And I *like* Errol Morris.
Um dos filmes mais minuciosos da história do cinema. Benning reorganiza objetos e paisagens em uma estrutura tão crua quanto detalhista, todos esses elementos de um imaginário norte-americano que perpassam sua obra parecem que aqui, mais do que nunca, evidenciam uma doença social implícita na geometria de cada espaço, na motivação de cada gesto narrado nos depoimentos, na brutalidade das reencenações que soam inocentes (o que é o plano da garota no telefone?) mas contém toda uma composição sociocultural que já nasce na organização natural da imagem, que está latente na paisagem de qualquer subúrbio, na fachada de qualquer residência, no portão de qualquer instituição, jaz na própria definição comportamental daquelas propriedades, emana suas convicções no espaço público, irradia sua maldição civilizatória no simples plano de uma rua.
