1987 Directed by James Benning
In Landscape Suicide Benning continues his examination of Americana 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…
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…
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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.
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…
There's no way I'm going to top this review by one of my top three favorite reviewers on here, especially since I only have a few minutes to log this. However, one aspect of the film I'd like to highlight in addition to his observations is the experimental nature of Benning's shot structure. The opening five minutes - the only use of shot/reverse-shot in the entire film - reveals the conceit of this piece in two ways: by focusing solely on the tennis player for the first several volleys, Benning draws our attention to his isolation from the viewer (we look at him, not with him), further accentuated by the use of the reverse-shot, which becomes a critical political instrument;…
That was fucking dismal
Nothing is more horrifying to me than hopelessness in humanity
This film transcended sadness and just made me feel like a black empty void, I don't know if if that's good or bad but I definitely had an extremely strong reaction to this film.
A long long road. Perfect. Gorgeous 16mm print beaten to a pulp, with an introduction by Dennis Cooper and Zack Farley.
A rarity to see a motion picture made with such a unique structure. Both actors are superb. Interviews gave me the chills.
Francesca Beale Theater 16mm print
James Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay. And nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear than in Landscape Suicide, in which Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart: Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous killer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies. Like many of Benning’s films, Landscape Suicide consists largely of footage of places,…
Homicide is perhaps the most sensationalised subject. Broached time and time again by popular culture as a lurid example of the extreme human behaviour.
Or rather the most extravagant. A word and concept that is anathema to Benning's project of using duration and structuralism to strip America down to the bone and reveal a loneliness seemingly inherent in its sheer expanse.
Which, in this case, he makes use of by picking two famous killers, Bernadette Protti and Ed Gein, who are separated by time, almost three decades, and geography, with Protti stabbing a classmate in the sunny Northern California, 1984, and Gein killing multiple women in the snowy climes of Wisconsin, 1957.
Shots of both locations are placed alongside separate…
Cannot comment on Benning's other work, but the result here is spellbinding in its presentation. Like a brainchild cross of Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman, both stories mirrored in construction. The interview 'recreations' provide the balance to the long sequences of said landscapes. The horror, shock, and sadness behind the images (more importantly, the why of these images) are not far from this text. Allegories of repetition, faith, destruction. Plays out like an album with moments that capture a distinct idiom unto itself.
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