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You know what James Benning does with Landscape Suicide? He makes Errol Morris look like Gore fuckin' 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.

"Only a few thousand people watched Landscape Suicide, but everyone who saw it went out and made a documentary about the bleak, violent vicissitudes of the American character."

unique dreamlike meditative nostalgic fuckin weird etcetc

something about this just *works* but it's too visceral to really explain

🎶mem'ries🎶

A fantastic experimental documentary from James Benning, incorporating fascinating murder interviews, a clear artistic style, and his classic use of gorgeous landscapes. Melancholic, beautiful, harsh, peaceful, unsettling, innocent, delicate, tough. It is so many contrasting things at once, and it culminates into a profound and wonderful piece. You don't often see documentaries structured or carried out this way. The interviews are lengthy yet interesting, and the 'montages' of nature, wildlife, roads, buildings, and forests simply have to be witnessed.

The only thing of note about this film are the script and the performances. As a re-enactment of court transcripts from two cases of murder, both the director and actors come together to produce what I would unquestionably assume to be real confessions and testimonies if I didn't know otherwise.

However, inserted in between these re-enactments are lengthy looks at landscapes and other mundane details about small towns. As the title suggests, this could have been inserted as to question the kind of environment that produced the murderers we are, in a certain way, presented. However, the length at which we're made to consider this is pretty absurd, and eventually I completely lost interest in the experimental imagery and started to fast-forward. Maybe I should have given this more of a chance, but there really wasn't much substance to be found in this narrative at all.

Plus troublant que bien des films d'horreur. Dans ce film, du moins, je suis sur la même longueur d'onde que Benning. Le non-dit plus révélateur dans le discours parlé.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by Errol Morris

Benning makes poetry out of archival filmmaking. Reminds me of Lynch in the interrogation of Americana and revealing the limitations of what can be known. Also this is my new favorite film.

♡
The murders are an abyss; the heartrendingly static displays, however, pierce into the melancholia synthesized of the talking-head accounts (and often, at unlikely breaks of the films' duration). You will uncover alongside yourself a flat, yet tense nostalgia that nevertheless casts a sentient coldness over both the certain and the doomed, looming the perpetually sunbathed memories of the lost.

synthesis of experimental, documentary, and narrative filmmaking into something completely its own being. tense, upsetting, and surrealistically beautiful, managing to provoke and question the audience with technique and choices on Benning's part (it definitely feels like something Haneke would've watched during his formative years), and I never fail to get weirdly nostalgic seeing rural Wisconsin onscreen. the "Memory" scene is an all-timer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya9t5CUxnH4