Synopsis
Ten shots of skies.
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10 Skies
Genre
Releases by Date
Premiere
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Austria
Source: IMDB
Releases by Country
Austria
21 Nov 2004
- Premiere Source: IMDB
Popular reviews
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Watch the restoration HERE. Lossless blu-ray download available soon.
If you've followed me on this site for any length of time, you'll likely know my obsession with American filmmaker James Benning. Just yesterday I referred to him as the greatest American Filmmaker to ever live, and hinted at a Benning Project™️ I was working on. I expected it to take a lot longer than it did, but it turns out that my gaming PC is even more adept at rendering HUGE files than I thought possible (shouts out the new hardware acceleration in Premiere 2023), so I'm happy to reveal, much sooner than expected, that I have been working on a "restoration" of James Benning's seminal film Ten Skies.
Erika…
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I started this previous weekend with a film and a book. The film was James Benning’s Ten Skies - a simple, experimental film that consists of ten shots of skies around Southern California, each one lasting exactly ten minutes. The book was Erika Balsom’s Decadent Editions essay on the film. It was a carefully planned pairing - I took Friday off of work for a mental health day and I intended to spend the sunny portions of the day on the beach where I do most of my reading. I figured that my own sky would make a perfect companion for Balsom’s essay and I was completely right.
I’d highly recommend picking up Balsom’s book. It covers everything that you could possibly…
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do you remember when you were little? and your mom told you not to stare at the sun but you didn’t know or care about why so you tilted your head up and stared defiantly until your eyes watered and you admitted defeat.
do you remember when you were a little older? your parents were fighting and you didn’t know why. you were scared and wanted to be alone. so you went to the backyard and laid on top of the picnic table and looked up at the clouds.
do you remember when you got older? you and your brother would sneak into the backyard every night and lean against the hot tub while smoking a joint. you’d stare up…
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genesis/climax/post-apocalypse: the three preliminary stages of active development and deterioration, the cycle of life as presented by the cirque du nuage. we see the universe for the first time, laugh and love beneath its wide-open window, get angry and downtrodden by the goings-on of earth ordeals and project our saddest thoughts onto the only entity who listens. billions of souls and their darkest voices... no wonder the sky turns grey.
the act of rebuilding: we begin again from scratch. the world grows blue again, the grey making way for tomorrow.
Ten Skies concentrates on the spectacle, that which we all know by heart. the spectacle is so awesome to witness because it's a reminder of a part of our lives…
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I close my eyes. I am at the top of the mountain. I saw an angel. We are dancing under the same sky. I could live in these moments forever. Floating like the clouds do. I can’t stop chasing time. Time's running out as often as it does. Behold the clouds that float above, they too will slip away just as time has. When I open my eyes, I wish to see you.
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the world is a beautiful place and i am no longer afraid to die
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a cloudbuster is a device designed by austrian psychoanalyst wilhelm reich, which reich claimed could produce rain by manipulating what he called 'orgone energy' present in the atmosphere.
the cloudbuster was intended to be used in a way similar to a lightning rod: focusing it on a location in the sky and grounding it in some material that was presumed to absorb orgone -- such as a body of water -- would draw the orgone energy out of the atmosphere, causing the formation of clouds and rain. reich conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster, calling the research 'cosmic orgone engineering'.
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nature is painting abstracts for us. A plethora of shapes emerge. a duck, a man, a house. watched with some friends and we all saw the same things, each of us would call it out “There! There! It’s an elephant!” and the other would yell in agreement. Not sure if we were all seeing the same things or that’s just the influence of group perceptions on art.
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bro watch a chit load of james benning with high quality headphones in a dark room with a small fan blowing cool air into your face sipping on a cool refreshing beverage with your feet in a warm foot bath or even one of those fish baths where they nibble on your feet and you will see it is pure unadulterated relaxation and not cringeworthy
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ten skies is something we all once knew intimately but have since forgotten—the sheer joy of losing ourselves in the vastness above. each shot of drifting clouds in benning’s film recalling a lost connection to nature, to a time when the sky held endless possibilities for our imagination. when we were younger, the world seemed as big as the sky itself, and we were free to make sense of it however we pleased. the clouds were not just clouds; they were stories waiting to unfold. as children, we had an instinctual need to lay on the ground, our eyes tracing every shift of the heavens. there was a magic in catching those fleeting moments, where the clouds rearranged themselves into…
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Had a really beautiful time showing this masterpiece to my friend Carson. He responded to it so strongly, it feels special to accidentally show another person their new favorite film. We discussed each individual sky, its progression, its termination, and we talked for many hours after it had ended.
I'm convinced the entire universe exists in this film, and ultimately it's one of the most optimistic things I've ever seen. I have to read Erika Balsom's book on it.
James Benning filmed ten skies, edited it together, and it's better than most films, period. But is he the artist, or has nature simply played its course? Without the frame, would we even see the sky in this way? In any case, we're beyond blessed to have it.
Seen on my friend's projector