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.
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Source: IMDB (Whitney Museum of American Art)
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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…
Formed from the clay that comes from the earth, we self-harm in the form of homicide. Landscape Suicide is about the chilling phenomenon of murder and our perspective of such a terrifyingly normal thing.
Split into two halves and using actors to re-enact transcribed confessions, Benning chooses to focus not on anything salacious but rather casts that myth down. True-crime can be fascinating to us despite such leery matters because we feel the need to understand, to scrutinize and psycho-analyze such cases as if they were test subjects, as if there is some grand scheme that allows us to understand the mind of the killer. But the act of killing is one often illogical, compulsive, and haunting not because of…
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 showing a woman repeatedly 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…
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,…
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.
Amy was gracious enough to have me on her podcast to discuss three of my favorite movies under the guise of “comfort films” and we get into why this masterpiece from James Benning both does and does not fit the bill, and so much more.
I’m grateful for her having me on, her patience in dealing with my many tangential ramblings and nervous enthusiasm, but an overall lively and pleasant conversation that, while veering here and there, always came back around to why exactly we love some of the films we do, and what makes a comfort film, really, if that’s even possible to say definitively.
Enjoy!
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),…
That title couldn't be more misleading as no suicide actually occurs. I think they should have called it "Landscape Homocide".
Anyway, this short docudrama that blends fact and fiction is unsettling, particularly to the hazy cinematography that heightens the sense of foreboding. It's almost as though the beauty of the damp countryside contrasts with the gruesomeness of the events and murders that turned these gorgeous locations into homes of evil. The sometimes monotonous narration contributes to the film's harrowing nature. For a brief minute, I mistook the video for having genuine interviews with the two major characters, one a little-known killer and the other, the infamous Ed Gein, who explain what drove them to perform their deed, or in Gein's…
"Even at the price of human life itself."
The definitive structuralist vampire movie.
Fave Benning!
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…
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.
Functional representations of the American doldrums—reclamations of the sensationalized. Pictorial, but also archival; images manifest via multitudes. Melancholy witnessed through to the bitter 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”…
