San Francisco Cinematheque (Venue Partner)
145 9th St, Suite 240
415.552.1990
This event has passed.
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Landscape Suicide
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- When
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Friday Feb 26, 2010 (8:15pm)
- Where
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Directions: Screenings are held at venues across the Bay Area. Check event listings for venue information.
- Price
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members: $6 / non-members: $10
Screening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (map)
presented in association with the Film Studies Program at the University of San Francisco and the Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Program
Since the early 1970s, James Benning has created a body of formally innovative, long-form film works which use duration, understated camera work and (at times) elliptical narrative to examine cultural assumptions and contradictions with American culture and history, often revealing darkness or ideological conflict lurking beneath the surfaces of everyday appearances. A filmmaker committed to navigating his own deeply ambivalent relationship with American culture and history, Benning’s works explore the intersections of landscape, history and ideology as elegant monuments to contemplation and the passage of time.
A bleak companion to American Dreams , Landscape Suicide finds parallels of isolation between infamous mass murderer Ed Gein’s life in 1950s Wisconsin and that of teenager Bernadette Protti, convicted of killing a classmate in mid-‘80s Orinda, California, as reconstructed from the substantive details of each “true crime” case. (STEVE POLTA & JONATHAN MARLOW)
James Benning: Landscape Suicide (1986), 95 min.
