James Benning
LOS
reviewed by Gary Levinson
What is Los Angeles? To the people who live there, it’s many things. Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, Downtown lofts, really good “Mexican” food, waiting for a parking place at a shopping center, a completely jammed 8-lane (each direction) highway at 2am, probably mostly things to do with traffic.
For people who don’t live there? Hollywood, surfers on the beach, Malibu, golden hand prints (just like a mason’s insignia) in the pavement….
James Benning is a California insider. His film LOS, gives us 35 authentic postcard snapshots of what L.A feels like. Starting with the aqueduct (if you’ve lived there you know what a water shortage is), and stopping at, among other things, a billboard in West Hollywood, at the airport, at a highway, the desert, at a trash recycling center, at an intersection, on top of the Hollywood hills, at the jail, at the ARCO center, at an auto compacting facility, and yes at the beach, his filmings share with us his view of what it means to be L.A.
Although I thought that maybe there was a little too little emphasis on cars, traffic, and the brown turd that hangs over the city, watching this film brought back to me the real nature of what locals call La-la-land.
As outstanding as the film is in communicating the essence of L.A., it is not meant to be a travel record.
Like Benning’s other relatively recent films (RR, Ten Skies, 13 Lakes) LOS is a collage of filmings (I assume carefully chosen). In this case there are 35, each taken with a fixed camera position, with a fixed lens, in a fixed place, and each over a real time period of 2 ½ minutes. It’s easy to take the filmings for their own value (“Oh! I like that one!”), but of course the film should really be regarded in its whole.
Benning has said that the name of the film is simply LOS (and not LOS ANGELES), because he wasn’t trying to create a complete portrait of the city.
There is no dialog, there is no narrator, the surrounding sound is the only narration. After watching LOS I began to wonder why any films bother with dialog; it seems at best like a waste of energy, and at worst a significant distraction from enjoying the beauty of existence.
Viewing this film is also a chance to reflect on just how it is we perceive the world around us. First of all, our eyes are drawn to humans; when there is a human is the filming our gaze will be inevitably drawn to it. Also although we consider ourselves to be visual creatures, the surrounding sound is of immense importance in giving meaning to a scene.
The filmings are all very interesting, and we all have certain thoughts associated with the various things shown. If I can’t say that all the filmings are beautiful (Trash handling comes to mind: interesting to watch, but not really beautiful), some of the most mundane or routine things are simply beautiful. For example, watching the cars flow down the freeway at dusk on a rainy evening. Benning makes it easy to see and realize that there is beauty in everything, just waiting to be discovered.
reviewed by Gary Levinson
review © 2009 Levinson
Links (in German):
http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/de/verleih/news-anzeige/article/1693/239.html?cHash=d9749e2c52
http://home.snafu.de/fsk-kino/archiv/los.htm
Entries (RSS)