The United States of America

“A view of the United States of America from a mid-COVID perspective, with references to some of my prior films, along with past political and social citations. The film was inspired by a 2020 Criterion Channel showing of The United States of America, a 25-minute, 16mm film, made together with Bette Gordon in 1975.” — James Benning

The few spoken passages of the film, at the request of the filmmaker, are not subtitled. A paper translation will be distributed at the entrance to the auditorium.

Forty-seven years after a short film with the same title, made with Bette Gordon and shot entirely in the interior of a car, James Benning changes the rules. The shots of this new The United States of America no longer cross the country from East to West but rearrange two-minute views associated with each of the fifty American states in alphabetical order, adding the potentially new state of Porto Rico. As always, each space exists in a present, past or future relationship to resource management. Underlying each shot, the humming of industrialisation, the changing frequencies of a non-stop engine: extracting, harvesting, producing, transporting. Sparingly integrated onto the soundtrack, political speeches (of Eisenhower, Stokely Carmichael and John Trudell) show the extent to which the ownership and governance of the land oppress and destroy bodies, while the rare pieces of music heard seem to respond to the spectator’s desires. Yesterday’s road movie captured the geographic transformations of the landscape through the fixed frame of a car’s windscreen and pointed to the notion of manifest destiny; today’s road movie accumulates static shots that seem to stake out not only a sort of retrospective of the American filmmaker’s works – rivers, flags, miradors, factories, power plants, lakes, clouds and trains recalling past films –, but also the composition of a fragmented and comprehensive representation of the country. Of course, like any language, representation is an arbitrary system, and it could well be that this democratic horizontality is nothing more than a huge joke.

Antoine Thirion