El Valley Centro
El Valley Centro, James Benning’s latest feature, is a fairly minimalist effort consisting of 35 shots, each of them two and a half minutes long, filmed in direct sound with a stationary camera in California’s Central Valley. About halfway through I found myself, to my surprise, thinking about Joseph Cornell’s boxes, those surrealist constructions teeming with fantasy and magic–dreamlike enclosures that make it seem appropriate that Cornell lived most of his life on a street in Queens called Utopia Parkway.
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One thing that reminded me of Cornell’s boxes was the perfectly squared off screen in the loft–masked to emphasize the borders–and the precise way the projected images filled it. I’ve seen only Benning’s films on this screen, so it’s possible that other films shown on it, if they were artfully composed, would evoke Cornell’s boxes. In any case, this screen wonderfully demonstrates the profound difference between a TV screen and a movie screen–besides the quality of the images–because it’s strikingly well defined, in contrast to the curved and therefore ill-defined borders of most TV screens. TV screens make you feel like you’re peeking at something through a ragged hole in a fence, thereby reducing the effects of composition and emphasizing what might be called “screen content”: familiar faces, generic plots, recognizable logos, and so on. In other words, the aesthetic inferiority of video and TV is less a matter of unclear images than of poorly defined frames–which helps explain why Benning hasn’t released any of his films on video. Without their distinct frames, many of their special qualities would be considerably diminished.
I’ll try to describe briefly the four shots identified above to give some notion of the range of formal possibilities in this film. The “hay raker” shot contains a certain amount of formal suspense as a hay raker, starting as a tiny speck, moves steadily toward the camera from the far side of a field until it reaches the foreground and turns offscreen to the right; we continue to hear its progress after it moves out of the frame, then see it reemerge, retreating leftward down the field. The camera’s position makes this second trajectory almost horizontal in relation to the frame while the first trajectory is mainly vertical. Variations on this pattern appear in shots 8, “field workers, Union Pacific, Sutter,” where a man with a hoe moves toward the camera; 11, “plow (fog), Martin Rodriguez Farm, West Butte,” where a man drives a plow toward and then away from the camera; and 17, “cotton picker, Prudential Insurance, Buena Vista Lake (dry),” where the cotton picker, like the hay raker, approaches the camera, swoops around it, and retreats down an adjacent path. In all four cases, the people using the tools or driving the machinery give no sign of being aware of the camera.
Back in the 70s the most characteristic Benning composition was a horizontal triptych. In El Valley Centro it’s a simple two-part vertical construction, and the appearance of the horizon line almost invariably in the same place in every shot ultimately leads to a certain monotony. Though I had a nice time watching this movie overall, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if I’d had more of a sense of logical progression–or regression–from one shot to the next. What one has by the end is an arrangement of attractive boxes of the same size that are neatly stacked together but not in any particular order.
