Easy Rider, James Benning, 2012.mkv

James Benning’s films have always been difficult to classify. Although structure is a major concern in most of them, they are not structural films; despite their preoccupation with landscape and ecology, they are not environmental tracts; some can be described as documentaries, although the layering of text, image and sound, and – since his conversion to digital – the use of compositing often tips them from fact into fiction. Benning’s recent ventures into found footage filmmaking (with Youtube Trilogy and Faces in 2011 and The War in 2012), and now his 2012 remake of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), have been seen as radically new departures in his work, but in fact they foreground a practice that he has engaged in since the 1970s: replication. This takes various forms in his films, including appropriating texts and objects, recycling or referencing bits of his previous films, and making works that revisit earlier works or experiences. Revisiting and recycling can produce complex temporal schemes that combine the historical time of a place or object with the time spent by Benning in observation, exploring the capacity of film, as a time-based medium, to reconstruct or even retrieve the past time registered by landscapes and artifacts (most notably in casting a glance [2007]). His art projects beyond filmmaking have revealed his love of American folk art, in the copies he has made of pictures by Henry Darger, Martín Ramirez, Bill Traylor, Mose Tolliver and others, and in the craft skills he employs, including building and quilting.






Benning’s Easy Rider is a film that takes stock, measuring change over a period of more than forty years. Retracing the journey made by Wyatt and Billy in 1968, the film pays attention to the landscape in the first instance, noting the changes that have taken place, but also looking and listening in a way that Hopper’s film does not. Working with digital editing software, Benning uploaded the original film onto a computer and replaced each scene with a single shot. With no actors, his film stars the original locations or equivalents chosen for practical, aesthetic and critical reasons. The soundtrack mixes ambient sound from these locations with samples of the earlier film’s soundtrack, creating acoustically haunted landscapes. The semiotic reduction that results from replacing each scene with a single shot allows certain themes and motifs to emerge more prominently than in the original film, as well as enabling Benning to place his own interpretation on the bikers’ journey and its conflagrant end. The road movie joins a long American tradition, running through 19th and 20th century literature and the Hollywood Western, of favouring traveling over settling. As Thomas Wolfe and Nicholas Ray would have it, ‘You Can't Go Home Again’. Benning picks up on this cultural and historical dichotomy and, in our conversation, criticises the bikers for their ingratitude to their hosts and their lack of respect for the commitment made by those who put down roots. A prominent system in the film features various dwellings in which people might live, each with its own socio-economic and historical implications. But while Benning may respect community and commitment to place, his camera behaves like a latter-day Huck Finn, continually lighting out for the territory. The only interior shots are quotations from the original; Benning shot no interiors. In the scene at the commune, a restless Hopper says: ‘If we’re going, we’re going, let’s go’. To remain free, it may be necessary to stay outside. This restlessness inevitably raises the most political question for contemporary Americans: the conflict between freedom, as embodied by the open road, and responsibility, particularly towards the environment. Pulling away from the original’s solipsistic concern with sex, drugs and death, Benning confronts this issue in the devastating conclusion of his film.

General
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Complete name : D:DownloadsNOVOSEasy Rider, James Benning, 2012.mkv
Format : Matroska
Format version : Version 2
File size : 445 MiB
Duration : 1h 35mn
Overall bit rate : 650 Kbps
Encoded date : UTC 2013-09-07 03:34:32
Writing application : mkvmerge v5.8.0 ('No Sleep / Pillow') built on Sep 2 2012 15:37:04
Writing library : libebml v1.2.3 + libmatroska v1.3.0

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