Sogobi

(2001, 90 minutes)
Presented by The Idee Levitan IHC Endowed Lecture Series
Wednesday, February 5 / 5 P.M./ Free
Isla Vista Theater 1

"Perhaps no other filmmaker is as fascinated by the geographical, historical and social aspects of our national landscape as James Benning, who has been creating 16mm portraits of American spaces for four decades." - - The Austin Chronicle

"James Benning is one of my filmmaking heroes, an independent artist in the
purest sense of the word." - - Richard Linklater, filmmaker

Renowned experimental filmmaker, James Benning, will introduce a screening of Sogobi (2001, 90 minutes), the final full-length segment of the California Trilogy, his epic meditation on the regional landscape at 5 P.M. on Wednesday, February 5 at the Isla Vista Theater 1.

The earlier films in Benning's triptych, El Valley Central (1999) and Los (2000) focus respectively on the agricultural belt of California's Central Valley and the city of Los Angeles. The survey is completed in Sogobi, (the Shoshone word for "earth") which presents a portrait of the Californian wilderness. Each film in the trilogy is identically structured, comprising 35 static shots, each two and a half minutes in length with ambient sound captured on a single microphone. There is no voice over. The viewer is placed directly in a series of locations and invited to attend for the length of each shot to the qualities and features of the landscape presented. The California Trilogy is a modular work which has been likened to a jigsaw puzzle: each segment stands alone though the arc of the project is revealed through a viewing of the whole series. Sogobi won awards at major film festivals in 2002 in Berlin, Tucson, Vienna and London.

Born in Milwaukee in 1942, Benning studied mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison , a legacy discernible in the meticulously structured nature of his films including his highly acclaimed early works, 81/2 X 11 (1974), 11X14 (1976) and One Way Boogie Woogie (1977) which combined structuralist investigations of off-screen space, sound-image relationships and cinematic time with a sensitivity to composition, color, light and landscape, regional and popular culture and a distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic interest in narrative. During the 80's Benning lived in New York producing work that dealt elliptically with history, memory and death: American Dreams (1984) juxtaposes baseball giant, Hank Aaron memorabilia against the disturbed writings of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace. Combining reenactments of court testimony and location shooting, Landscape Suicide (1986) examines the circumstances surrounding two notorious but ostensibly unrelated murders in Wisconsin. In 1991 just before moving to Val Verde where he lives and Cal Arts where he teaches, Benning made "North on Evers" (1991) which chronicles in diaristic form a cross-country motorcycle trip. In the years immediately prior to The California Trilogy he has made a number of highly acclaimed films focusing on the landscape, history and ecology of the American west including "Brigham Young's Iron Heel: Deseret" (1995), an account of the history of Utah based on 100 years of New York Times reports, "Four Corners" (1997), and "Utopia" a film that uses an appropriated soundtrack to complement and comment upon his visual chronicling of a journey from Death Valley, California to Mexicali, Mexico.

This event is part of the Idee Levitan IHC Endowed Lecture Series and is cosponsored by the UCSB Art Symposium.

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