In a short catalogue note on Joyce Wieland’s La raison avant la passion (1969), Hollis Frampton described this trans-Canadian epic as a film “about the pain and joy of living in a very large space: in fact, in a continent.” Six years later, James Benning and Bette Gordon would make a film that brought many of Wieland’s formal and thematic concerns south of the border, gave it a rather more direct title—The United States of America—and, in appropriately American fashion, cast themselves as demurring stars. Where Wieland’s film consists largely of landscapes seen through the passenger’s window of fast-moving cars, Benning and Gordon placed their camera in the back seat, shooting past themselves through the windshield, as they traversed the States from east to west. And while La raison avant la passion is coldly framed by the algorithmic sorting of every combination of its title’s letters as onscreen text, The United States of America plays out the public–private performance of intimacy that is the two-person road trip with a knowing, ironic warmth. This reconciling of scales—the smallest unit which qualifies as social humbly reiterating the lines of Manifest Destiny, the shape of the grand, ordering terror of statehood and nationality—is, I think, another way of facing up to the pain and joy that Frampton found in Wieland’s film.
Nearly half a century on, and now firmly situated as one of his country’s major filmmakers, Benning has made another . Though it’s been referred to more than once in the press thus far as a remake of the earlier work, this isn’t the case in any meaningful sense (though Benning dealt extensively with the concepts of repetition and remake over the course of his career, on which more below). On the level of form, inverts almost every quality of the earlier work. In keeping with the style that Benning has rarely diverged from over the past two decades (save for his YouTube films), it consists of 52 shots—one for every state, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico—each running 105 seconds and taken from a fixed camera position at roughly human height. They are presented in alphabetical order, and each is separated by a section of black screen, which includes a title naming the city and state in plain white text, rigidly segmenting this tour in contrast to the earlier film’s unnamed flow of roads and highways. And while the earlier film used, or at least faked, the diegetic sound of the car’s interior—the radio and the pointed silence of Benning and Gordon—here the soundtrack is a collage of location ambience and archival recordings of voices ranging from Dwight Eisenhower to Stokely Carmichael.
