Born in Milwaukee, James Benning is now a respected American filmmaker and UWM celebrates his work in "Filmic Measures: Landscapes in Time," at the Union Theatre, Friday, March 28 through Sunday, March 30.
Three recent works -- all landscape portraits, including two about Milwaukee -- screen during the event, which also features an appearance by Benning.
"I was born in Milwaukee, Wis., during World War II in a German working class community that sent its sons to fight their cousins," Benning recalled. "My father worked on the assembly line for a heavy industry corporation that was then building landing gear for the U.S. military. Later he became a self-taught building designer."
Describing his own varied life, Benning said, "I played baseball for the first 20 years of my life receiving a degree in mathematics while playing on a baseball scholarship. I dropped out of graduate school to deny my military deferment (my friends were dying in Vietnam) and worked with migrant workers in Colorado teaching their children how to read and write. Later, I helped start a commodities food program that fed the poor in the Missouri Ozarks."
At 33, Benning earned his MFA in Madison and went on to teach filmmaking at Northwestern, Wisconsin, University of Oklahoma and UC-San Diego.
"In 1980 I moved to lower Manhattan making films with the aid of grant and German Television money. After eight years in New York I moved to Val Verde, Calif., where I currently reside teaching film/video at California Institute of the Arts. In the past twenty-five years I have completed 14 feature length films that have shown in many different venues across the world."
Benning's "One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later," screens Friday, "RR" shows on Saturday and "casting a glance" screens Sunday. All showings are at 7 p.m. and all are regional premieres. Admission is free.
Friday's film is a diptych of films dating from 1977 and 2007 that revisits a series of Milwaukee landscapes, exploring how they've changed over the course of nearly three decades. The earlier film was Benning's second experimental feature and the 2007 work is a shot-by-shot remake.
"Benning's films offer deliberately filmic experiences unlike those available with any other moviegoing," says Carl Bogner of UWM's Film Dept., who coordinated the event. "His films are designed to prompt us to look, to savor the act of seeing. Benning makes mesmerizingly beautiful films but perhaps most striking is the time that he gives the audience to look -- immersive takes that invite one to consider the immaculate compositions, to
survey and to discover within the image. I find his films to be so visually pleasurable but also quite productive experiences, generative of otherwise unconsidered thoughts."
His work has received countless accolades, including this one from Film Comment, "Like Ozu's films, Benning's poetic explorations of the American space bring us to a moment of pure contemplation, in which a fleeting absolute may be glanced at behind the cool seduction of appearances."
Bogner says Milwaukee audiences will especially enjoy "One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later."
"I'm most excited about seeing his Milwaukee films with a Milwaukee audiences. 'One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later' is actually two films, shot 27 years apart. The viewer is invited to think back across the films to align the later image with its 1977 antecedent. It's like a game of concentration, I guess. But it will be more heightened with Milwaukee viewers, as the experience of the films will be interlaced with their own sense of the city's geography and history, of their own memories of the city."
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
