For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call this film Breathless? Regardless of its appeal, the game exists. So when this single-shot film opens with workers chainsawing a large tree on a remote mountain road, dismissing an allusion to Godard’s jump cuts in Breathless becomes difficult. A metaphor for hacking away perhaps — in this film a tree, and in Godard’s a stagnancy in film form? But due to the durational nature of this film, the balance of this metaphor quickly shifts, as the tree remains cut for 70 more minutes and new events expand this seemingly simple game. These new events forgo Godard’s jump cuts, expanding the metaphor into an inquiry about formal innovation’s place within film history and beyond.
The vast composition, enveloped by disparate trees, is pummeled by a rocky mountain, which takes up two-thirds of the frame, leaving no air above. The most prominent grouping of trees in the frame (with the trimmed one) sits clumped together at the bottom of the mountain and appears to lean over the side of the road. Their vibrant orange color stands out compared to the greys, greens, and browns of the rest of the shot. The truck, its giant crane, the man in it chopping branches, and the intermittent sound of his chainsaw all coalesce into a minuscule section of action at the center of the frame. In breaks of silence from the chainsaw, wandering from the centered event to ponder the giant landscape in its details comes naturally, only to be distracted once more by the burr of the saw. Once the tree is properly trimmed, the workers shred the remains, causing a continuous groan far louder than the chainsaw. One man then blows stray leaves off the road, finishing the job. After the truck drives further down the road and out of the frame, we sit in ambient silence, viewing this now gutted tree in relation to all its friends, until the same sequence of sounds from the crew is repeated in the distance, off-screen. If the metaphor still holds, a new tree alludes to a new innovation — possibly someone else’s or Godard’s.
This film’s formal stasis then functions as a polemic: as a new hacking takes place, this film remains steady. Is the film suggesting that formal innovation is a hasty ideal in film history? Perhaps in frequently innovating anew linearly, cinema reifies itself into a formal mask to be shaped and shifted, never touching upon its calcified analgesic essence. Silence now pervades in Breathless. The trees are juxtaposed by their mutilated friend. The trimmed tree, however, now contains the extra charge of its future growth, a growth that will surely end in its being cut down again. Is film history a sequence of hackings that all cancel each other out? What about Benning’s place in that history?
Some filmmakers feel the need to innovate based on the generation of filmmakers directly before them. Many self-proclaimed experimental filmmakers, for instance, still take it as their mission to push forward formal parameters set by filmmakers from the ’60s and ’70s. Contrastingly, there’s Peter Hutton, who explicitly self-identified with an older form of cinema against formal innovation in favor of adhering to life itself. He sided with the Lumieres in simply showing. In this polemic against prioritizing form lies the seed of a different and gracious “innovation”: to evoke more with fewer formal elements. This ability reboots cinema’s beginnings by way of what reality gives first and foremost, rather than what the cinema itself has concocted. At a certain point, it’s clear that Breathless will not have any cuts, and that its narrative will unfold naturally, solely based on the decided frame and dual cardioid microphone position1. These positions, and the title of the film, lead to a (while maybe familiar in Benning’s work) completely unique texture and experience in film viewing. If its content/title contains some type of question about film form, its form provides an answer. Breathless, so particular in its composition and events, ponders how much more there is to say using a formal register reminiscent of cinema’s inception.
As the light changes on this mountain, only faint ambient sounds are left, I am reminded of Thomas Cole’s A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains. Whereas the tiny figures in the Cole painting are frozen for us, here the small zone of action only remains as a memory. I wondered if this stillness would remain for the rest of the film. But from this painterly composition begins to roar an intense grumbling that, in its fullness, can be clearly identified as a fighter jet. The power of this sound compared to the shredder, saw, and leaf blower is unimaginable and shifts the film viewing experience from intellectual intrigue and idle gazing to bodily viscerality. Its unseen towering position (only to last a handful of seconds), over the mountain, the trees, the workers who cut the tree, and Benning himself, invades the meaning of what has come before. A whole strata of power is invoked, and the game of finding Godard’s Breathless within Benning’s Breathless is made superfluous by an object of the world which pronounces itself more prominent than the mountain we’ve been idly looking at. The visual representation of a massive storm approaching in the Cole painting is now the sound of an F-35 (formal innovation par excellence). The game of B–B2 yields to B2-Earth, infantilizing not only cinema’s place in this current world, but then, necessarily, the usefulness of how this film engages with cinema’s trajectory.
The only object which exudes more power than this human-made machine is the sun itself, which announces its power, contrasting the jet, through slowness: a shadow from a tree in the foreground inches further into the road, letting us feel the immensity of this force upon the image’s 87-minute runtime. The jet cannot keep up with this ever-present slowness; the very construction and use of these jets diminish, for the sake of mass destruction and genocide, the earth’s shelter from the sun. They prove our distraction from a power we are too disgustingly propelled to heed. That this film ends its final moments, after all, with a music cue from Breathless (1960) presents a biting question: Will we keep playing games with cinema in this flagrant world?
1. Matthias, Kyska. “Interview With James Benning.” Othon Cinema, 2024, https://othoncinema.com/2024/11/28/interview-with-james-benning/.
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