Eight Bridges

James Benning is a master of moments. Over a career that spans five decades and twice as many modal deviations, Benning abstracts the American Problem through cinematic experiments as alienating as they are precise. To label the director’s films “slow cinema” would be to imply too much action. His works are glacially patient, often to the point of provocation, their rewards withheld only for audiences with the tenacity to risk watching paint dry. Early entries like One Way Boogie and 11×14 reach implicit narratives only by way of collage. Even Benning’s most famous works, Landscape Suicide and American Dreams: Lost and Found, can feel like relief paintings, their thematic weight and political poignancy outsourced for viewers to decode — or invent — on their own. Benning’s films are equipped to inspire epiphany and conniption in equal measure; they are litmus tests for individual curiosity.

Benning’s latest work, EIGHT BRIDGES, joins 13 Lakes and Ten Skies within a personal canon of observational landscape film. The title says it all: EIGHT BRIDGES comprises eight, ten-minute shots of bridges across the United States, each uncut and buffered by about five seconds of a silent, black screen. Projects like these invite, and perhaps welcome, a healthy dose of cynicism. Life is short, and it’s tempting to dismiss the idea of eight static shots of bridges, packaged under the auspices of a movie, as the excesses of liberal arts run wild, a confirmation that your daughter’s $40k education was indeed a waste of money. But EIGHT BRIDGES, like so much of Benning’s work, is deceptively loaded: it can feel like nothing is happening until it’s clear that everything is happening.

EIGHT BRIDGES’s shots are stunning, alchemical equations of compositional intention and temporal serendipity. The Rio Grande Gorge Bridge divides heaven and earth as clouds’ shadows fill the gulf below. In a grounded shot of the Dubuque-Wisconsin Bridge, the structure’s piers and abutments stretch skyward like arms lifted in worship, radiant and beatific. The film’s most striking composition is of the Florida Keys’ Seven Mile Bridge: with no visible land in frame, the bridge barrels past the horizon into infinity, its blue waters hypnotic and alien underneath. Each shot is arresting, deliberate, the masterwork yielded from half a century spent chronicling American land. Some even reveal a sly sense of humor. In the film’s opening segment, from a perch in the hills of Sausalito overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a constant stream of tourists cycle through a lookout point to gawk at the San Francisco landmark. All these people have gathered to consider the bridge — why shouldn’t you?

Functionally, EIGHT BRIDGES operates as an overriding adjustment to individual economies of attention. By about the third segment, which documents Selma, Alabama’s Edmund Pettus bridge, the itches this writer felt at the beginning of the film — which included phone- and watch-checking, and induced wonder at how one could possibly write about extended shots of bridges — began to fade, and the movie blossomed. Each segment is still enough to tempt a smart TV into hibernation mode, but also to eventually reveal a considerable amount of movement. Two-way traffic bifurcates each structure; bugs, birds, and clouds fill the expanse above while water challenges their directions below. In 1974’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard makes a case for bioregionalism as a purifier of one’s capacity for observation; one could easily mistake her descriptions of the flora in her backyard as a screed on the entirety of the Blue Ridge Mountains. EIGHT BRIDGES acts as confirmation of Dillard’s thesis: one notices more life within a ten-minute frame here than is found in full days within one’s own rote habits.  

In the absence of a traditional artist’s statement, EIGHT BRIDGES provokes its audience to derive meaning and intention on its own. Why, then, the bridge? The film’s most immediate theses seem to be structural and political. In each shot, the bridge exists as the lone object without discernable movement, mythic and monolithic amid its bustling nature. It demands questions of permanence, of man’s capacity to enact structures that will outlive himself, of his transmogrification of the land he treads and the beings that share it. Each bridge also carries a storied history within its brief American tenure. The most notable is likely the Edmund Pettus. Named for the U.S. senator and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, the bridge was host to the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1965, in which state troopers and civilians brutalized civil rights marchers as young as 14 years old, sending 17 to the hospital and injuring 50 more. In EIGHT BRIDGES, the Edmund Pettus sits placid and serene, its malignant past feigning dormancy amid a revived American nightmare.

James Benning has become a household name within structural cinema, which, bafflingly, exists as a distinctly American phenomenon. The works of Hollis Frampton and Ken Jacobs — astoundingly slow, deliberately myopic — seem antithetical to the dopamine hammer of American exceptionalism. But perhaps these films are a rebuke of our country’s capitalist demands on our attention and sense of time. Benning, whose own reverence of nature extends far enough to have inspired him to build a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, bears EIGHT BRIDGES into a great and defiant stillness. Its meaning is yours to interpret, its quiet yours to savor. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG

Powwow People

Only his second feature-length film after maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2021), Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People is the director’s least tangibly experimental project to date — at least in visual terms. And given the clear formal designs of his short film catalog, it’s hard not to read this as an intentional shift. There is little pronounced abstraction to the compositions here, which aren’t nearly so explicitly painterly as the director has conditioned viewers to expect, and there is even less avant-garde manipulation of the images. And for a filmmaker who… [Previously published full review] — LUKE GORHAM

Narrative

15 years after the political uprising in Thailand by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (also known as the Red Shirts), during which more than 80 demonstrators were killed and 2,000 were injured, the families of deceased victims are still seeking justice. In preparation for a fiction film about the deadly demonstration, filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong brought together eight relatives of those victims for an intimate, facilitated workshop and discussion. The resultant mid-length film, Narrative, is a curious, often cold account of a group of people attempting to make up for injustice through unfamiliar, laborious means.

The film begins with a prayer. A group of four people sit before Buddhist monks, repeating after them in reverent devotion. The theme of repetition will, for lack of a better term, repeat throughout Narrative. Inside a stark, white studio, actor Ornanong Thaisriwong proposes for the participants of Suwichakornpong’s experiment an exercise in empathy. They’ll take turns telling a story with one emotion, which is written down on a card they take from Thaisriwong, and their partner must guess the emotion when they’re finished. This simple premise might carry some emotional weight were it not for the fact that every person telling their story mentions the emotion they’re meant to keep secret.

Meanwhile, beyond the permeable boundary of the set, the film crew adjusts and moves their cameras and boom mics, producers milling about out of sight. Other people, perhaps relatives of the participants, sit on chairs in the back of the room, some knitting, others staring into space. Suwichakornpong herself even sits on the ground in between two participants during a conversation with a human rights lawyer, unseen until we catch her face at the edge of the frame.

These multiple divergences lend Narrative an air of experimentation, but drain it of feeling. It’s essentially a research project, a partial proof of concept, constructed out of strategies both cinematic and therapeutic — but they make it a difficult film to enter emotionally. If one strategy within the 50-minute runtime works, it is the one that takes us momentarily away from the film set and into the real world. Leaning against a balcony railing, a middle-aged participant talks, in extreme close-up, about her family being the sole source of fighting motivation against an impassive legal system. It is one of the few moments in which the film seems to allow us to connect with one of the participants.

The final exercise in the film points to repetition more explicitly. In pairs, the participants tell each other what they’re thankful for and their partners repeat what they say, as if the words they just heard were their own. In theory, the repetition mirrors the prayer from the beginning, and suggests the act of remembrance can serve as a kind of plea for justice. This time, however, the film’s score, until now an intermittent but pleasant drone, becomes discordant and drowns out the participants’ words. We can see their emotions more clearly but hear nothing. In spite of the collective trauma held in their small group, they smile, even laugh, with each other and for each other.

“What tools do we have to hold the state accountable,” says the lawyer after he explains to the participants? It’s up to them to hold an immoble justice system to account for their injustices; perhaps the conversations borne of these staged exercises — mostly just scraps of sound that point our attention less to feeling the affect of their speech than to gleaning its content — and the film constructed out of them can be that tool. That seems to be what Suwichakornpong hopes her upcoming fiction film will do. Given how many atrocities across the world go unpunished despite a surplus of living, cinematic proof, in Narrative that hope reads as merely a naïve gesture. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

The Seasons

In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, which she co-directed with Miguel Gomes, Fazendeiro took an unusual approach to that problem. It was ostensibly a film about another film project that was derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and she and Gomes chose to arrange that film in chapters which were then shown in reverse order. The pandemic and lockdown, of course, generated their own bizarre sense of temporality… [Previously published full review] — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Rib of the Greater Bay Area

When Chinese mixed media artist Zhou Tao had his critical breakout with The Periphery of the Base in 2024, it seemed like he had conjured up an entirely new form of surveillance-as-art. His observations of a massive (and undefined) infrastructure project’s construction in the Gobi Desert only remained briefly grounded in the more anecdotal and observational side of what could have been a conventional documentary. The film’s editing then transfigured the resulting material into a series of free-floating transitions and dissolves via telephoto zoom lens manipulations. The resulting creation resembled the subconscious projections of a heatstroke-addled mind taking flight. His new project, The Rib of the Greater Bay Area, is more muted and less about the extremities of sky and sand, but his transitions remain just as borderline indescribable — this time, they encourage the description “as free-flowing as water” for their focus on the bodies of water in the titular Greater Bay Area of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao.

Humans are seen enjoying themselves in The Rib of the Greater Bay Area, but they never quite stick around: Zhou frequently uses the blurry greens of plants by the waterside, or the blue tones of water and sky, to switch to an entirely different body of water with different people utilizing it. The sound mix seamlessly fades in and out, but it never quite sounds entirely like water due to the incorporation of noises from surrounding bridges and signals from buoys and communication towers. Most of the locations were reportedly chosen for being sensations on Chinese social media website RedNotes, a source of recommendations for both the average photographer-tourist, and for Zhou’s own experiments in displacement. There’s an increase in the focus on humanity when compared to the preceding Zhou films in The Periphery of the Base and Zhou’s data center exploration The Axis of Big Data (2023). (Water, or lack thereof, is the main common factor uniting these three locations.) Extreme close-ups of both actual bystanders and the metallic contours of human figure statues are recurring images. It’s likely that the tourist-centric nature of these sites demonstrates the fact that they are aimed toward the needs and enjoyment of the people, rather than the more inhospitable locations Zhou has previously explored and deconstructed. We even get the dry joke of seeing people use their smartphones to capture similar images in a more banal fashion (anyone can be Zhou Tao!), and a bride in a wedding dress appears to be submerging herself in the water for a photoshoot in her own right — a marriage out of mythology to the sea itself. Still, one can always count on birds flying through the sky as a guide from one location to another in his most recent triptych of works.

Any further descriptions of The Rib of the Greater Bay Area’s merits would have to tend toward attempting to approximate the audiovisual, and the film’s downstream drift is best experienced for oneself rather than read about — it’s a time-based pictorial scroll where the unwinding is the key action. Nothing is ever seen in its totality, and understanding the complete picture requires seeing it in action. It seems perhaps unlikely that Zhou Tao saw the obscure-but-great Stan Brakhage film Made Manifest (1981), but the final shift from the impermanent forms of bodies of water to the wavelike forms of mountains has a certain kinship with the experimental master’s awe at the wild world. Still, for an attempt at a few more reductions of cinema to mere words: one sequence, set to the eerie echoes of a melancholy song on some faraway coast, bisects the frame into a pure black triangle and a slowly rippling body of water that glows like the sunset it seems to be reflecting. It only lasts for a few precious moments before the water returns to a more conventional color and we shift the focus to a lonely swimmer’s paddling through a more conventional shade of blue. Another sequence goes from the unreal prismatic hues that we associate more with lens flares and digital screens than with nature, before transitioning to the earthy sight of filthy-looking water buffaloes being bathed by a handler. Whether Zhou decides to keep maintaining thi stylistic approach or plans to deviate remains to be seen, but for pure technique, few filmmakers can match his filmmaking cartography at the moment, precisely because his maps are so untraceable.. — ANDREW REICHEL

Remake

Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has been documenting the business of his daily life and, like Mekas, he has thematically organized those quotidian fragments and arranged them into coherent cinematic statements. Unlike most diary filmmakers, however, McElwee had a bit of a breakout hit in 1985 with Sherman’s March, a film that began as an ostensible travelogue and evolved into a sort of nonfiction Woody Allen film. As McElwee traveled through the South retracing… [Previously published full review] — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Matter of Britain

Howard Wiseman’s self-described “quasi-history” of dark age Britain, Then Arthur Fought: The Matter of Britain, is an account of the historical material — matières, as the original French classification of medieval heroic tales goes — that has been, over the centuries, reconfigured as romance, legend, and myth in the popular imagination. “Matter,” though, is doing more work here than meets the eye. Taken as a subject, “matter” is perhaps a problem; a question that needs answering, or one that, at least, warrants investigation. This polysemous title offers anyone hoping to look at issues of contemporary Britain through a mythic lens a lot of freedom to do so.

Peter Treherne’s debut feature, Matter of Britain takes advantage of this freedom by adapting the Holy Grail myth with a cast of hundreds from his home village of Mayfield, East Sussex. The communal nature of the collaboration imparts a political robustness to the film that might otherwise not exist had Treherne cast professional actors and dropped them in this rural, often bleak and alienating landscape near the Southern coast of England. The film unfolds in 12 chapters, during which we meet the story’s main players, including Sirs Lancelot, Galahad, and Percival, and King Evelake, as well as watch, in vérité documentary style, the members of the Mayfield community go about their daily lives. 

But Matter is remarkable not just because we see the villagers tending to their work of rounding cattle, shearing sheep, and tending crops, and rather because we see them in direct relation to their portrayals of knights on the quest for the Holy Grail and various other medieval figures like kings, temptresses, and soothsayers. Through this juxtaposition, Treherne elevates the villagers and their work to the same mythical register as the Arthurian legend they’re adapting as a community. A deer hunter’s solo outing takes on an assassin’s meditative calm. Cattle rumble like a storm, great beasts whose breath condenses on the air as if from a furnace. All about you is a feeling of bone-deep saturation. Treherne gives the land a sense of austere grandiosity, a knowing presence. The result contributes a new layer of “matter” to Britain’s mythical history.

In a text accessible on his website, Treherne analyzes a number of medieval paintings which take agricultural labor and laborers as their main subject. Just as he argues of those paintings, Treherne’s eye in Matter of Britain is neither explicitly repressive nor sympathetic. Rather, he portrays the villagers as plain workers caught in a Sisyphean struggle against nature. He also doesn’t name capitalism, austerity, climate change, or any other repressive force that pushes against the life of a farmer, but instead relies on the proximity of the Holy Grail myth to impart extranarrative political heft. Such ambiguity makes one’s first impressions of the film hard to articulate. 

The Holy Grail, which promises eternal life to whomever finds it and cannot be seen by sinners, is an explicitly religious myth. As such, Treherne pays as close, if not more, attention to the rhythms of the village’s spiritual life. Church attendance, like the film’s production, is a communal affair disinterested in the individual; steeped in the same regimented, ritualistic, endurance-based choreography as a battle Sir Lancelot stumbles across on his quest for the Grail. Treherne extends this idea by taking a disinterest in the notion of heroes. Percival, Lancelot, and Galahad have their individual roles, but in Treherne’s hands, they are not vaunted. Case in point, Lancelot dies in that battle, collapsing among the ruins and contorted bodies only for those bodies to rise up and walk away.

These heroes, then, often set amongst the village in their bizarre medieval garb, are nevertheless of its people. A woman in modern clothes whispers the story of King Evelake to a chainmailed Percival sat next to her in a church pew, further blurring the lines between myth and life. Percival’s deflated realization that he is not meant to find the Grail positions him within a whole community of people whose own fates are also not meant to be mythologized but, just in being, inescapably are. Just as we know Percival, so should we know the people of Mayfield. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Still Life Primavera

The ever-varied and ever-botanically-focused Pierre Creton’s Still Life Primavera finds the director making one of the structural experiments that he previously dabbled in with films like House of Love (2021), where he placed his camera on a record player and let it spin away to make something with the manipulative wit of a Michael Snow film. The camera doesn’t appear to move at all this time around, but it once again looks out a window: there’s a lit candle as the only object visible, but we’re being tricked when… [Previously published full review] — ANDREW REICHEL

Amilcar

Succeeding the opening text of Amilcar is a close-up on a man’s face depicted in ultra-slow speed, soon revealed as interview footage, amidst a disorienting sound design. He wears a pair of angular spectacles and turns his gaze away from the camera. He dons a puzzled and pensive visage, creasing his forehead. It’s Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, the subject of Spanish filmmaker Miguel Eek’s documentary Amílcar. “Independence, to what end?” asked by an unseen interviewer, as the lens slightly pans out. “For us, above all, to be ourselves,” Amílcar responds deftly. “To be African men, with all that characterizes us, but on the way to a better life and that we can identify ourselves every day with the rest of the world. We want independence to do in our country what others have done in theirs.”

Constructed out of vast material, including Portuguese colonial archives, revolutionary films, and original 16mm footage, Amílcar proceeds to replicate the mindset of its titular subject, which allows for a compelling ode to the radical figure and a critical examination of colonial and imperial violence across Africa. Spanning three decades, the documentary is a pseudodiaristic gold mine for Marxists and socialists, as well as students of the revolution and history at large. It’s narrated in voiceover by Nuno Miranda as Amílcar himself, invoking the freedom fighter’s spirit through his personal letters, poems, and political writings, which form the foundation of the screenplay, co-written by Eek and Alba Lombardia.

Whereas the film chronologically uses years in which Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau was under Portuguese colonization as narrative coordinates, it’s far from exhaustive, moving in fragments and skipping Amílcar’s childhood. Instead, it begins two decades later, when Amílcar was still a student — the only Black one — at the Lisbon Institute of Agronomy, where he would come across the only female student named Maria Helena Rodriguez, who would soon become his first wife and to whom he would write private letters, at least until he met Ana Maria, his second wife. However, the documentary refuses to neatly mythologize its subject as a Great Man — for one, we rarely see Amílcar on screen, at least until over an hour into the movie — but rather uses him as a complex anchor of a larger anti-colonial rhetoric, of what it truly looks like to decolonize the African continent. As Amílcar puts it: “The revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be able to commit suicide as a class. To be reborn as revolutionary workers, and identify with the aspirations of the people it belongs to.” 

As Eek’s fluid work wends onward, we follow Amílcar’s many selves: the bright student who studied his homeland’s brutal history, the proud lover, the diplomat, the sharp political thinker under the nom de guerre Abel Djassi, and the charismatic freedom fighter who founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (also known as PAIGC) in September 1956 and organized the Portuguese colonies toward a greater cause, which he describes as not just a fight for free territory, but for complete humanity. What is impressive here is that the Spanish director hardly relies on talking heads, though his vision still defaults to interstitial information, as is so often the case in many documentaries — at times, all one gets are scanned surveillance documents against the black screen, accompanied by translated subtitles. 

By reconstructing Amílcar’s memories via documents that were both used to celebrate and hunt him, Eek paints an impressionistic portrait of Portugal’s imperial project, in which every African person, to be considered an “assimilated,” and therefore a “civilized,” citizen, must learn how to live the “European way,” from dressing and styling their hair the “proper” way to reading and writing Portuguese correctly. “Re-Africanizing the spirits is not about going back to the past. It’s not about folklore or romanticism, but reclaiming the people’s ability to express themselves from within,” says Amílcar at one point.

Elsewhere, the film exhibits a feverish form, featuring clever match-cuts as well as grainy 16mm compositions and shifting from vibrant colors to monochromatic ones. Despite the historical markers, its sun-drenched images, to some degree, feel fascinatingly spectral and out of time, neither here nor there, at once embodied and disembodied. In this way, Eek’s vision burns into the viewer’s mind. The most prescient bit in the documentary are, undeniably, the sequences depicting Portugal as a genocidal state, sending squadrons of planes to drop bombs on the liberated zones, primarily targeting children. Sound familiar?

As with many a story of radical movement, Amílcar’s life, and therefore Eek’s documentary, ends in the internal conflicts suffered by the revolution, Cabral’s assassination in January 1973, the independence of Guinea-Bissau that soon followed and its eventual separation from Cape Verde seven years later, and the toppling of the Salazar dictatorship through the Carnation Revolution in 1974. That this doc is movingly experimental yet still grounded not only makes it all the more potent, but speaks of the spirit of the guerrilla warfare that Amílcar helped build from colonial scratch and toward true African emancipation. Amilcar is a film of defiant montage and eternal narrative, one whose specters loom large to this day.. — LÉ BALTAR

Tycoon

Charlotte Zhang’s docu-fiction of contemporary and prospective Los Angeles, Tycoon, contends with events both real and imagined, intimate and global. In it we follow Lito and Jay (Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes), two grifters always hunting for their next score. Theirs is a story of conspiracy and care, hoisted up and shattered just like Los Angeles, which, in Zhang’s imagination, is a city of pent-up rage and political corruption thanks to a devastating livestock crisis in the lead up to the 2028 Olympics. In this way, Tycoon is reminiscent of… [Previously published full review] — CHRIS CASSINGHAM