by TWY
How can a clap of thunder remind us of a song? Precisely, I was reminded of a song by The Ronettes titled “Walking in the Rain,” the opening track of their 1964 debut album, Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica. That song opened with the same sound of thunder, and then, by the side of the angelic chorus, Ronnie Specter sang the most ancient yet essential feeling of any love song: “I want him, and I need him, and someday, some way, woah, I’ll meet him…” As strange as it sounds, in a film that involves murders, guns, knives, and amnesia, as I heard the same thunderous roar against the image of a water tower in Plainfield, Wisconsin, it was the Ronettes’s song that began playing in my head. By no means do I mean that Landscape Suicide is a love song, but I am saying that it is a quintessentially American film, much as The Ronettes’ music was the archetypal American love songs — the United States was all these things, maybe still is, and James Benning remains one of her most silent and perceptive observers.
In the recent 2022 edition of the BFI poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, Benning picked ten of his own films, Landscape Suicide included, as his votes, with a funny explanation: “Since I don’t see many films, my only reference is my own.” But it is hard to blame him since if there is any film he sees as the ultimate film, it is the nation and the land itself. I have yet to see Benning’s more recent The United States of America (2022), which is not a remake of the 1974 short with the same name, co-directed with Bette Gordon. Still, Benning has been the most prolific and panoramic in displaying this country throughout his work. America is that film, and its images also created the country in which D.W. Griffith or John Ford shared credits only partially. Benning continues that film, so do John Carpenter, David Lynch, Kelly Reichardt, and many others. How else is that each time we see a house, we also see a dream, and how else is that each time we see a rooftop, a bush, or a windshield, we also see hiding places, isolation, loneliness, and impending doom?
I must clarify that The Ronettes’ song was never in the film, but two “musical” sequences and fragments from other songs occupied great significance. To name a few: a teenage girl is talking on the phone in her bedroom while the song “Memory” from the 1981 musical Cats is playing, but curiously, we didn’t hear the phone conversation, and we can’t even be sure that the song was really playing on the record player—the images and the sound separated, veiled, it was all a tape; in another landscape shot, we hear “Good Rockin’ Daddy” by Etta James, also seemingly playing, for eternality, inside a Plainfield bar. Songs, dreams, and murders lie beneath small towns, lost highways, and country fields. Who is the girl on the phone? Is she supposed to be Kirsten Costas, who was stabbed to death by her friend? We can only be sure that it was the song that hid the secret, creating a veil between our ears and eyes, between the recorded images, muted, and the song that cloaked the image’s appearance and revealed a soul. Each melody, each shot, is an American dream. Music, fiction, matters, and history move through time. Time has passed, 1986 but also 1957. Decades later, amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Benning made a film, On Paradise Road, composed of six immobile shots filmed at his apartment, the longest of which showed a white wall with a little souvenir hanged on it—a cardboard figure standing on a small boat floating on nothing, and, off-screen, the filmmaker played, in its entirety, Bob Dylan’s song “Murder Most Foul” from his latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways, not just a history song reminiscing the murder of John F. Kennedy half a century later, but also a love song made of images and signs that was the country he born in, not out of nostalgic or chauvinistic love, but out of an abstract but concrete love of the world through the kingdom of art, a montage which Dylan sang: “Play John Lee Hooker, play ‘Scratch My Back’… Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe… Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling any good…“
A white wall in a James Benning film is always a place full of memories, and so is everything else. But how does one analyze these objects, these two faces, these images of such monumentality? To quote Erika Balsom in her monograph on another Benning film, “Somehow it seemed right that any encounter with the images of TEN SKIES should be absolutely separate from my words.” For any objects filmed, Benning first discovers their spatial relationship with a landscape to find the origin of its engineering. With RR (2007), his film on the American railroad system, a monument “built on greed and fraud,” the filmmaker explained in an audio interview that one of the reasons he made the film was that “railroad can’t go more than 2% grade, and because of that,” the tracks “have to fit into the landscape, so it is a way of recording a landscape by using the tracks as a way of showing the contour,” and while Landscape Suicide describes not railroads but suburban towns, respectively Orinda, California and Plainfield, Wisconsin, both landscapes interested Benning in the way that their presences had become hiding places for darkness, which, in the film’s case, are the killing of Costas in the hand of Bernadette Protti, and the homicides committed by Ed Gein.
While Landscape Suicide is not a love song, it is still a dream song, a film about dreams, just as Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE, with their conjurings of Roy Orbison, Linda Scott, and Nina Simone, are also films about dreams, and a film about murders in the same way that Lynch’s films are about murders, which is to say the dying of dreams—immortalized onto trees, snowfields, houses, roads, letters, photographs, pages from the Rolling Stones magazine, and faces of the killers—made more secret by the actors who portrayed them. More unyielding than just being “true crime” subjects, these actors, Rhonda Bell and Elion Sucher, are inside the words of the others. There is an ancient quality to each item that Benning filmed—he saw them as crystals, gems dug up after a million years. And indeed, these crystals are full of memories, full of time, only that they don’t glow with light but with their (un)naturalness, with their banality, and only the cinema sees the dream that was inside. Benning also complicates by introducing the black frame, each time very short but enough to distance all images, even within the long sequences, such as the two “interviews.” This is as if, between every blackout, while the actor-killers’ voices had remained continuous, a thought within the person would have shifted—imperceptible movements in the soul only seen because the image had flashed itself, its voltage had changed.
Consider the film’s first sequence: a player and two tennis balls. The first one is seen, and the second, hidden in the hand, only strikes when we are off guard, as if appearing out of nowhere. This movement repeats like a needle scratching on a looped record—it will first seem like the image is recycling itself, but after three or four times, we are beginning to see variations. But before this ritual can be a metaphor or a training manual of the film, we first see the movement’s definitive rhythm, its persistence on a parabolic trajectory, and the curve that created the image. Where did the tennis balls go? To “the other side,” of course. But like a child playing on the porch in front of their house—they stroke the ball, and, sometimes, it disappears into the horizon, flies into the neighbor’s tree or garden, and occasionally hits some other people’s window. We’ve all seen these images and heard these sounds, even when we never lived in such a town, but that curve of the tennis ball is leading us to the secret of space. Every house hides something and is hidden from something. The filmmaker’s camera strikes an invisible gaze, piercing the veil—houses behind bushes or trees, built on graded ground so that they are away from the road, hiding from it. And when the film moves from the gradient California to the snowed Plainfield, even the plain hides, too.
LA FRÉDÉRIQUE - journal of cinema. 
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