One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later
Oct 27, 2011
(James Benning, USA, 2005, 16mm, 120 min)
Sponsored by MOHAI
Co-Presented By Third Eye Cinema and MOHAI
In conjunction with MOHAI’s exhibition "Now & Then," we revive one of experimental cinema’s finest. In 1977, concerned about the decaying nature of his native Milwaukee, James Benning shot One Way Boogie Woogie, an hour long film composed of 60 shots of industrial urban landscape: smokestacks, sidewalks, three Volkswagens, people and animals here and there. In characteristic fashion, Benning's apparently simple, static shots are exercises in meticulous artistic composition and his careful sequencing ensures that the director's playful humor is given full expression. Twenty-seven years later, Benning returned to Milwaukee to shoot "the same film again." However, the shot-by-shot restaging has brighter colors and there is a distinctly modern tone; buildings are showing their age, or gone completely and the same is true of the people. Seen together, these two films offer a cogent illustration of how America has changed in the intervening years, fraying in places and gentrified in others. Benning's method and his affinity with his subjects are extraordinary. He completely absorbs the landscape, imbues it with geo-political and cultural relevance, then re-presents it with a unique mix of formal rigor and mischievous invention.
