11x14

James Benning’s groundbreaking avant-garde film from 1977.

A young lesbian couple travel through the Midwest. A married man may be having an affair. Another man hitchhikes as he searches for work.

Named by critic James Hoberman as one of the ten most important films of the 1970s, 11 x 14 differs from James Benning’s later films in that it has a narrative and actors! Though it is a very Benning-like narrative that we have to try to reconstruct for ourselves. Benning has said: «By the time the film is finished, it will have been possible to relate the shots in a number of different ways.»

The film is shown in a restored edition from the Austrian Film Museum, in collaboration with Arsenal – Institut für film und videokunst.

The first two things that are likely to impress you about a shot in a James Benning film are the formal beauty and its capacity to evoke the most passionate and trivial kind of nostalgia for industrial waste of one kind or another. The fact that these two qualities tend to diverge more than mesh produces a disquieting sense of absence common to Edward Hopper paintings and Antonioni films, a sense of endless waiting and boundless yearning that haunts his landscapes like a specter.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

While Benning later on liked to highlight the frame by working with a fixed camera… in 11x14 he points towards the spaces between images – and even to the fantasies those images might trigger… 11x14 creates awareness of the ways movies are built, and it does so in brillantly intelligent and consequently often very funny way.

Bert Rebhand

11 x 14 is Benning’s first significant film and establishes him as one of the most promising American filmmakers.

Amy Taubin