13 Lakes

James Benning’s living paintings of lakes.

When you watch a film by James Benning, something happens to your experience of time that is both interesting and fascinating. Through a series of static shots, with little or no staged action in front of the camera, we are drawn into a very particular state in which ideas of suspense and drama take on a different meaning. Here, the drama comes in the wind blowing through a cornfield, the light shifting across the mountains, and a train passing in the distance. The suspense lies as much in what does not happen as in what unfolds in front of Benning’s static, stoic camera.

As its title suggests, 13 Lakes consists of thirteen sequences filmed at lakes with a stationary camera. There is no dialogue, no voice-over, no people, and no explanation. We see ships and boats in some of the scenes, and hear a freight train in the background, but otherwise it is all about waves, clouds, light, and sound. The film has a painterly quality, and at times it can feel like a moving image by J.M.W. Turner. Some of the sequences are almost painfully beautiful, and the more you watch, the more absorbed you become in this unusual and highly distinctive film. Some will experience these thirteen static sequences as the greatest test of patience they have ever faced in a cinema, while others will have one of the greatest cinematic experiences of their lives—as film critic Neil Young puts it, “a life-changing cinematic event.”

“You’ll feel joy, surprise, wonderment, exhilaration, and intellectual stimulation. It’s hard to think of the last film which worked on so many different levels, and on so many different states of mind, as 13 Lakes, and it certainly can’t be compared to anything else you’ll see on a cinema screen this year.”

Neil Young