Small Roads

The roads less traveled – seen through James Benning’s camera lens.

James Benning is known for films where literally nothing happens. Films such as 13 Lakes, L Cohen, Nightfall and Allensworth consist of a series of sequences with minimal movement in front of the camera; in a couple of them, you can just make out people in the distance. Otherwise, the films are made up of static shots in which the wind rustling through the trees and clouds drifting across the sky create the dramatic tension (and the fact that dramatic tension really does emerge is what makes Benning’s films so wonderful and unique). In this light, Small Roads is almost an action film by Benning’s standards, with cars and trains thundering past the camera again and again. But not quite.

Filmed over a period of two years, Small Roads takes us to 47 remote roads across the United States. Using a static camera, Benning films the roads and landscapes, creating a distinctive topographical portrait of the United States through the changing seasons. The film makes us reflect on our role as viewers and the expectations we bring to a film. It has no narrative progression; instead, it is a series of moving landscape paintings, with a surprisingly rich range of natural sounds on the soundtrack. Drama emerges in the most unexpected ways: in the form of a bus that never arrives and lightning strikes on the horizon.

One of the most meditative experiences I’ve ever had with a film.

Steve Pulaski

[James Benning] is a national treasure to be reckoned with: the Frederick Wiseman of stillness.

SLANT Magazine

Small roads is digital cinema as virtuoso landscape painting, depicting each two-lane blacktop from a central perspective, each 16:9 countryside highway glistening under the hot sun, shrouded in fog, or coated with a dusting of mid-winter snow.

International Film Festival Rotterdam

From a cactus-edged highway across a desert, through deep woods and along pleasant byways that could be in deepest England, through badlands, alongside spoiled industrial sites, past the surprising magnificence of telegraph poles, and, in one case, a marvellous juxtaposition of modern bright yellow road signs with a horizon of impossibly romantic mountains that could have been painted by one of the early American landscape artists .

Sheila Seacroft, A Seat in the Dark