One Way Boogie Woogie (James Benning, 1977) and 27 Years Later (James Benning, 2005) (Patreon)

Some of my readers may be surprised that I had not already seen One Way Boogie Woogie, which may be James Benning's absolute masterpiece. I had seen small portions of it over the years, but had never actually sat down and watched the whole thing, mostly due to a strange superstition of mine. If I know that there are films out there by my favorite filmmakers that I still have yet to see, then there remains something to look forward to, even in life's bleakest moments. But hey, I doubt it's going to get much bleaker than Covid / 2020, so it was time to break out the cine-champagne.

I was also, of course, inspired by Mike D'Angelo's recent viewing of OWBW, and his generally positive assessment. It reminded me that this was quite possibly Benning's funniest, cleverest film, far removed from the lovely but highly straightfaced ("stately") work Benning has been making for the past twenty years. Mike mentions that while he can see and appreciate the formal operations within the individual scenes, he does not necessarily observe a grand design, and in a way this makes sense, because it's kind of the lack of a grand design, or a different concept of a grand design, that is driving OWBW.

Made between 1976 and 1977, the film is Benning's response to structural film, as well as his own "break" with structural film in its more orthodox guises. Films such as Frampton's Zorns Lemma, Snow's Wavelength, Sharits' S:STREAM:S:S:SECTION:S:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED, and others, exemplified the genre by subsuming every part of the film to a dominant idea or "shape." Like a modernist painting, everything that was in the film referred back to the film itself. So even when these films contained imagery from the outside world -- street signs (Frampton), a pseudo-performance of death (Snow), or rushing water (Sharits) -- they did not really refer to the world itself, to time and history and lived reality. 

By contrast, OWBW never stops referring to the outside world. It is about the dialectic between orderliness and the things you find "in the wild," the ordinary spaces of everyday life. They are not transformed into neutral content; they are engaged with, toyed with, acted through and contemplated as historical, human spaces. Some of the framing jokes in OWBW resemble the false-control and "direction" of British avant-gardist John Smith, but a lot of the film actually isn't all that different from the spatial / architectural manipulations of Roy Andersson. Of course, where Andersson builds his sets for forced perspective, Benning uses various Midwestern landscapes for their flatness and frontality.

You can see in this (rather primitive -- sorry) screenshot how Benning and Andersson differ. Andersson's preference for recessed compositions, implying infinitude, suggests the "metaphysical" paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, an artist whose work was a fairly direct influence on Antonioni. As for Benning, who actually features a Mondrian canvas in one shot of OWBW, his title is a direct homage to the painter, and a subtle hint and how his film falls in line (and disrupts) the formal shibboleths of structuralism. After decades of making paintings in his characteristic style, Mondrian was inspired by New York jazz and made "Broadway Boogie Woogie" (above left), which was considered by critics at the time to be something of a travesty. For Mondrian, it was as if he had painted Manet's Olympia or Warhol's Marilyn Diptych. Had this guy lost his mind? 

Well, no. He was simply shifting his focus. Whereas his most famous paintings were all all about creating absolute internal balance within the hermetic "world" of the painting itself -- a harmony that all but ignored the reality outside its frame -- Broadway Boogie Woogie was engaging with outside stimuli, and how that particular historical input (jazz in the 40s) might interact with the "Mondrian" method. So really, OWBW finds Benning doing nearly the same thing with "structural film." He has made a film that is "about" the limitations of one-minute shot durations; the relationships between objects in the frame; the unique properties of color produced by shooting in Midwestern daylight; and the often-thwarted expectations produced by setting up sound / image relationships that are sometimes in sync, sometimes in counterpoint.

But One Way Boogie Woogie is also about the Midwest in 1977: the way cars looked, the way people dressed, the color and style of the buildings. But more than this, Benning captures a specific Rust Belt ambiance that other experimental films of the period do not share. If there's a patrician air to Snow's and Frampton's films, and a bit of a punk attitude to Sharits's, Benning's are decidely working class. And we see a side of American industry -- oil refineries, nondescript storefronts, tool and die shops, and many, many freight trains -- that was on the wane when Benning was making OWBW and is a husk of its former presence now.

Benning certainly drives this point home with his follow-up film, 27 Years Later, which is intended to screen immediately after One Way Boogie Woogie. In it, he returns to all of the locations where the original film was shot and, as much as possible, recreates the camera set-ups for a "remake" worn down by the winds of time. 

There is a certain formal irony built into 27 Years Later, since Benning shoots it on digital video, making it "cleaner" than the 16mm OWBW, even in its lovely restoration. But what we find is that most of the locations are no longer there, or have been altered beyond recognition. Where OWBW is droll and surprising, 27YL is unavoidably melancholy. It has little to report, apart from the fact that time marches on, but in some ways this may be enough. We see performers from the earlier film, young men and women then, now gray and middle-aged. Some performers don't return at all. Above all, Benning finds gentrification, the destruction of lower-middle-class neighborhoods, and the erosion of America's industrial base. 

So, if part of the bracing originality behind One Way Boogie Woogie was that structural film could be playful by opening its eyes to the world outside its narrow parameters, 27 Years Later, sadly, comes to the opposite conclusion. In 2005, Benning is still looking beyond the confines of formalism. But he and his friends find considerably less humor as they move through an American landscape that has been systematically drained of life.