One Way Boogie Woogie

The film is made of sixty shots, each one minute long, in which the camera never moves. Every shot is a fixed frame; what enters it may be a truck, a train, a worker, smoke, or nothing at all. The tension between painterly space and cinematic space is felt not only as an intellectual contrast but as a movement back and forth between the permanent and the passing. The account builds no subject and offers no explanation; duration and repetition are its only method. The longer the looking lasts, the larger the smallest change inside the frame becomes. James Benning’s sixty minute American film was completed in 1977.