Ten Skies

The film shows ten separate skies in ten shots, each ten minutes long and entirely still. The camera looks upward from a garden in Val Verde, California; nothing happens except the movement of clouds, the change of light and the shift of colour. But as one watches, other things become visible in the sky: the smoke of a factory, the trails left by aircraft and the soot rising from a fire. The director calls these shots found paintings and says the film is an anti-war work; the beauty it shows is the beauty people are destroying. James Benning’s hundred and one minute American film was shot on sixteen millimetre and completed in 2004; it is regarded as the companion to his 13 Lakes.