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Spring EquinoxOn November 10, James Benning premiered five of his latest works (thinking of red, wavelength, measuring change, Spring Equinox and Fall Equinox) at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, accompanied by a short response film by Michael Snow. Benning was also present for a Q&A before and between the screenings. Prompted by the pleasure as well as the discontent of the encounter with these films, we decided to engage in a dialogue that would offer us the time to interweave thoughts with as little space in between as possible.Dear Ivana,Writing to you about the new films of James Benning we have seen together at the Austrian Film Museum, I have the urge to begin with the end. It seems fitting, bearing in mind how Benning proceeds in his Spring Equinox, which I found to be the most vibrating film of the evening. Shot on a road passing...

I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.

Evil Dead. This week, these two words are all that matter to horror fans, as the long-awaited reworking of the cult classic The Evil Dead hits theaters. (Actually, two other words matter just as much: Bruce Campbell. I'm not into horror flicks, but yeah, he is the coolest.)

For the rest of us, there is the homegrown comedy Somebody Up There Likes Me (pictured above). Fellow River City film fans, I beg, urge and implore you to see this terrific Austin movie. Sadly (and unsurprisingly), the Friday night show with director Bob Byington and star Nick Offerman in attendance is sold out. But worry not -- there are plenty of other screenings. You also might like the Slamdance 2012 awardwinning feature Welcome to Pine Hill, screening at 9 pm Monday at Stateside.

True cinephiles won't want to miss this week's Austin Film Society Essential Cinema Plus series, which presents four recent films...

Below you will find our total coverage of the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival by Adam Cook.

Above: Denis Côté's Vic+Flo Saw a Bear

Impressions

#1

On Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster and Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Hope

#2

On Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, Sebastián Leilo's Gloria and Denis Côté's Vic+Flo Saw a Bear

#3

On James Benning's Stemple Pass, J.P. Sniadecki/Huang Xiang/Xu Ruotao's Yumen and Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel, 1915

#4

On Jafar Panahi/Kamboziya Partovi's Closed Curtain, Hong Sangsoo's Nobody's Daughter Haewon and Richard Linklater's Before Midnight

#5

On Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess and Jacques Doillon's Love Battles

B-Sides

On The Weimar Touch retrospective, the Waves vs. Particles art installations by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel, and mini-capsules on Hala Lofty's Coming Forth by Day, Thomas Arslan's Gold, Pia Marais' Layla Fourie, Nicolàs Pereda & Jacob Schulsinger's Killing Strangers and Shane Carruth...

Stemple Pass

Dir. James Benning

Part of a larger project that includes other films, a book and an installation, Stemple Pass hones in on Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the "Unabomber", one of the two main subjects of the broader work. The other is Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden). Initially the project began without an artistic intent: James Benning built two cabins replicated after the (surprisingly similar) ones that Kaczynski and Thoreau lived in. He was eventually driven to explore the obsessions of these two figures (as well as the filmmaker's own), ultimately drawn into these multiple approaches.

Consisting of four static shots, each of a different season (though not presented linearly so as to avoid easily applied poetic connotations of "this represents this" parsing), the film spends two hours watching the replicate cabin, seen in the bottom right of the frame, overwhelmed by the surrounding nature. For much of the film,...