El Valley Centro

A stunning albeit challenging achievement in film! You must retrain your "movie senses," but once you do, what an experience! This is not about life in the valley, but the life OF the valley. I would love to see other James Benning pictures, if I could only find them. His movies only play at festivals and obscure art houses and museums, as far as I can tell.

Part of Benning's "California Trilogy", this is the film of his I've enjoyed the most of the 6 I've seen to date (Although I also really liked "American Dreams: Lost and Found).

Benning examines California's Central Valley in a series of long, static and mostly beautifully composed images, often using a symmetrical frame that echos the way people have shaped the land. He brings out the oddness of the area I've always felt – there's barely an inch of the region that hasn't been re-shaped by man, and yet it is largely devoid of people, being mostly vast agricultural tracts.

There's a clear, ominous note of how man is destroying the environment around him, whether in the crop duster flying straight at the camera, or the local fishermen, whose lines go into filthy looking water going through a concrete channel.

For an hour and a half film composed of nothing but long, wordless images, I was shocked at how quickly the time passed, and how, by the end, I felt I had experienced something emotional as well as intellectual.