Review by cudas

Conceptual-art portrait of Los Angeles County, comprising 35 two-minute shots of streams, hills, buildings, factories, gardens, highways, rivers, cattle, trains, people, the ocean, a cemetery, the skyline, policemen, back streets, a jail, soccer players. Bennings' camera remains static, and in the absence of commentary the only sounds we hear are whatever's audible in each of these places: snatches of dialogue, distant background music, the rumble of cars and trains.

Needless to say, Los won't be to all tastes - in today's market-oriented climate, such a project necessarily runs the risk of 'pretentiousness' accusations - but it's surprising how quickly you adjust to the film's unique rhythms, and this is a very straightforward, accessible kind of experimentalism. In terms of an artist using cinema to express himself, it dwarfs almost all this year's 'conventional' releases: if any film of 2001 can possibly change the way its audiences think about and view their world, it's James Benning's mysterious, majestic, magical Los.