James Benning

Having a guest speaker come to class and make comments about his/her work is always somewhat interesting. With the case of James Benning, it was indeed interesting, but also a little confusing at the same time. I had seen some of his previous work from the 70s and a documentary on his work with 16mm film, but could not make it out to some of his showing this weekend on campus.

Judging from what I had seen previously, he defintely has a natural talent for finding beautiful shots that take up the frame. Whether it's smokestacks, ocean waters, farming machinery, etc. Having said that, I feel that I can't totally agree with his methods or hypothesis on maths influence on film. It seemed to me that because he clearly had a lot of knowledge on the subject, allowed him to justify certain elements, trying to find loopholes with "imaginary numbers:, "infinity", and the obscurity of the number "zero".

Whether I was confused, bored, of just simply unconvinced, it seemed his argument was a bit far-fetched and tried to suggest that all things are relative. It's like comparing apples to oranges. You can compare different art forms such as art, music, and literature, but when it comes to arithmetic, that is in a field of it's own. Now, if we were talking about the dimension of the frame, or simply the technical elements, I might buy into that a little bit, but overall I was a little skeptical of his theories, dispite his advanced knowledge and obvious artistic skill.