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Screenings
Part of the series Contested Landscapes: Three Digital Features by James Benning

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  • This is a past program

Copresented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hammer Museum

Screening and Q&A with filmmaker James Benning.

Both elegiac and lovingly rendered, critical and celebratory, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is Benning’s paean to the ideals and hard truths of the American cultural landscape. Emerging from the era of COVID-19 and its social restrictions, Benning’s USA (an updating of the 1975 film with the same title co-made with Bette Gordon) portrays the country’s 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, as sites that exist in the imagination as well as through representational sounds and images. But while THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is meditative and reflective in ways that are characteristic of Benning’s earlier work, this is a landscape that is haunted by its past, evidence of which can be seen, heard and felt throughout the film.

—Steve Anker

(2021, dir. James Benning, digital, color, 97 min.)

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