Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, TWENTY CIGARETTES. Referencing Warhol’s screen tests, 1930s Hollywood glamour, and the disappearing cigarette break, the film captures 20 of Benning’s friends (including filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, and book editor Janet Jenkins) satiating their smoke cravings. Each shot’s length is determined by the time it takes each subject to smoke a cigarette, and over the course of the film a dynamic range of personalities emerges out of an array of physical characteristics, distinctive settings, and personal relationships to the camera. (Amy Beste and Jessica Bardsley)

Twenty Cigarettes

This non-narrative film depicts the routines of a girls' basketball team in a junior high school near Tokyo. Shot with a stationary camera, it consists of six ten-minute segments, some of which show the girls' routine exercises, others of which are choreographed.

Goshogaoka

Filmed in real time and from a fixed camera angle, No creates a visual choreography from an everyday action. A Japanese peasant couple is bundling hay and later spreads it out again over the field. This action, which occurs in linear geometric precision from back to front and vice versa, ensures an observation of the landscape, perspective, light, and time. Lockhart’s work emerges as a landscape painting in real time.

Set in a small town in the Sierra Nevadas, Pine Flat is a look at youth and a meditation on nature, socialization, and solitude.

Pine Flat

Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard.

Lunch Break

Double Tide documents the work of a female clam digger in the mudflats of coastal Maine and is filmed on the rare occasion in which low tide occurs twice within daylight hours—once at dawn and once at dusk.

Double Tide

‘Podwórka’ captures six groups of neighbourhood youth as they play in seemingly deserted yards, offering an intimate portrait of daily life in Łódź, Poland. Shot with a fixed camera, this single-channel video projection highlights American artist Sharon Lockhart’s concern for the interrelationship between the still and the moving image.