James Benning - RUHR

 

Still from RUHR, James Benning 2010


I saw RUHR by James Benning on Saturday as part of the London Film Festival.

Comprising seven fixed frame composition that range in length from seven minutes to one hour, the film is primarily an exercise (as Benning himself proclaims) in looking and listening. The footage is all shot in the heavily industrialized region of Ruhr in Germany; however, these images could be of anywhere in the world, as the intention here is not really about place, but about the viewers relationship to observing place.

Watching the film, which at times can be challenging, (as you are watching the same scene/object/setting for up to one hour with very little change taking place) is what I can only describe as what it might be like to watch the world with your eyes closed. To explain what I mean by this it is first necessary to consider the way the philosopher Henri Bergson chose to talk not of things or appearances, but rather to speak everything in the world as ‘images’ and how images can be both matter and perceptions at the same time (see Bergson: Matter and Memory). Therefore, as I watched RUHR the line from the first page of Matter and Memory came to mind, ‘Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.’ What I experienced in RHUR felt like what it might be like to see what happens in the world when my eyes are closed, in other words to perceive (to see) without perception. For Bergson perception serves action; that is, unable to take in all sensory information in the world, perception filters images that make up the external world; meaning that the images that do not concern our needs and actions pass right by us. What I see or perceive in the images on the screen in RHUR is that which is present, but without potentiality for action - in other words that which perception normally filters out.

A different way of thinking about the seven fixed framed composition that make up RUHR is to consider them as 'animated photographs'. Animated photography was the name frequently given to very early films in the period 1895 - 1906. These films normally lasted from anything from 20 seconds to 3 minutes and were fixed frame (the camera did not move) and the action, which was usually of a simple city scene, unfolded gradually in front of the camera. The movement that was witnessed by those early audiences often seemed to take place as if by magic. In these films, which were also referred to as living pictures, the movement was not the big movement that cinema would soon be so proud of as it demonstrated it’s array of techniques; instead, these were the detailed movements of smoke drifting out of a factory chimney (just as smoke drifts out of the coke quenching tower in RUHR) or leaves blowing down the road (just as in watching RUHR attention falls on the subtle rustling of a leaf blowing in The Matenastraße Tunnel). Animated photographs did not yet have the techniques of pan, zoom, edit and montage that came with the 'movement-image'. Another comparison between RUHR and animated photographs could be seen as both having durational equivalence between the time taken to film and the time taken to play back the film to audience. In many ways RUHR could be compared to animated photograph; however a big difference is technology and its ability for manipulation. Benning made it very clear in the Q&A that followed the screening that in this film small manipulations had taken place to give a truer feel of the place being portrayed. Elsewhere he has stated ‘sometimes irregular events give a false sense of reality and by removing them the truth becomes more apparent; but of course any truth is only the perception of the viewer ...’ What that perception might be brings us back to my starting point ...