Ten Skies (James Benning, 2004)

Surprisingly, the sky I keep returning to when I think about Benning’s aptly named Ten Skies is the first. In many ways, it’s the “worst”. It’s the least compositionally interesting, with just an empty blue field and a wayward cirrus streak extending from the upper left of the frame, and as a result, not just an anomalous blue shot in a film dominated by grays, but also the least dynamic. In retrospect, this introductory ten minute shot, which prefaces 9 more static ten minute shots of the sky, works through contrast, and what I’ve latched onto is that this shot’s unique motion, that of dissipation, a melancholic depiction of transience that prefaces the more bombastic, violent images to come.

There’s a tendency to write and think about Ten Skies as a transcendental, romantic film, where the audience can indulge in an anachronistic immersion into classical beauty. In reality, Ten Skies is actually explores the same artistic ground as Benning’s more overtly political landscape films, which by and large excavate the relationship between industry and landscape. Writing about El Valley Centro, Benning’s first film in his California Trilogy, I commented that the film is about the contrast between natural and industrial motion, juxtaposing rippling water and serpentine landscapes against the straight lines of machinery and agriculture. Ten Skies depicts industrial imposition within each self-sufficient frame, turning visual motifs of El Valley Centro into cohesive somatic experiences. Dominating the constructed, asynchronous soundtrack with sounds of industrial noise (helicopters, machinery, factories, guns), the circular, mechanical vibrations rhythmically conflict with the natural, pseudo-psychedelic movement of the clouds. The physical experience of watching Ten Skies is effective precisely because it’s as meditative as it is disjunctive.

Audio from El Valley Centro is actually repurposed in Ten Skies’ fourth shot. In the film’s only recognizable dialogue, Benning pairs the sounds of immigrant agricultural exploitation with the film’s most classically beautiful shot, featuring a natural chiaroscuro so striking it belongs in a Renaissance painting. It’s a statement of purpose about the fading/nonexistent conditions for unadulterated natural beauty, and just as quickly as Benning presents this otherworldly image, the composition is blown off the top right of the screen.

More than Benning’s other films, the amorphous, restless movement of clouds in Ten Skies calls attention to the rigidity of the frame, and of the film’s clearly defined structure. On one hand, it speaks to the the transience melancholically conjured by the film’s first shot (the desperate desire to capture dying beauty, which also extends to the film’s 16mm forma), but more importantly, the static framing of Ten Skies emphasizes the porous nature between the earth and the sky. The second sky, a blooming cloud which grows increasingly orange and gray, is an example of Benning’s powerful usage of exclusionary framing as figurative device. While we eventually intuit that this is an image of a raging fire (an especially resonant image in this current moment), by showing us only the smoke trails and not their source, Benning is able to more evocatively summon the systemic industrial forces that contribute to the smoke. Over the soundtrack, he layers sounds of helicopters. Our propensity for narrative assumes that they may be putting out the wildfire, but Benning simultaneously points to these industrial noises as a cause in and of themselves.

A similar play with sound occurs in the seventh sky, which depicts the billowing plume from what’s presumably a smoke stack. Smoke stacks memorably appear in One Way Boogie Woogie, where they’re semi-ironically accompanied by pop music as a playful invocation of a dying Americana. Here, the sound is at its most nondescript - a wall of noise punctured by illegible whispers. As with all of the other shots, the sound in itself tells a succinct narrative of industry overwhelming humanity, but to my mind, this is one of the most beguiling sound-image juxtapositions in the entire film. As the shot progresses, the smoke stack is blown to the right of the screen, almost disappearing to the bottom right corner. While the initial experience of the sky allows us to pinpoint the unnatural plume as an insidious force, emitting pollutants into the atmosphere, Benning forces us to reckon with absence. The smoke stack veering out of the frame allows us to imagine the global impact of industrialization. Benning’s play of foreground and background (I saw experimental filmmaker Francisco Rojas invoke Red Desert in his Letterboxd review, and this compositional play calls to mind what I consider a signature Antonioni composition, relating Ten Skies to the Italian modernist’s films of suffocated humanity) presents the magnitude of climate change by proverbially pulling the rug out from under the audience. Industrial apocalypse is here and all around us.

Magnitude is a word I haven’t stopped thinking about in relation to Ten Skies. It’s an effect of the film’s conceptual purity, its formal intentionality, and its play with duration. Erika Balsom’s wonderful monograph on the film discusses Benning’s relation to the contemporary rise of so called “slow cinema”. She discusses the infamous Dan Kois piece about “cultural vegetables” and the common (preposterously reductive) misconception that slow cinema is not just reactionary, but regressive in its romanticization of old ways of seeing and listening. What I would personally add to Balsom’s own rebuttal (which includes fascinating detours into Benning’s digital work and fascinating projects like Snow’s WVLNT) is that taking Ten Skies as a regressive, old-fashioned film about natural beauty constitutes a willful misreading of the film, one that feels jarringly at odds with my personal experience. Like the best durational cinema, Ten Skies is about experiencing and processing time (I’ve occasionally wondered about the relationship between certain veins of slow cinema and rhythmic therapy like EMDR). Ten Skies has some connection to films like Memoria, works of art where an expansion of temporal and sensory perception cue us to the irreducible power of affect. In other words, something all three of those films do is pinpoint the ways historical and personal traumas are intrinsic to physical experience and combine it with plangent experiences of spectatorial, perceptual freedom. They induce a transcendent range of feeling that’s powerful in and of itself. Ten Skies makes the immense systemic forces of industry, xenophobia, warfare (hear: the gunshots in shot 8, resonances with Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The Diary of a Sky), inextricable from its transcendent beauty, and by forcing the audience to inhabit its ambivalent audiovisual space, produces an expansive, irreducible experience commensurate to the film’s political urgency and emotional intensity.