11 x 14 (1977) in 35mm with filmmaker James Benning in person

With nearly a half-century since its release, James Benning’s first feature-length film 11 x 14 (1977) appears less like a personal breakthrough and more like a major inflection point in the history of American experimental cinema. Made while Benning was teaching at Northwestern University, the film probes an expanding radius of Midwestern landscapes by way of elevated trains and car windshields, interstates and backroads, exteriors and interiors. Across these banal-yet-miraculous locales, captured in stunning long-takes and tableaux, Benning disperses faint threads of narrative, distilling the drama of everyday life in a manner reminiscent of painter Edward Hopper.

11 x 14 marks a point of confluence for several streams of the American avant-garde: Structural film’s emphasis on cinematic materiality and duration, the underground cinema of queer intimacy, the Beat-tinged excursions of Bay Area countercultural filmmakers Bruce Baillie and Robert Nelson, the photographically majestic landscapes of progressive-era documentary, and the emerging “new narratives” of Jon Jost and Yvonne Rainer. Consolidating these precedents without retreading them, Benning brought the enduring themes of experimental cinema—time, light, environment, movement, freedom, sexuality, and the medium itself—into bracing new formal terrain, opening pathways that numerous filmmakers (including Benning himself) are still productively exploring 48 years later.

Following a rare 35mm screening of the 2017 restoration by the Austrian Film Museum and the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Benning will appear in person for a discussion and audience Q&A.

The Block Museum is proud to partner with the MFA in Documentary Media, the Department of Radio, Television, and Film, and the School of Communications at Northwestern to welcome James Benning as a 2025 Hoffman Visiting Artist for Documentary Media.

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