Speculative Video Essay · 2018
Reading //
Binging //
Benning
"How much can you see of a movie you can't see?"
About the Film
A speculative video essay about filmmaker James Benning's work Readers — a film that most viewers will never see. Working from descriptions, interviews, and fragments, Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee ask: what does it mean to watch a film you can't watch? What can you know about a movie from everything that surrounds it but isn't it?
Commissioned by the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam Critics Choice Program, the essay operates as desktop documentary — a stream of consciousness investigation conducted through open browser tabs, half-remembered texts, and the particular intimacy of screen-based research. It's a love letter to cinema that can't quite be seen, and to the act of looking anyway.
The film was named among the best video essays of 2018 by Sight & Sound — cited by 47 contributors in their annual poll — and was featured as Episode 4 of The Video Essay Podcast.
Press
"A dynamic, good-humoured video essay about how we watch and how we read."
— Tara Judah, Desistfilm"Creative and playful 'speculative video essay' on the film Readers ... stream of consciousness meets artistic research."
— Miklos Kiss, Sight & Sound"Possibly my favourite desktop essay so far."
— Stanisław Liguziński, Sight & Sound"Illuminating and perfectly paced."
— Nelson Carvajal, Free Cinema NowOn James Benning
James Benning is one of the most significant and reclusive American experimental filmmakers working today. His films demand duration, attention, and the willingness to watch landscapes simply exist. Readers — the subject of this essay — depicts people reading in natural light, and is rarely screened publicly.
To engage with Benning's work is to engage with cinema as a form of sustained, unhurried attention — a counterpoint to the desktop world from which this essay is made. The Austrian Film Museum has released definitive DVD editions of his work for those who want to look.
DVDs available from Austrian Film Museum. This essay is also listed in the Screen Stories Library.