El Valley Centro

James Benning's California Trilogy consists of three cinematic surveys of different regions of the eponymous US state, all of them topographical image-sound studies of the interweaving of landscape, culture, history, and politics. Each film is divided into 35 shots, which each last 2.5 minutes.

EL VALLEY CENTRO: For Benning, the contemplative snapshots of California's Great Central Valley, surrounded by mountain ranges, are "found choreographies": vignettes of the combine harvesters, field workers, freight trains and excavators moving across the vast expanses of a landscape characterized by monocultures. The traces of images merge into a kaleidoscope between meditation and critical commentary, movement, and standstill: calm, highly concentrated and powerfully poetic.