Allensworth: James Benning’s microhistory of California’s first Black town

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

Watching a James Benning film is the cinematic equivalent of spending hours seated before a massive painting in a museum: if you’re in the right sort of contemplative mood, it’s an exercise in sharpening one’s perceptive faculties – one of the principal reasons Benning is so well loved by cinephiles of a certain bent.

In his latest film, the American master of landscape cinema turns his attention to Allensworth, California. Founded in 1908, the unincorporated town was California’s first to be established, financed and governed by African Americans. Rather than addressing this historic precedent directly, Benning takes a characteristically oblique approach by focusing mostly on the tiny rural community’s natural surroundings and historical façades in a series of 12 static shots running at around five and a half minutes each, one for each month of the year, essentially rendering a sort of cinematic calendar of present-day Allensworth. (This sort of temporal conceptualisation is a hallmark of Benning’s oeuvre: 2004’s 13 Lakes, for instance, is comprised of 13 ten-minute-long static shots of different lakes; also from 2004, 10 Skies adopts a similar mathematic scheme.)

Such an approach gives rise to a viewing experience that alternates between an unusually deep attention to detail, which the more rapid cuts of conventional film editing naturally preclude, and zoning out, turning one’s attention inward. So, in viewing the ranch house that forms the foreground of the February section, one’s attention might turn from the masterful wooden architecture, lovingly restored with a recent paint job, to the sounds of roosters crowing in the background, to the sunshine in the sky above, perhaps contrasting it with the grey sky from the January section.

Occasionally Benning will disrupt this plain place portraiture with a song played softly in the background – Nina Simone’s ‘Blackbird’ at one point, Lead Belly’s ‘In the Pines’ at another. The most formidable disruption occurs in the month of August (wherein the first day of school in the United States traditionally takes place), the film’s first and only ‘staged’ image as well as the sole moment in which a human form occupies the lens, as a young woman, adorned in a replica of the dress civil rights activist Elizabeth Eckford wore on her first day of attending the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, stands in front of a chalkboard and reads several poems by Lucille Clifton that powerfully evoke the strength and adversity of the African American experience. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, such an interruption might seem unnecessarily didactic; but as an unlikely set piece in this landscape patchwork, it powerfully unveils Benning’s underlying intention to convey a forgotten microhistory and its deeper connections to a larger – and ongoing – struggle, essentially revising our understanding of all the scenes that came before and the ones that will follow.