Six massive concrete piers rise from a gray-green-brown water surface and taper into a narrowing line toward the vanishing point of the image. The rear end is spanned by a slender steel arch, kept in the same industrial green as the ribbed underside of the roadway. A bridge filmed from a low angle. The cars moving above are only to be guessed at. From time to time birds glide across the image, at one point a boat crosses. Otherwise, nothing moves. Absolutely nothing.
“It seems to be time to look at bridges,” announced the US avant-garde filmmaker James Benning in the Berlinale programme booklet for his documentary Eight Bridges. Eight bridges in 80 minutes, plus two minutes of end credits: Following his predecessor works Ten Skies and 18 Lakes, Benning examines onscreen another landscape phenomenon of his homeland.
His method is maximal formal rigor and radical slowness. The camera set up on the shore does not move for ten minutes: no pan, no cut—in real time cars or trains roll over the roadway, pedestrians appear at the edge of the frame and disappear behind a fence, clouds drift by.
21. February, 9:30 PM, Silent Green, Berlin
Rattle, a Honk, and a Splash
Even the sound track refuses all cinema conventions. No voice-over, no music to underscore the visuals, no sound effects to dramatize what is seen. Instead, field-recording-like ambient sounds, as if Benning were saying: it is what it is. Somewhere a bird caws in the reeds, there is rustling, you hear occasional honks, traffic noise, occasional splashing.
Benning’s meticulously composed camera frames resemble painted tableaux of the industrial age: water and air, sky and earth, vegetation and reinforced concrete of the most diverse epochs, functions and styles. The almost ludicrous tenderness with which the camera attends to banal utilitarian constructions and everyday glimpses transfers to the viewer over time. A bold modernist concrete formwork leaps to the eye, a wonderful railing red.
The gaze sharpens on details such as the rope that hangs into the water from the lower left. What purpose might it serve? Why do teenagers repeatedly climb the embankment above the Golden Gate Bridge (the film’s sole bridge celebrity) — a test of courage? Which city supplies the many delivery trucks that sit in traffic?
At some point the act of seeing has slowed down to such an extent that the procession of clouds across a windy sky seems almost rapid. The stories James Benning withholds from telling arise in the viewer’s underemployed mind all by themselves. In the credits, the bridged portraits are presented like stars: Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama; Hi-Line RR Bridge, North Dakota. The portion of the audience that has not fallen asleep applauds with admiration.
