Deseret

“James Benning took the founding of the New York Times in 1851 as a departure point for his latest film, ‘Deseret’. In the best Benning tradition, ‘Deseret’ unfolds magnificent landscapes captured with a stationary camera during a dozen-odd trips throughout the calendar year – desert, plains of snow, lonely trails, trees in bloom, cemeteries, ruins, unfriendly rocks, empty settler’s houses, roads that seem to be leading nowhere, a few isolated human figures. “‘Deseret”s starkly composed images suggest a space haunted by the official history written back East in the Times. Benning collected 93 stories about Utah, boiled them down to a few lines and used a different shot to ‘illustrate’ each sentence. As we reach 1900, his black-and-white footage spectacularly turns colour. The stories told recount the loss of American innocence: from the woes and persecution of the Mormons, the fights with the Indians, the struggle to become a state, to the turning of Utah into a testing ground for nuclear power. And beyond the power of words, Benning’s camera keeps probing: do landscapes remember?” – Berenice Reynaud