One Way Boogie Woogie, courtesy James Benning / Arsenal Berlin

Weds 10 December 2014, @7pm

One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later

In 1977 I shot One Way Boogie Woogie in Milwaukee’s industrial valley. As a kid I played there, hopping freight trains and fishing in the Menomenee River. In 1977 the valley was beginning to die. Factories were moving out. The steel foundries were rusting. I wanted to document its decay. Using friends, family, and three Volkswagens, I shot in March on brightly lit days creating 60 one-minute narratives. Then 27 years later I decided to make the same film again. I located all 60 prior camera positions and most of my old friends and family. Things had changed with age. A few people had died, some of the buildings were gone. I used the same soundtrack from the old film, cutting the new images to it. It is a film about memory and aging.

– James Benning

Rigorously formal, yet humorous and full of life, Boogie Woogie’s sequence of 60 static one-minute shots surveys the industrial landscape of Benning’s native Milwaukee. Hailed as a masterwork of avant-garde filmmaking, it takes location shooting literally, offering a playful moving image parallel to the work and interest in the ‘man-altered landscape’ of the New Topographics photographers (whose influential exhibition was mounted two years earlier)......Continue Reading

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