The United States of America in Wroclaw, Poland

A chaotic film review

Last Friday evening I ordered pizza, ate an entire bag of Cantuccini which was originally meant as a gift to a friend, and agonized for five hours about going on a three-day trip to the New Horizons film festival in Wroclaw. Someone invited me the day before and I did not even know why I was taking the invitation so seriously. The alternative was not to go there at all. 

After a few more biscuits the decision was between going to the festival and later writing about it or not going and writing about the things that I was (and still am) actually supposed to be writing about. I ended up actively agonizing for two more hours, making a vodka tonic, tidying up the apartment, and booking a seat on a Flibxbus leaving from Südkreuz, Berlin at 5:00 AM.

This is a low-effort attempt at putting together notes typed on my iPhone in between (and sometimes during) the screenings. I needed to keep the promise to myself that I’d actually write about them but without the pressure of delivering a marketable and coherent narrative. So, I am going to review some of those films I saw here.

These texts, on top of being incoherent, are also full of spoilers of films that will come out to your local theatres soon. Reading this might not just be a waste of time and a pain to go through — it might very well ruin your next 12 months of cinema visits. 

The first section of this post is not about an actual film review, it just sets the basis of the mental and physical states I was in before watching one of the films. Maybe you can skip it.

As I said, things are chaotic here. 

Arriving

I arrive in Wroclaw more or less alive on Saturday, the 23rd of July 2022. It is scorching hot and it’s only 9:00 AM. I also did not get any sleep. My body is weighted down by the books that I could not leave home, the heath, the deadlines I might miss, the bus that almost crushed into a Lada, the sight of a new country, of a town, specifically, that looks a lot like the other easter European ones and that, just like them, bears the signs of high-frequency violence and regime changes.  

“See the gates here”, my friend points out at a Soviet block while helping me carry one of the bags, “they got huge entrances because they needed to be able to get the tanks through”… “oh, you think so?”, “no, I *know* so!”, he replies. I disassociate while imagining the weight of tanks smashing the asphalt, parading in and out of the courtyards. I picture the soldiers, drunk, not austere, I can hear the puns they must have exchanged, I feel the fear of the seriousness of their jobs and the irony needed to get through the day. 

The city is ripped apart in all sorts of ways, its architecture and urban planning look vastly incoherent to me— my friend mentions dominations by Nazis, Soviets, Hungarians, and others — Wroclaw has been a land of contention for a long time, long before I visited. 

I am here though and I am somewhat forced to deal with it, feeling as if someone dropped me on a random geographical point, like one of those homunculi on Google maps, now landed on a street that does exist, after all, I can see it. I register the images of the moving building as we walk by them, one wounded courtyard after the other. 

But I digress. Right after a four-hour Flixbus trip (which is enough time for your legs to get restless but not enough to get some decent sleep), I literally run to the cinema theatre — the Polish are very strict on cinema rules, religious almost, which is no surprise for a country in which Jesus Christ has been officially crowned as its king.

I did not sleep for more than 24 hours at this point, I am experiencing something that feels similar to low-level disassociation: I quickly look at my own life and body as if they aren’t really mine, nor really there. This state reminds me of a familiar feeling of peripheral awareness, of being a little lateral to reality, a little alienated, which, in many ways, mirrors making and watching films. 

That is, at this point, my most generous interpretation of the state of mind I am in. It’s too late to avoid or try to feel otherwise, so I just go with it. I am now hovering over a body (not really me) that decides it is too time-consuming to take a leather jacket off in that 28 degrees Celsius heat. I sleepwalk to the first film of the day.

The United States of America

Still from “The United States of America” (2022)

“It sounds kind of fascist, but I don’t mean it that way” 

James Benning speaking about his filmmaking process

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My friends decide that the first film we will watch today will be one of director James Benning’s, a well-known structuralist filmmaker, as well as structuralist filmmakers can be known. I do not know of Benning’s work; I comply. 

I am quickly told the basics of the film:

1) Title: “The United States of America”
2) Concept: a series of moving image postcards from each USA Federal State, shown in alphabetical order
3) Background: this is a remake of a previous version of it, made by Benning himself in the 70s, but shot from the back of a car.

What this means to me is that I am going to nap my way through it, and probably I am even expected to. When it comes to YouTube videos to sleep and relax to, it doesn’t get any better than that — at least in theory. 

We are a few minutes in and I cannot, for the life of God, fall asleep. This is a wonderful film. Each shot is announced by a still image: a black background with the name of a city, a comma, and the name of the state they represent, typed in serif white font. Each shot shows a landscape: a moving image, shot from a still camera, securely planted on the ground, or on a tree, or on a fence, or somewhere. Each lasts a few seconds, or minutes perhaps: it is a 90 minutes film with time equally distributed amongst each USA state, you do the math, Puerto Rico is also included by the way. 

Each shot is a thing of beauty, but it is also funny — some people on the right are chuckling, others look around to make eye contact with the rest of the audience, some can’t help crossing and uncrossing their legs, and someone in the front just starts laughing out loud. Some people leave, snickering. 

My friend understands I do not know much about this guy at all and that I am just landing in the mostly unexplored territory of experimental filmmaking, so he generously tells me more about his previous oeuvre. He gives me some “context”: “Benning spends lots of time planning each shot in advance, this is part of what making a structuralist film means actually and…” I disassociate again: wind turbines appear on screen and I think of one specific video clip I watched earlier on Twitter: there, one of the blades catches fire and starts drawing elliptical circles in the grey sky. 

A few shots later, we are looking at a still from the state of Montana, where it snows in a peaceful pines forest and everyone sighs and tilts their head a bit, maybe wishing they were there. I do wish I was there. In Paris, Tennessee, a full moon is pictured, not in any particularly fancy way, no special knowledge of astronomical photography seems to play any role here; it is shot as if you or I would try and shoot it with an iPhone: you can tell that being there is a much larger experience than taking a picture of it. That is almost a decent description of what a postcard is, anyway. Two pink clouds cross over each other and that’s all we’ll get to see of Tennessee. 

The volume is low as if we are supposed to feel like we might very well be there. Make no mistakes: this is an honest, naturalistic rendition of a place.  But the screen is quite small, and the quality of the images is standardized like in a series of postcards. Cognitive dissonance starts creeping in.

By now it feels like we must be midway through the film, although time has started taking different forms and durations. Someone gives a monologue about colonization, disguised as a radio show, then some other muffled voiceover creeps in, it sounds political too. I learn it is Eisenhower speaking. The volume gets louder, the sound can no longer be diegetic. All this struggles to look like a serious filmmaker, objectively depicting the beauty and eeriness of Americana, and now this? This cannot have been a mistake — not for a man as serious as Benning. Alicia Keys reads out something, maybe in Ohio, I am not too sure. 

That’s when I know James Benning was fucking with us. The chuckles get a little louder. Just when I catch myself romanticizing his fastidious dedication to the craft of arithmetically arranged moving images, I start questioning the procedural and well-researched nature of his filmmaking. Is it all gimmicks? What is this allegedly innocent, rigorous old man really about? 

I put my suspicions aside for a moment, I am a newbie to structuralism after all. As soon as the non-diegetic shots are done, I plunge back into some sunflowers swinging eerily from side to side. I am quick to buy back into his coherent representation of reality. I even feel envious for a second, and of course worse about the deadlines I now know I will inevitably have to miss. Who is this guy who can be so disciplined and precise? And why am I sitting here looking at his work instead of working on my own things? I try and lean back to fall asleep, just to be able to cope. I still cannot because the shots keep being increasingly more stunning, and now I am also kind of angry at him. 

The silver lining is that he did not, in fact, travel that far at all. The credits reveal that the entire film was shot in California.

Et voilà, I make my way back into my body as I ambiently listen to critiques of Western centrism and Silicon Valley while walking outside the movie theatre and back into the bright, injured streets of this Polish town. “isn’t it all made there, anyway? Isn’t California really a microcosm of the US, if not of the entire world?”. Maybe. 

As I walk to the Airbnb to finally take a nap, I am relieved I am not the only one with questionable work ethics.  

Things:

https://twitter.com/mythoamerica?lang=en