American Dreams: Lost and Found / Landscape Suicide - 2-DVD Set

American Dreams: Lost and Found / Landscape Suicide - 2-DVD Set (DVD) (*)

$40.99

Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
German ( Subtitles )

Product Origin/Format:
Germany ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
145 min

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
2-DVD Set
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Booklet

Movie filmed in 1984 - 1987 and produced in:
Canada ( USA, Canada )
United States ( USA, Canada )

Directed By:
James Benning

Written By:
James Benning

Actors:
James Benning
Rhonda Bell ..... Bernadette Protti
Elion Sucher ..... Ed Gein

Synopsis:

For 40 years, James Benning has been a singular, defiant voice in the American independent film scene. This 2-disc set the first in a planned series devoted to the filmmaker's oeuvre features two of Benning's seminal works from the mid-1980s for the first time ever on DVD: American Dreams (lost and found) is the filmmaker's personal take on the history of the USA from 1954 to 1976, told through a complex and thought provoking amalgamation of image, text and sound. In Landscape Suicide, he effortlessly strides the boundaries of narrative and documentary forms as he recounts two infamous murder cases that took place almost 30 years apart.

American Dreams: Lost and Found (1984)
American Dreams is chock full of concrete, discrete elements that comprise an American iconography of the past three decades. The film encourages a kind of perverse nostalgia for 'the good old days': Nixon's 'you don't have Nixon to kick around any more'; Elvis' response to questions about his gyrating style and the rumour that once he shot his mother; Patty Hearst's 'Tania' statement; Senator Ribicoff's reference to 'Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago'. All of which is punctuated by the music of the period and set against a composite image of Hank Aaron memorabilia (arranged chronologically, 1954-76, the span of the champion home-run hitter's major league career), and the sordid diary jottings of the would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer.

Landscape Suicide (1987)
In "Landscape Suicide" Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning's distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. The two monologues are embedded in Benning's characteristic meditations of landscape: long shots of the Wisconsin farmlands, general stores, dirt roads and pick-up trucks, and the carefully tended lawns, swimming pools, sprawling bungalows and malls of the middle-class California suburb. These images are offered in the classically spare mise-en-scene which Benning has perfected in his work as a cinematic poet of the contemporary American environment. Here, in his most accessible film so far, the beautiful, open vistas are dense with the significance of the catastrophes they engendered.

American Dreams (lost and found) - USA 1984 - Directed, written, photographed, edited and produced by: James Benning - Premiere: February 19, 1984 (Film Forum, New York)
Landscape Suicide - USA 1986 - Directed, written, photographed, edited and produced by: James Benning - Cast: Rhonda Bell, Elion Sacker, Eve E. Ellis, Lisbeth Jetton, Pegge Winslow, John Benning, Rusty Johnson - Premiere: October 4, 1984 (Minneapolis)
DVD features (2-disc DVD)
DVD 1
American Dreams (lost and found) 1984, 53'
20 page bilingual booklet
DVD 2
Landscape Suicide 1986, 92'

This product was added to our catalog on Wednesday 08 January, 2014.

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