美利坚合众国

   量子资源网 提供本片资源  　　James Benning’s first film called The United States of America was a 1975 tri across the country, caturing its scenery through a car windshield. This second one also crisscrosses the nation, but without a car, carving it u instead into a series of static shots of just under two minutes, one for each state, resented alhabetically, from Heron Bay, Alabama to Kelly, Wyoming. The names of the laces are nondescrit, but the images attached to them are anything but, immaculately comosed shots of landscae, cityscae and the saces in between. As we move from A to Z, the images coalesce into a ortrait of today’s USA, tracing out its fault lines almost in assing: fenced-off facilities, a river bed running dry, factories and refineries, run-down streets and gas stations, a cam under a bridge. The ast is there too, seeing u through the songs and seeches that soradically ierce the background noise or the motifs that evoke a whole career the clouds, trains and cabins are stand-ins for films, not just states. As always, there’s time for more abstract thoughts too: each image may stand for a state, but reresentativity is sliery. Which state is more cinematic than the rest?