Ten Skies

by Erika Balsom

‘James Benning’s movies show me how to look, and confirm the way I want to see. Erika Balsom, clearly a kindred spirit in her regard for these movies, has not just studied TEN SKIES, unfolding hidden intricacies of meaning, but apprehends it on instinct, too. The results are precise and also wise.’
Rachel Kushner

‘Part of the epic achievement of Benning’s TEN SKIES is to confound expectations of minimalism with a mesmerising study of time, light, movement and moisture that traces the shifting relations between clouds and earth, nature and people, teaching us how to look and listen in the process. Erika Balsom’s study – ‘a punch of clean rigour’, like the film she describes – recognises and extends those lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of (and access to) depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become.’
Jonathan Rosenbaum

‘Erika Balsom brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through the history of experimental cinema, to philosophical musings and art historical scholarship, and back into Benning’s thoughtful imagery. Take this little book, put it in your pocket, and wander the landscape until you find the perfect spot to sit and read, pausing now and then to look at the sky.’
Sharon Lockhart

Part of the Decadent Editions series.

About the film
Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde.

About the author
Erika Balsom is a scholar and critic based in London. She is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, a frequent contributor to Artforum, 4Columns and Cinema Scope, and the author of four books, including An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017).

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Art, Essays

151 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2021

About the author

Erika Balsom is a Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King's College London and the author of Exhibition Cinema in Contemporary Art.

Reviews

[Justin Remer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another outstanding entry in the Decadent Editions series from Fireflies Press. Faced with writing about a film whose entire content is ten ten-minute shots of skies, Erika Balsom creates a text that illuminates the processes of filmmaking, film watching, and film writing. One of the best critical monographs on film I've read.

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 2 out of 5]

We may jokingly deem Los Angeles a cultural desert as it was knocked in the ANNIE HALL days. But even Woody, directing at LA Opera, now seems it a world-class cultural center; and I can brag that Angeleno cinephilia officially reopened with a screening not of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK or LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or some other magic-of-the-movies chestnut…but rather with a screening cum book party, revolving around Erika Balsam’s book on TEN SKIES, James Benning’s 2004 series of ten shots of ten skies, each lasting ten minutes.

The wonderful documentary GUNDA, in which only barnyard animals are characters, shows us the animal’s perceptive processes in extremis via the manner and attitude of a chicken. Constantly reorienting his/her head to grasp new information, the herky-jerky head of the chicken nearly says aloud “Who? Wha? Whoa! What? What’s happening here?” We are reacquainted with the notion that eyes and ears are first and foremost trouble detectors, not glasses into which are poured aesthetic pleasure.

So what Benning does in recent films is radically counterintuitive. He invites us to look. Seeing is optional. He forces us, if you want to use that loaded word, to stare out a window and keep looking…and what happens when we look at the sky for ten minutes? Where does your mind go? I found myself, in a zoning-out moment, noticing the hair of the girl sitting in front of me, the back edge of her chair, the cheesy but beautiful fake lanterns mounted on the walls of the impromptu theatre. Benning Benning-izes the world.

In TEN SKIES Benning problematizes our viewing experience in a way he hasn’t done lately. The soundtrack underneath his ten skies is, as he put it in a Q&A, “aggressive,” also very dense and busy. One sky is laden with gunshots. Another crackles with non-English-language dialogue that a post-movie Benning diagnosed as “the talk of migrant farm workers.” Elsewhere, a roar, familiar to those who have sat next to the wing of a prop plane, dominates. In a big way, there are off-camera stories. Benning often challenges us to look. Here, he reproduces the experience of looking away.

Erika Balsom’s book is part of a Fireflies Press series of books on films of the twenty-first century—one book per year. I look forward to Melissa Anderson dilating on Lynch’s hugely underrated INLAND EMPIRE. (It seems a bit of a waste to me to spend Nick Pinkerton on that dullsville slice of thinly cinephilic slow cinema, GOODBYE DRAGON INN.) Balsom set herself quite a task: essaying a movie which has no plot, characters, not necessarily even discernible themes, a film which simply IS and DOES. On that score, she fails spectacularly. Rather than addressing the film on its own terms (imagine Barthes picking up this challenge!), she defaults to typical critical fare—connecting it to other film writers and filmmakers, citing Farocki, Godard (improbably), the unavoidable P. Adams Sitney. The book bleats banally about Benning’s place in the great-macho-artist lineage and, of course, his “indictment of whiteness.” Benning claimed post-picture (and in the book) that TEN SKIES is “an anti-Iraq War artwork;” if so, Balsam did not find a way into that reading.

A Benning landscape picture defies “recapping” and maybe even uncapping. When I have seen these films theatrically projected, wildly ADHD Gen Z kids responded to Benning’s enforced eyes-wide-open time-out with blissful gratitude. I may have had quite enough slow cinema for one lifetime but I look forward to Benning’s next: a remake of his co-made-with-Bette-Gordon 1975 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, with “52 shots, one for each state, and also Puerto Rico and D.C. But I’m shooting it all in California. Isn’t that really Hollywood?”

[chaz mullis · Rating 5 out of 5]

easily one of the best film books OAT

[Garrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

a brief and pleasant companion to a film that is only ten, ten-minute static shots of the sky. the film, TEN SKIES, poses some intriguing questions that reverberate in this book's criticism: what happens when background becomes foreground? how much meaning can you make of art that provides so little? attempting to hold focus for 100 minutes on the sky is a meditative and insular process that heightens analysis, but to what end?

during my viewing of TEN SKIES, i entertained some half-baked, clunky thoughts on orientation, movement, and...yes...definitely something about ecology. i felt silly and out of my depth, sitting in a small theater full of L.A. cinephiles and criterion/letterboxd bros, all of us searching for semblances of meaning that may not even be there. with a film this vague, at what point is the viewer reaching too far to find significance? TEN SKIES is a wide open landscape that invites subjective interpretations, but as someone with little experience with film, and moreover, "avant-garde, art/slow cinema," i wondered: was i actually thinking for myself, or was i looking for meaning that i thought should be there? i felt my own thoughts push up against the boundaries of cinephilia, and as such, was especially curious to see what meaning a *ahem* scholar and film critic with a deeper understanding of cinema and James Benning's *ahem* oeuvre could uncover and explain.

maybe i was just looking for structure for such a structureless film, but i got a lot out of the many ideas that Balsom covers in this small book. her writing is most enjoyable when it amplifies and contextualizes the complexity and beauty of TEN SKIES; in her words, "a film that takes aim at our collapsed present, offering an alternative to dominant modalities of time and experience." she has so many lovely passages like these that not only do the film justice, but truly enhance a viewing of it.

but her writing can also be quite frustrating when she ventures too far into the labyrinth of film criticism and overly-academic analysis. this can be, at points, illuminating for a reader that is more unfamiliar with film, but i found it mostly obfuscating and too far-reaching. a good example of this is when Balsom discusses TEN SKIES as an "anti-war film," suggesting that the framing of shots below the sky is a subversive, political act, a "rare sustained inversion of a perspective closely aligned with epistemological and literal violence: view from above." i enjoyed this interpretation, but also remembered Benning's answer at the q&a following the film screening. when he was asked to expand on his thoughts when he referred to TEN SKIES as an anti-war film in 2004, he said, simply: “it felt like the thing one should say at the time.” a humorous reminder to not be too reliant on the analyses of others, even if they are wrapped up in a richer academic understanding of film and presented in a clean, cute book. nonetheless, i do think Balsom hits the mark countless times, and her thoughts are well worth the time if you have or would like to watch this film (which you can! it’s on youtube).

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may not be the greatest fan of James Benning. I can appreciate the formalism in his work, but perhaps his reflective, Western avant-garde approach doesn’t particularly impress me. Nevertheless, the chapters in this book on Ten Skies and on Benning’s other films are a genuine pleasure to read, even though some of Erika Balsom’s interpretations, readings and projections of Ten Skies stray rather far from the film’s own form—a point she herself acknowledges when writing about the third sky. I was especially drawn to the essay on the sixth sky, which raises questions of gender in Benning’s oeuvre and its relation to the marginalised American male lone-wolf, as illustrated by the Unabomber. It’s fascinating to view Benning’s work through this lens, given that he is both a filmmaker who labours over his own productions and a Romantic who senses a profound closeness to nature (here understood in the Romantic sense). The seventh sky is also handled admirably, particularly the discussion of the proximity between industrialisation and cinema as a technique that rationalises Time. This analysis is highly pertinent to the mise-en-scène Benning presents on screen.

Reading this also reminded me of the ‘sun wrangler’ practice among gaffers on film sets, who can deftly read the light simply by observing the sky. That craft still makes a powerful impression on me, evoking protagonists of many 1990s climate-fiction novels, replete with sky-based weather-observation pursuits (storm chasers, cloud watchers and so forth). Overall, the book also brought to mind the fourteenth-century anonymous Christian mystic treatise The Cloud of Unknowing, especially the section on the ‘cloud of forgetting’—a process of relinquishing ego and desire before entering the ‘cloud of unknowing’, that mass of clouds which conceals God so that He may be encountered directly, akin to dwelling in the mist rather than through thought or intellect. Perhaps, to apprehend Benning’s work fully, one must simply surrender oneself, struck dumb by the obscurity, the blurriness and the vastness of the cloud of unknowing.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

i've only made tentative dips into the waters of experimental film, haven't seen anything by benning, nevertheless was still pretty engaged by this. another entry in this series of ten books on ten key films of the 2000s, another instance of long form film criticism that expands what writing about the (now nearly impossible to define) idea of cinema can be. Faced with an inscrutable work like TEN SKIES Balsom decides on a method of criticism that knows it cannot hope to come away with a clear picture of things but can only drift in and out of some kind of focus. In her words; "TEN SKIES at once rewards a close attention to detail and sanctions wayward drift. In these pages, what I want to mirror is not the film itself, which can never be made present, but something of this double movement, writing now closer, now farther, from its images. Knowing I can never catch up, I am let loose to roam." Truthfully, the way my brain works, with a tendency toward feeling rather than thought, yet alone articulable thought, this drift sounds natural to me not just for something like the work at hand, but for most art in general. Lovely to see the technique in practice though, Balsom drifts as well as Maggie Nelson in Bluets (which gets referenced), as well as Olivia Laing, as well as Nathalie Leger. I'm hungry for more.

[Pate Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an excerpt of this a few months ago for a workshop Elena Gorfinkel hosted at UW-Madison. Balsom’s careful approach to ekphrasis was compelling enough to persuade me to purchase this cute volume, especially after enjoying Melissa Anderson’s Inland Empire monograph in the same series.

The sky outside after finishing this book is a somber, total gray. Leafless trees from my childhood home reach up to meet it; tiny droplets reach down from it in that interstitial realm between mist and rain. Slowly, the gray fades to black, the same black the trees have taken on. Far from Benning’s euphoric or apocalyptic visions, this rainy day isn’t quite so aestheticized, but it’s the one outside of my backyard. I’m grateful for a new way to look at it.

[James Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this in the 36 hours or so after seeing TEN SKIES projected at Light Industry. Balsom, acknowledging the challenge of writing about a movie that is made up of ten 10-minute shots of skies, starts off by comparing that challenge to that of the people who initially created a scientific taxonomy of clouds. She then goes about ruminating on the experience of watching the film, placing it in the context of film and political history, giving some background on Benning as an artist and trickster.

Just like Pinkerton's Fireflies Press book that precedes this one, the book is about film in an era of transition and decline. TEN SKIES wasn't Benning's last 16mm movie, but it was among the final few. Balsom talks a lot about the difference between watching this in a theatre and watching it on YouTube. Balsom cites Hito Steyerl's "In Defense of the Poor Image" to defend the YouTube version on political grounds but to me it feels like Balsom's true allegiances lie with the experience of watching it on film, well-projected, in a dark room (or maybe those are just my allegiances). Balsom's book is a wonderful and moving celebration of the possibilities of this artform; it's mildly tragic that movies like these are so hard to see in their most perfect form.

[My Tam · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a picture is worth a million words, film would be in the billions. This book selects an economy of language that envisions and narrates 10 Skies into human imagination and meaning. Concise and its own form of beauty - I was completely transformed and finished it in one sitting. Its reference materials is a PhD dissertation in the making while using relatable diction. A book about a film that also deserves to be made into its own moving picture. For now, it’ll just be embedded into my imagination and dreams. Highly recommend.

[Christopher McQuain · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. This series of cinephilic monographs is, in every respect, treasurable, and this entry (surely TEN SKIES is the most challenging to write on, of the films covered so far -- a fact Balsom acknowledges and fruitfully explores) is no exception.

[Anton]

erika balsom är kanske min favorit av aktiva filmkritker och ingen har riktigt hennes perspektiv? kort bok, från en serie böcker som fireflies press ger ut, om james bennings film ten skies som består av enbart stilla foto av tio himlar. stark film, starkt kompletterad av den här texten

[Adam Krasnoff]

Aspirational stuff. Feeling very thankful and inspired.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benning-heads: it is okay to read Ten Skies without having watched Ten Skies.

[Breogán Xague · Rating 5 out of 5]

Supoño q isto é o q pasa cando xuntas a dúas cabras 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[Domitori · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Benning’s TEN SKIES is a 100 minute long film comprised of ten static shots of ten different skies, each lasting 10 minutes. This highly accurate description seemingly preempts not only any necessity to watch this film but also any necessity — or possibility— to write anything else about it. And yet Erika Balsom managed to write 150 whopping pages (plus footnotes) about TEN SKIES, and to make it exciting, engrossing, ebullient, educational and edifying. This is the second book in the series The Decadent Editions published by the folks who were behind The Fireflies magazine (“ten books about ten films: a film for every year of the 2000s”) and it should be a blueprint for what the monographic writing on (experimental) cinema could accomplish.

[Dani Cabo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro tan o más imprescindible que la película de James Benning que analiza, una reflexión lucidísima y apasionante sobre las imágenes, su significado y su alcance. De los más grandes ensayos sobre cine que he leído hasta ahora.