Twenty Cigarettes | Review

Ninety-nine minutes, twenty shots, twenty cigarettes, twenty faces (ten men, ten women) – sounds exciting, doesn’t it? To anyone who hasn’t already been converted by one of James Benning’s deceptively simple structural films, the prospect of sitting through all of Twenty Cigarettes is perhaps more toxic than a cigarette itself. However, while this is by no means Benning’s finest hour, it represents yet another accomplished work of minimalism, in which every gesture – every twitch in the frame – sends ripples through your cerebrum. If there is a disappointment here, though, it’s that those ripples don’t continue to the viscera – the first time such could be said of a Benning film in over a decade.

Working once again in his newly adopted medium of HD digital video, Twenty Cigarettes models each shot around a small set of rules: the shot begins right before his subject lights up, and ends the moment the cigarette goes out. The somewhat playful structure links the film with his 2007 masterpiece RR, in which every shot begins when a train enters the frame, and ends only once the train has disappeared off the edge, around a corner, or into the horizon. In this way, these films are collaborations between Benning and his subjects. He dictates where the camera is and where it’s pointed, but the duration is out of his hands. If the conductor of a mile-long train crawls his engine along, or the smoker takes a puff only once every 52 seconds, we’re all in it for the long haul.

This worked wonders in RR, lining up a densely layered landscape epic, but makes for a mixed bag here. Many smokers, including avant-garde stars Sharon Lockhart and Thom Andersen, are fascinating to behold, even if it’s only because of our recognition of a familiar face. Others, however, add nothing to the dialogue. Where RR featured 43 shots that each introduced a new element to the conversation, one might leave Cigarettes petitioning to decrease the quantity of cigarettes per pack to somewhere around a dozen. The big vacancy that one will feel in this film, though, is the lack of any sort of vertiginous build-up. Whether it was a train roaring toward us, or a fixed gaze out onto a reflective lake or up at a cloudy sky, the gravity and sublime grandeur of Benning’s compositions have always heightened the viewing experience to a point where we are virtually destabilized from the theatre chair. Here, his Warholian screen tests leave us with little sense of depth or natural splendour, and are modelled off of an often numbing stasis.

This can’t really be taken as a moral statement, either. Benning is no smoker, but one doesn’t get the impression that he is demystifying the ambivalently glamourous habit as a form of picketing. Tied as much to cinema history as it is to the stereotype of the French intellectual, it takes a lot to make smoking anti-cinematic, and yet it is presented here lumped right on the line between ‘hypnotically fascinating’ and ‘squalidly tedious.’ One of Benning’s initial intentions with the project was to study how his non-acting performers relaxed from their stilted self-consciousness into an unknowing mode that could allow for moments of true portraiture. At the expense of alienating the audience for large portions of his film’s duration, he managed to achieve just that.

Reviewed on September 10th at the 2011 Toronto Int. Film Festival – Wavelengths 2 Programme.
99 Mins.

Rating 3.5 stars