One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning's 1977 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, 11x14 points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema.(James Hoberman, who chose 11 x 14 as one of the top ten films of the seventies (Film Comment, January 1980) and later wrote the above text in The Village Voice)
One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning's 1977 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, 11x14 points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema.(James Hoberman, who chose 11 x 14 as one of the top ten films of the seventies (Film Comment, January 1980) and later wrote the above text in The Village Voice)