Casting A Glance

In advance of seeeing James Benning's Casting A Glance, I erroneously told my friend who was coming along to it that it was going to be an arty documentary about a bridge in Utah, with footage shot over thirty-something years. In retrospect I don't know where I got the bridge part from. A doublecheck of the description afterwards revealed that the word 'bridge' didn't occur anywhere in it. But I was right about Utah and the thirty-something years of footage, and even the 'arty', after a fashion. And those turned out to be the important things. This is not to imply that I thought this was a good film, however, because I did not.

Casting A Glance is a series of held shots of a vast stone spiral jetty sculpture and surrounding environs on Utah's Great Salt Lake, taken during different seasons and weathers. It transpires in this manner: A date will glumly flash onto the screen, the first in 1970, the last in 2007, to be followed by a series of long static shots of stones, water, foam and hills, accompanied by a cacophony of wind and surf roar on the soundtrack. Then it's time for the next date, then the next series of shots. Such is the delivery of the film's eighty minutes.

If the terrain had changed more (or even a bit?) in a macroscopic fashion across nearly four decades, that might have seemed to be the best argument for the film's existence. But it didn't. The only changes I perceived were the expected seasonal ones. The result was extremely dull, visually, conceptually, sonically – whichever way you care to rotate the experience. The images prompted very little contemplation within me, except occasionally about the nature of this film, and were only rarely of much aesthetic engagement.

I can report that the 1980s on the salt flat were a time of water and boredom. 2002 was a time of painfully distorted recording of wind noise. I'm sure I heard other people in the cinema muttering about the assault on their ears at this point. Benning skipped showing us any footage of the site during the nineties, but if he'd had the idea that it was time to quit the project at this point, he obviously didn't stick with it.

To have recorded the material over the long time period was the principal feat here, but the resultant film needs to stand as a successful construction in its own right, and it is a weak and boring one. Something else should have been done with this material, though I accept it's easy for me to say that without thinking about what that something else might have been.