A historical criminal investigation in Benning’s radical response to genre cinema.
The film is based on the stories of two American murderers, serial killer Ed Gein—a farmer and body snatcher from Wisconsin who died in an asylum in 1984—and Californian school student Bernadette Protti, who in 1984 stabbed her classmate to death. With actors hired to reenact witness testimonies and read out court transcripts, the movie barely touches on the actual murders, focusing instead on the shockingly mundane motivation of the murderers and the landscapes: the paved roads and malls of Wisconsin, the bungalows, swimming pools ,and lawns of suburban California.
By planting evil, crime, and death, which have been assimilated and devalued by entertainment genres, back in reality, Benning maintains his distance from the stories, avoiding affect and sensationalism. In Landscape Suicide, a depressing farm town in the Midwest (Benning, born in Milwaukee, was hailed as cinema’s voice of the Midwest at the beginning of his career) and an affluent suburb in California are two poles that converge into a single geographical location somewhere, as a reviewer from the Chicago Tribune put it, «in the dark recesses of the American Dream.»
The film will be shown in English with Russian subtitles.
The film will be introduced by film critic Evgeniy Mayzel.
Landscape Suicide
Director: James Benning
USA, 1987. 95 min. 18+