The title of Christopher Buckley’s bestselling novel Thank You for Smoking would make a perfect epigraph to James Benning’s movie.
The film features twenty people and twenty shots, the length of each determined by the time the protagonist takes to light, smoke, and throw away a cigarette. The protagonists are all Benning’s friends, including experimental filmmakers Sharon Lockhart and Thom Andersen, but who they are does not really matter. There is no dialogue and no voiceover, nothing but the twenty cigarettes and twenty silent explorations of the landscapes of human faces.
The human face is a magical material. Two seminal masterpieces of Soviet and international documentary filmmaking—Look at Her Face by Pavel Kogan and Ten Minutes Older by Herz Frank—consist entirely of looking at human faces. Kogan’s camera secretly follows the visitors to the Hermitage looking at the Madonna Litta, attributed to Da Vinci, while Frank’s single-shot film is focused on a boy’s face during a puppet show. Benning has chosen to film a more grown-up activity, frowned upon by doctors and the authorities, yet very popular. In fact, the cigarette is a perfect tool to keep a person in front of the camera for just enough time for them to forget they are being filmed. The result is a fascinating (despite the static camera and the absence of narrative) adventure, a journey across faces and characters.
Twenty Cigarettes
Director: James Benning
USA, 2011, 99 min. 18+