I finally saw this companion piece to 13 Lakes last night at the Ontario Cinematheque and I must say, it is absolutely breathtaking. It is as vigorous and intense as anything in the cannon of Brakhage. For the patient viewer it stands as a philosophical meditation on the ever-transforming landscape of nature as well as a testament to how much beauty stands outside of the realm of man. When you see a plane or a bird, they seem so alien and intrusive to this world just outside our own.
The clouds sometime seem to have faces, you want to project anthropomorphic features onto them, they shift like Rorsach paintings, sometimes the clouds appear as an ocean, or a vast, impenetrable mountain range...
This is a limitless film for someone who possesses even a modicum of imagination. I also thought about how many great people looked to the skies for truth and enlightenment. Franklin's experiments with lightning, Wittgenstein's experiments with wind and kite coordinates.
This is epic, heroic film-making. If Benning hadn't have made this film, someone had too.
The only problem I have with the film is semantic, and will probably only bother me. 13 Lakes was about 13 different lakes. 10 Skies is about ONE sky, segmented by breaks between ten ten-minute film reels. This segmentation and Benning's way of framing it, make me wonder if I'm missing something rhetorical in the piece, outside of its intuitive formalism.
The other thing about this film is that visually its very straining on the eyes because there's multiple patterns moving at the same time, all the time, endlessly layered, endlessly emerging but also slow moving. Haze comes like a fade in, but its opacity begs the absolute limit of looking. The result is as close to a trance effect as you can find in film-making.
Looking forward to seeing more of Benning's fabulous work.
