11 x 14

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)