“The appreciation for a film like The United States of America is always dependent on one’s interpretation of it, given the freedom it gives your mind to roam.”

Postcards from the edge. The wandering mind goes to strange places, invited to do so by the contemplative cinema of James Benning’s The United States of America. Comprised of a series of two-minute static shots of all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico), in alphabetical order and virtually devoid of humans, his film shows images of the US that normally don’t get committed to the film frame. Thus, the edge. Not for the impatient, the poignancy of Benning’s images slowly becomes apparent as you connect the dots, the whole picture of the United States revealing itself the more you contemplate it. The appreciation for a film like The United States of America is always dependent on one’s interpretation of it, given the freedom it gives your mind to roam; those willing to sit with it will find a deeper meaning, while others might deride it as a ‘moving slideshow’ or a travelogue of the US. In other words: your mileage may vary (Benning certainly racked up some miles shooting it).

Many of the shots show America’s vast open spaces, the majesty of its nature. The land of opportunity, the open road, the beauty of a country we also saw glimpses of in Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland. Some states get the short end of the stick (poor Ohio and Tennessee with only shots of clouds); others get the kind of imagery you’d imagine for them, like palm trees in Hawaii or horses in Kentucky. Some are a bit more puzzling, at least to the outsider (why doesn’t Kansas get the shot of sunflowers, for instance, given the state’s nickname and official flower? It is instead given to Maine), but all of them combined show the grandeur and diversity of landscape that the United States undeniably enjoys.

Benning also uses some shots to underline the US’ exploitation of that natural landscape, though wisely not showing the direct consequences (pollution, erosion, etc.), but letting the viewer infer them. The juxtaposition of the peaceful ‘nature shots’ with oil refineries in Louisiana, pumpjacks in Oklahoma, or the mining industry of Minnesota is thus all the more impactful. Similarly, a few of the shots are underscored by audio fragments, essentially the only ‘dialogue’ we hear in the film, and these fragments are deliberately playing over specific states. Thus we get Malcolm X’s famous “by all means necessary” interview accompanying Mississippi, a fervent and God-fearing sermon about ‘fornication’ over the fields of Nebraska, an interview about the genocide of Native Americans set against the Utah landscape, and a speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex seemingly coming from a big mansion in Delaware. These shots fit in with others that have no such audio, but also point out some of America’s biggest issues: a shot of great opulence in Florida and one of a homeless tent camp underneath an overpass in California are just as clear as the issues with black people, the US’ deep-set religion, its fraught history with the country’s original inhabitants, or its imperialist tendencies punctuated by those audio fragments. The fragments are historic, subtly pointing out that these issues are not new and America has been struggling with them for decades.

“This land is your land, this land is my land,” the Woody Guthrie song goes, one of the few diegetic songs we hear in the film. Indeed, The United States of America goes from California to the New York island, but one gets the impression that its land is not really for everybody, especially when you juxtapose the homeless in California with the financial district we see in New York. Not all song choices are subtle (John Lennon’s Imagine, for some reason coupled with Wisconsin, in all its idealistic schmaltz is like a sledgehammer here), just as not all shots are subtle (the Great Lakes for Michigan? Too easy), but as the film that started in Heron Bay, Alabama ends with a shot of a linked-up fence in the middle of nowhere in Kelly, Wyoming, most of The United States of America will have given the viewer something to ponder. In a time when the United States already had a president that wanted to put such a fence on its borders (though he called it a ‘wall’), and with that Woody Guthrie line in mind, it is perhaps the perfect closing shot of a film that shows that there is a lot of beauty to be found in the United States of America, but that unfortunately it is not enjoyed equally by everybody.