James Benning's Sundance art-documentary, "casting a glance," casts its eye on the Spiral Jetty, the 1,500-foot-long rocky coil created by artist Robert Smithson in 1970 along a remote northern shoreline of the Great Salt Lake.
The film is peaceful, meditative and even beautiful. To many people, it also will be boring as hell.
"Casting a glance" is a series of long, static shots of the jetty, filmed from different angles on a 16mm camera that makes the footage look like something from a 1970s home movie. There's no narration, no music, no camera movement and no background history to place the footage in context -- just one serene, 60-second shot after another. For 80 minutes. It's like the visual equivalent of the New Age music they play at spas to relax the clientele.
The movie is showing in the festival's New Frontier category, which is where Sundance sticks films that are too arty, experimental or just plain weird for mainstream audiences. Even so, the Thursday night screening at Park City's tiny Holiday Village theater was only about half full. A number of viewers gave up and walked out mid-film.
In fairness to Benning, his movie is oddly fascinating in places. He returned to the jetty more than a dozen times between 1971 and 2007, capturing its ever-changing appearance under sun, clouds, snow and crusts of salt as the lake's water levels rose and fell. He even visited several times during the 1980s, when the jetty was completely submerged, to film the lake's surface.
After watching for a while you realize that Benning is trying to replicate the contemplative experience of seeing the jetty in person -- without the distractions of narration or music or gliding camerawork. Like Andy Warhol with his art films, Benning is forcing the viewer to slow down, look and think.
But would it have been too much for the director to show up for a Q&A afterwards? The film ended abruptly, with no credits, leaving Thursday's audience to rouse itself and shuffle out in silence to ponder — or complain about — what they'd just seen. Of the 150 or so Sundance screenings I've attended over the years, this was definitely one of the strangest.
--Brandon Griggs