The key lies in the capital letters. For someone renowned for his understated, minimalist approach towards his art, James Benning has made his point loud and clear this time round with ALLENSWORTH, an hour-long tribute to the African-Americans who defied huge odds to fight for their deserved dignity in life in the pre-segregration U.S.
A montage of 11 five-minute-long static shots of landscapes and buildings that were once part of the first Californian settlement to be founded, inhabited and governed by Black people – plus a solitary live shot of a young woman reciting poems by American literary icon Lucille Clifton – ALLENSWORTH ranks as one of Benning’s most overtly political statement in years, if not in his five-decade career. It easily surpasses the opaque hints of critique against colonialism and cultural appropriation in natural history, his 2014 documentary about the Vienna Natural History Museum, or any of the films from his Californian trilogy.
Making its international premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum, ALLENSWORTH should sustain a long run on the festival circuit, starting with a berth at Cinema du Reél in Paris next month.
Filmed across one calendar year, ALLENSWORTH invites the viewer to look, ponder and imagine the circumstances, context and compass of a town established by Colonel Allen Allensworth, a freed slave-turned-pastor, in California in 1908. The 20-acre settlement offered African-Americans a safe haven to live in, and was also considered proof of how Black people could build and manage an independent, thriving community when freed from the shackles of racial bigotry of the day.
The town faded away in the 1920s when the local water company diverted its wells to neighbouring white towns and a rerouting of railway lines stripped the community of its own station. Having stood abandoned for years, the town has since been transformed into a “state historic park”, with buildings refurnished on site for educational tours.
ALLENSWORTH begins with a shot, filmed in January, of a barren piece of land where two trees stand mournfully in open winter. There’s no trace of any kind of human presence until the sounds of a passing, unseen locomotive are heard – a gesture Benning repeats throughout the film, with trains (and cars) rolling or speeding through the frame – thus marking the way the town began from scratch.
What follows are individual shots of Allensworth’s buildings, among them private homes, a store, a school, a post office, a hotel for business travellers passing through, and the cemetery. Just as in most of Benning’s films, there are also clear onscreen indications of what they were – a list appears in the final credits – but their appearance here, one after the other, reveals a town which once maintained a clearly defined social order.
Apart from raising attention about Allensworth’s existence to uninitiated American and international audiences, Benning also elevates the buildings into something way beyond their usual association with resilience or regret, found only in the final shot of a gravestone that might symbolise the end of Allensworth. Here, they are edifices radiating visual beauty. In some of these five-minute shots, sunlight and shadows appear and fade; in others, trains and vehicles punctuate the landscape. In the one shot marked “October”, a large tree leans onto Colonel Allenworth’s house in a wild gust, a visual allegory of his premature demise in a fatal traffic accident, that foretells the downfall of the settlement.
But there are more obvious indicators of Benning’s views, too. Nina Simone’s song “Blackbird” and Lead Belly’s “In the Pines”, both touching on the sorrow and perils faced by African-Americans in Jim Crow-era America, accompany two of the shots. Benning’s most unambiguous political gesture, however, lies with the “August” shot, in which a young Black woman (Faith Johnson) recites several of Lucille Clifton’s defiant poems about African-American identity, written afterwards about the civil rights movement.
With all these elements intact, and an ending that includes the well-known photo of African-American student Elizabeth Eckford being hassled by white students while trying to enter a racially segregated school in 1957, ALLENSWORTH offers a brief, beautiful but powerful shout-out to those who fought bigotry with courage.
Director, screenplay, producer: James Benning
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Forum)
In English
65 minutes
