Tulare Road 2010

Directed by James Benning

Benning shot Tulare Road on a highway in California’s Central Valley, an area that the director had previously explored in his film El Valley Centro (2000). Here, the only part of the SoCal landscape pictured is a lonely stretch of road extending to a distant horizon. Shot three times and presented on three adjoining channels, each version displays an almost identical composition of land and road under different weather formations, from dense fog to cloudy blue skies. The startling clarity of HD video plays against the landscape’s eerie stillness, broken intermittently by the rising and falling roar of passing cars or trucks.