One fine morning I awoke to discover that, during the night, I had learned to understand the language of birds. I have listened to them ever since. They say: 'Look at me!' or, ' Get out of here!' or, 'Let's fuck!' or, 'Help!' or, 'Hurrah!' or, 'I found a worm!' And that's all they say. And that, when you boil it down, is about all we say. (Which of those things am I saying now?)¹

The answer to this, one of Hollis Frampton's trademark riddles, is of course contingent on the reader. This contingency became acutely apparent, and even troubling in my viewing of James Benning's California Trilogy. Like this bird talk, the statements are pretty clear; the problem arrives with their interlocution. Benning, for one, is persistently absent throughout. But like South (Hurley, 1919), the film made from the footage of Shakelton's failed expedition to Antarctica, one is keenly aware that the filmmaker must have actually just been there, just then, of physical presence on terrain in a present, of, well, contingencies. One shot showed their ship 'The Endurance' frozen on top of a wave. The scene was so still you looked all over the frame for motion. A torn bit of sail flutters, barely perceptibly - life. That's what we do, looking these films over, we watch the world become animate, we see the life in it.

Someone familiar with California might understand these films geographically, and indeed, each film is in part a riddle of place, the answers neatly tucked into the back of the film. You know what to call it once you're gone. But only the quickest of wits could match the names to all the places, so briefly does the reference appear on the screen. No, you can only catch a few, like the San Andreas Fault. Was it really? Geography riddles aside, the films perform a sort of revenge of place itself. As virtual space grows into ubiquity, real space is ever more highly valued, ever more unreachable. Once upon a time, when confined between book and bed covers, places like Hardy's Wessex, or the visions of closed eyes featured more fleetingly than virtual spaces do daily today. Now, as that no-place threatens to replace place at every turn, to experience quality space in real time is difficult and rare. Even in its virtuoso performance here, we are still watching a movie. Place is not avenged by offering itself up to us for sensate inspection alone, but by shifting the ground under he or she who watches. Though the framing of these landscapes could not be more stable or more consistent, to view these films is to become a nomad, wandering through territory with only your senses and your wits about you.

These films don't worry about the distinction between virtual and real space very much, but rather the more profound trouble that lies behind that distinction. That trouble is the distinctly modern slippage between nature and second nature. Second nature, the nature that culture makes, threatens to become nature itself. Benning works through these two basic categories from every imaginable angle to show us how they make, undo and outdo each other, and how, sometimes, they can combine to make something else altogether. Lukács claimed in 1920 that 'second nature, the nature of man-made structures, has no lyrical substantiality'.² We might question this now. As Lukács knew full well, second nature wasn't going anywhere soon. Thus the problem was how to deal with such a soul-destroying phenomenon, one that was, moreover, a mimetic phenomenon, so good at taking nature's place. Lukács carefully teases them apart: 'This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses - meanings - which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities.'³ In the course of the trilogy we get to know that charnel house awfully well, from irrigated fields where only a train's whistle interrupts the anonymous regulation of soil, water and sun to make food, through sixteen-lane highways to the office building, church and prison. Lukács's solution to the ascendance of second nature went this way: 'This second nature would only be brought to life - if this were possible - by the metaphysical act of reawakening the souls which, in an early or ideal existence, created or preserved it,⁴ this solution did and does ring hollow. Since Lukács so eloquently formulated the problem, the task of 'reawakening' has been the subject of much theoretical endeavour.⁵ Theory aside for a moment, this task continually fuels our artistic productions, most particularly and appropriately in that medium whose very nature is second nature, film. As Maya Deren said, 'you point the camera, it does the rest.'⁶ So let's turn now to see what Benning does with it.

Each film is a study of an aspect of the California cultural and physical landscape. El Valley Centro (1999) deals largely with agribusiness, Los (Angeles) (2000) with the urban scene, and finally, Sogobi (the Shoshone word for 'earth', 2001) with the sights and sounds of the wilderness. Although they are discreet films, they share a formal structure along with recurring visual and sonic imagery. The division of subject matter alluded to above is not absolute, each film begins and ends with a body of water, each has a billboard tucked into it, something is always on fire somewhere, and, even in Sogobi, one is never spared technology's thrilling re-articulations of nature, such as the mountain of logs getting a shower while a monstrous derrick groans overhead out in the middle of nowhere, on terrain fit only for giants.

The films are each constructed of 35 two-and-a-half-minute shots. Each shot is filmed by a static camera, each composed with often equal portions of earth and sky and angled similarly, but varying sufficiently to achieve a vast and deep field of vision. Sound, likewise rich and contingent upon the environment, regains its mysterious quality, a quality lost when sound is reigned in and tied tightly to images. You hear the murmur of a conversation, it gets loud enough to catch a phrase or a few words, then you see the backsides of joggers. Far from docile, this ambient sound scrapes at the earth, soars through the sky, clamours and clanks, purrs and whistles and bores right at you. No longer merely servicing the image, sound runs wild. So unencumbered, sound here shares the intrigue of The Conversation, the thrill of a Hitchcock movie, though unlike such films, their source often remains a mystery. The images by contrast are fixed, sure and discrete.

The temporal and spatial precision of each frame portions reality out for physiognomic inspection. Like the epic scene in Brecht, the shot in Eisenstein, these scenes are 'so many tableaux', as Barthes developed the term.⁷ In a tableau and in these long takes the scene is 'laid out (in the sense in which one says the table is laid)'. And, it is cut out, sliced from infinite time and space and then re-fixed on the screen. So laid out, they demand perusal, inch by inch. So cut out, they accomplish the 'coincidence of the visual and the ideal découpages'.⁸ Such découpage or 'cutting out', wherein the viewing eye becomes the apex of a visual triangle, creates, according to Barthes, 'sovereign' images with 'clearly defined edges' in which 'everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view'. And like the 'perfect instant', which Diderot conceived as the ideal moment chosen by the painter, these carefully cut-out frames portray space such that it is at once 'totally concrete and totally abstract'.⁹ Benning's method, arduous pilgrimage to real places on the one hand and systematic mathematical treatment of their images on the other, produces films in which we oscillate between the abstract and the concrete, frame by frame.

Like early actualities, these films are contingent on the uncontrolled environment of the out-of-doors, people under mild-to-no direction, a fixed camera and the logic of the 100-foot reel. Lumiere's Boat Leaving Port (1895; the films were actually on 17-metre reels, about 50 seconds long), for example, shows three people in a large rowboat venturing out to the open sea. A wave lifts the boat up and almost out of sight, the film ends, the question of their safety, the thrill of the slide down the wave forever suspended. Mitchell and Kenyon's film Pendlebury Colliery (c.1900; 100ft reel) shows workers filing out at the factory gate and then crowding in front of the camera, some of the youngsters waving to say 'look at me'. Like many others, the Mitchell and Kenyon films were made explicitly to show at the fairground in the evening where people would pay to see themselves on film. That difference notwithstanding, the kind of attention these films evoke shares with California Trilogy a crucial feature since lost as cinema was got under control. Since about 1905, most movies have been heavily directed and edited to look like they are not directed at all so that the film's logic pulls you into it and away from your reality. By staying in one place once again, Benning gives us back our freedom to roam all over the image, and returns to us our sense of chance, of contingency. So clearly framed, so calmly paced, so carefully laid out, you survey these tableaux for their details, to find the flutter of the wind, to gauge the current in the water, to catch someone's eye.

However active a spectator they conjure, these images have something to say to us. The first film, El Valley Centro, begins at a spillway where deep blue water runs into a round sinkhole in a staggering mountain scene, the Eden where technology's rationalisation of nature begins. This place will be seen again at the end of the trilogy, but the water level will have dropped significantly. After all, the water was running the whole time. The body of water that ends this film is barely discernible at the bottom of the massive cement crater called the Teerink Pumping Station. If you were to fly over the film you'd spot a few bodies of water here and there for your enjoyment, but mostly you'd see water labouring for agriculture and transport. Like fishing in a drainage canal, El Valley Centro easily integrates utility and pleasure, nature and its rationalisation. As the movement from spillway to pumping station would indicate, the focus here is on the enormity and the reach of that rationalisation. Spillway, almond orchard, irrigation sprinklers, waste separator, hay raker, freight train, oil-well fire - these first shots give you a fair idea of industry's massive scale and impact. Natural and industrial noises fill the air and, in another context, these episodes could be seen as a paean to technology's awesome feats. But this is not Vertov, Eisenstein, or even Dovzhenko, though flashes from The Old and the New (1929) and, especially, The Earth (1930) will undoubtedly strike home. Benning's project, in these first shots, is not to imbricate people with technology or to glorify progress but rather to show the easy fit between technology and nature in all its happy autonomy. Water slaps, birds gab, dogs woof, sprinklers spit, trains toot, machines hum. The symmetry of planted rows filing out to infinity in their perfection and the clumsy cleverness of heavy machinery are notoriously photogenic. The absence of a manipulative film language, the pure it-ness of the image as it is delivered to us drives us to listen carefully to the sounds for subjective guidance. Although the mechanical, natural but never human sounds perform minor dramas, they are similarly autonomous. That massive organisation of nature called agribusiness, as strange as it is luscious, seems not to need us at all. We approach it and leave it as something already underway.

The subjective autonomy Benning achieves allows for what Heidegger would call a 'free relationship' to technology.¹⁰ Technology, for Heidegger, is 'no mere means' but rather it is, as he puts it, ' a way of revealing'.¹¹ 'It reveals,' he says, 'whatever does not bring itself forth and does not lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another.' Technology is the process that reveals anything that cannot do so itself. This same process occurs in nature as physis, 'the arising of something out of itself', when a blossom, for example, bursts into bloom.¹² Unlike the cultural, mechanical, technological realm, the natural one is one in which, for Heidegger, things reveal themselves. That ingenious transformation from seed to bloom reveals the blossom without the help of technology. Technology performs the same magic act from, say the plan of a ship or a house to the finished product, that nature does on its own, and it is a similarly beguiling spectacle. Unlike the usual way agriculture and industry are filmed, we don't see the magical revelation which we expect from technology, the movement from floor plan to finished house, for example, or the cultivation of a crop to a finished product, shipped and then set on the kitchen table. The trilogy performs instead a different revelation through technology, the essence rather than the trickery of both nature and second nature. On this issue Heidegger writes: 'the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it.'¹³ Benning robs technology of its star turn - clever transformation - and renders it, to begin with, in its most dangerous guise: neutrality. As the trilogy begins, we are seriously close to a world in which 'second nature is, in truth, first nature'.¹⁴ By beginning the film thus, by tuning us into its essence, Benning alerts us to technology in every frame. 'Everywhere,' Heidegger goes on, 'we remain unfree and chained to technology whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.' With these first frames we are shown a landscape on which technology is, in short, 'delivered over in the worst possible way'.

After the smoke and roar of an oil-well fire, and just when you are beginning to think that there are no people left on the earth - dead quiet - metal chipping into hard soil, shoes trampling on dry earth, people talking in Spanish and figures, moving forward towards you, are loosely syncopated with the beat of hoes weeding the field. As the guy in the centre row gets close, the moment you've been waiting for, a word, a nod, a glance, a bump into the lens that would reveal the camera's presence seems likely. So close does he come that his back and shoulders take over the frame, then, just as unremarkably, he recedes from vision, and a bit of song bursts from a radio, 'qué fue mi corazón'. I belabour these labourers because this is where Benning makes it clear that you will never be hearing from him. His stubborn absence is tested like a game of chicken, and no one flinches. When Griffith was filming in the ghettos of New York City's lower east side early on, he would have killed for such unobtrusiveness.¹⁵ This is not the place to account for the lack of interest in the camera nowadays, for surely 100 years have changed some aspects of how we address it. In so far as we peruse the image in instances like these for that address, for signs of 'life', not to mention a subjective presence behind the camera, we again share in the pleasures of primitive cinema. But that is not the kind of animistic communication we're after here. Benning manifestly denies us his vision because he wants us to retrain our vision. The task of these films, we now know for certain, is to destroy worn categories of thought, habitual ways of perceiving, and to apprehend reality in a different way altogether. To follow the labourer or to have him follow us to reveal anything more than what lens and frame admits would deny the real animism at work in California Trilogy, which is that of the landscape itself, whether it be industrial, urban, or natural.

Some of the landscapes in El Valley Centro haunt us because something is alive and moving, however barely perceptively at times, however noisily and rapidly at others, that might otherwise just as well have been dead. Some give life to death, the sounds of prisoners shouting a drill at the fenced cement-state prison, a plough's lights slowly emerging from a thick fog, for instance. Others find us searching through the low thunder of fluttering birds for the source of a noise while watching a dredge against a bleak industrial background for a sign of life. And yet others shock us with nature's violent, anarchic movement. A scattered mass of snow geese whips together into a loud, congealed mass, like Canetti's crowd, and just as suddenly disperses. As we are at work on our sensuous retraining, however, technology merrily runs apace.

We have, in the course of the film, run through primitive technology (the skill of lassoing the goat with eye-catching speed at the Rodeo) to modern technology. The distinguishing feature of modern technology is the fact that it can control and use nature over time and space. Because it extracts power from nature and uses it as a resource or reserve, electricity, to take one example, has a power over nature that is uniquely modern. Heidegger's objections to modern technology, recently taken up by environmentalists, understand technology's uniquely modern capacity to sap and store energy as one that effectively turns nature into a servant of technology. Benning gives us two extreme examples of such technology that 'sets upon nature and challenges it to yield'.¹⁶ About a third of the way into the film, we look down on a valley of whooshing white windmills, we hear a didgeridoo-like twang and the cooing of the wind in minor fourths. It is nothing short of a symphony, maybe even an opera in nature's language. The film ends, however, with a far more dour image, much more in line with Heidegger's defining concept of Gestell, which has the double sense of both an apparatus and a skeleton, somewhat maintained by its English equivalent, 'frame' that he uses to distinguish modern technology from the rest. The contrast between these two framings could not be more marked, the first activity and life, the last a giant tombstone for nature. Far from ambivalence, I think, this contrast is part-and-parcel of Benning's dialectical intimacy with the grandeur and the poverty of second nature as it works on us today. A series of concrete rows form a descending arena fit for Goliaths and, as we look down into all that empty space, behind an anonymous building flanked by a parking lot and a couple of silly-looking trees, we can discern, in the vast distance, that tiny patch of blue. Standing, waiting in reserve in deadly silence at this pumping station, water is dear, clearly, not only to this filmmaker but also, clearly, just so very dear. From the simple sinkhole to the industrial monument, from plenitude to scarcity, from Eden to Gehenna, technology, in the form of the camera, has given us the ability to see the nature of second nature.

Los (Angeles) begins with water cascading down the Los Angeles aqueduct towards the city to the sounds of highway traffic. We will eventually get to the beach, but for the most part Los looks at cars, roads, sidewalks, the movement of people, the stasis of buildings. A man and a woman kiss on a billboard, then a virgin asphalt road traverses housing lots with a bright-orange fire hydrant clowning around in the desert sand waiting for action. Maybe that's where the kissing couple will build their first home and get there on the highway that follows that shot, and finally maybe they'll become the happy couple jogging in the next shot, but somehow I doubt it. As much as they portend a future, these three landscapes are hieroglyphs, ciphers, ruins. In allegory, writes Adorno of Benjamin's Trauerspiel, 'the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history, a petrified primordial landscape'.¹⁷ Facies hippocratica means a face that has suffered from the worst. The highway, perhaps the most mesmerising image in this film, is in the midst of a 'summer rain'. Dark, thick mist covers a mountain passage from which white lights dart randomly at you and red ones run away. It is sixteen lanes wide, and then there are more roads burrowing alongside in the mountains. Benning isn't hammering home the evils of development, beginning this way. On the contrary, his response to the urban landscape is to produce the conditions for its allegorical comprehension. These images have the sensuousness of ruins, but it is progress rather than battles or earthquakes that gives them this quality. Benjamin writes: 'Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.'¹⁸ The wear of progress corrodes the stability of the present and, in so doing, reveals a detail, a flash of light or a thought from which we might get a purchase on the present, before it becomes the past.

'For radical natural-historical thought,' writes Adorno, 'everything existing transforms itself into ruins and fragment, into just such a charnel-house where signification is discovered, in which nature and history interweave'.¹⁹ The charnel-house, the place where bodies lay and rot waiting to be buried (or re-buried), has expanded significantly since Lukács puzzled over it, since nature could be so neatly divided from second nature, and since this film began.

Sogobi, the final film in the trilogy, puts us with those who are so privileged as to have experienced landscape 'in the beginning', where we touch at the 'surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unrufled'.²⁰ One thinks in whispers, language threatens like asphalt on pure nature. From the roaring sea (at low tide), through a tangle of oak trees, to salt flats where one squints amidst a spectrum of icy blues for a hint of movement, one learns nature's foreign tongue. Repeating a complaint that German translators should turn German into Hindi, Greek and English rather than their constant practice of doing the reverse, Benjamin cites the following on the effects of this more radical form of translation:

Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. The basic
error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own
language happens to be, instead of allowing his language to be powerfully
affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language
very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language
itself, and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He
must expand and deepen his language by means of a foreign language. It is not
generally realised to what extent this is possible, to what extent any
language can be transformed.²¹

The first nine scenes take us deep into the primal elements of nature, and onto archaic, mythic terrain. The camera performs this task of the translator such that our own language, our sensate vocabulary, is transformed.

This final sensitisation significantly ups the ante in this dialectic for which we now need new names. In the tenth episode, the babble of water is slowly overcome by the beat of a helicopter with a box hanging from a wire that travels in and out of view, the sounds of water returning. The billboard, a few episodes on, is blank except for the word 'Available' and a phone number in a desert sunset, the sound of an airplane and a frog. Scenes of nature cut through unscathed ever more infrequently. Near the end, the side of a mountain has been savagely cut through to make way for six lanes of highway. The patterns thus revealed in the rock take your breath away. Yes, that was the San Andreas Fault. Second nature is, in truth, first nature. I should have known all along.

— Rachel Moore