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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
