Opening: 24 Oct 2024 6:00 pm, Schleifmühlgasse 1

Watching the film—composed of four lengthy shots of people reading, interspersed with short excerpts from their chosen books—you occasionally get the feeling of staring into a mirror, with the subjects’ rhythm of perusal, reexamination, and contemplation bearing a close and slightly uncomfortable resemblance to your own.

The first reader, Clara McHale-Ribot, is making her way through D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, but this doesn’t become apparent until at least the ten-minute mark, when she shifts her position and exposes the book’s jacket to the camera for a short while. And so on for each of the four shots, featuring, in order, the author Rachel Kushner, the sociologist Richard Hedbige, and the performance artist Simone Forti.

It’s tempting, when writing about READERS, to stop at recreating the hypnotic feeling of watching the film. But this can give the false impression that Benning’s direction is nonexistent instead of just skillfully restrained; that his craft consists of turning on the camera and waiting for his viewers to do the hard work. A more accurate statement would be that Benning, aims to foster and celebrate the artistry of other people without compromising his own—a goal hinted at in READER’s cast of world-class thinkers and creators. This desire to connect with the ordinary, adventurous viewer also seems to have played a part in the director’s switch from 16mm to digital a decade ago.

Benning’s artistry is most visible in READERS at those moments when the film jumps between ways of seeing. In each short period following a shot of a reader, after we’ve spent oh-so much time scanning the frame at our own pace, we’re suddenly forced to read for ourselves, right to left and top to bottom. The effect is jarring but invigorating and even a little funny, lying somewhere between a non sequitur, a big reveal, and a punch line.

Benning’s four readers engage in a practice that’s becoming rarer with each passing day: spending time by themselves, sans electronic distractions of any kind, and pondering. By celebrating this, Benning’s output offers the ultimate rebuttal to slow cinema’s detractors. How can patient contemplation be trivial when it’s going extinct?

(quot. Jackson Arn, Long, Hard Looks, 2018)

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