American Dreams (lost and found)

16mm print!

Milwaukee-born filmmaker James Benning’s austere personal history of the USA from 1954 to 1976, told through an amalgamation of his Hank Aaron card collection with the scrolling scrawl of would-be Nixon assassin Arthur Bremer’s diaries. Benning describes the film as an homage to his own coming-of-age, combining his love of baseball with interests in American history, politics, and popular culture to achieve a formally complex and aesthetically challenging take on the American Dream.

(James Benning, 1984, USA, 55 mins, 16mm)