Our friends at Oklahoma City University’s Wide Open Experimental Film Festival return for our bimonthly screening series of experimental feature films. This month, we’ll be watching The United States of America (2022) by James Benning, a renowned independent filmmaker, educator, and activist. (He even taught at the University of Oklahoma in the late ‘70s!) Benning’s revisit to his 1979 film splices together static shots of places in each of the fifty states, lasting two minutes each, to tell a visual story of contemporary America. Much like the style of Frederick Wiseman, Benning’s film relies on the immersion of observation to deliver a message of a greater American experience and culture we are otherwise not attuned to.

Genre: Documentary, Experimental
Runtime: 1h 38m
Rating: NR