“Don’t be fooled by the smoke,” James Benning told a sold-out audience at the Toronto International Film Festival screening of his latest film “Twenty Cigarettes.” A collection of living portraits, in which 20 smokers, all friends of his, face the camera for the time it takes to consume a cigarette, it is both an homage to Andy Warhol’s fabled screen tests and a quintessential film for Mr. Benning, 68, a giant of American experimental cinema whose conceptually minimalist works tend to open up vast spaces for reflection.
Observation and duration are central to his method. The 2004 landscape films “Thirteen Lakes” and “Ten Skies,” with their stark, self-explanatory titles, are composed entirely of 10-minute static shots, each the length of a 16-millimeter film reel. In his 2007 film “RR,” a monumental study of railroads in America, each shot lasts as long as it takes for a passing train to cross the frame.
“Twenty Cigarettes” introduces a human dimension to Mr. Benning’s temporal investigations. All 20 of his subjects were left alone with the camera after Mr. Benning had framed the shot, and asked simply to smoke a cigarette. Some go from lighting up to stubbing out in under three minutes; others take two or three times as long. And all of them, Mr. Benning said in an interview on Sunday, “release a feel of who they are” amid the drags and puffs of smoke. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.
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