James Benning is one of the most widely praised of American avant-garde filmmakers. His earlier films, which include 11 x 14, One Way Boogie Woogie and Grand Opera, explore new narrative techniques through a painterly use of cinematic space recalling Benning's work in pop and minimalist painting. All deal in some way with the American experience (11 x 14, a study of the Midwestern landscape, has been said by critic J. Hoberman to “point toward the creation of a new, nonliterary but populist cinema”). Benning's newest feature, Him and Me, recalls the filmmaker's life from the Fifties to the Eighties in terms of both public and private events. It was featured in a National Film Theatre, London, series on new independent cinema, where the film received this note:
“A not-so-young couple meet, get a bit drunk, chatter, go to bed. The next morning the man is dead. But the film is much more than this; a collage of American life in the Sixties, a catalogue of hurt, disillusion and brutality, covering the McCarthy era, Vietnam and race riots, and a bird's-eye view of hostile, sterile New York. Not an easy film, with a seemingly arbitrary structure, but one which makes a deep and lasting impression.”