James Benning's films all deal with the American experience-with landscapes, exterior and internal. Benning pioneered the static landscape format often associated now with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, in the painterly formalism of 11 x 14, 8-1/2 x 11 and One Way Boogie Woogie in the seventies, and the oblique narrative forms of Him and Me and American Dreams in the eighties. In Landscape Suicide he once again approaches the point at which place and experience meet, this time in action, in examining two sensational murder cases. One is that of a California teenager who knifed a popular classmate out of jealousy; the other, the case of a Wisconsin farmer who shot a storekeeper's wife, seemingly inadvertently, then mutilated his victim. Two disturbing interviews with the murderers (compellingly reenacted by Rhonda Bell and Elion Sacker) are the centerpiece of Benning's exploration of their environments-very different landscapes that produce a terrifying, explosive solitude. "(Benning's) recontextualization of the killings...provides him with as potent a 'story' as he's told until now.... The banalities and splendors within Benning's tight frames are no longer begging to be seen as things-in-themselves. Instead, the images comprise a world that presses itself upon you, demanding to be seen" (Katherine Dieckmann, Village Voice).