James Benning's films all deal with the American experience-with landscapes, exterior and internal. In Landscape Suicide he approaches the point at which place and experience meet, this time in action, in examining two sensational murder cases: a California teenager who knifed a popular classmate out of jealousy; and 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 both 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).