YouTube Trilogy: 4 Songs, History, Asian Girls

"As audiences could see for themselves in a special screening series organised by the Austrian Film Museum in November 2011, Benning’s more recent films move in several directions simultaneously. He picks up on older projects, reworks them, yet at times leaves these behind and makes an utterly fresh start – striking a strange equilibrium between continuity and a new slant on particular models of film aesthetics. Benning has been viewed over the past decade as the USA’s landscape filmmaker par excellence, and at first it seems bewildering to find he has now turned his attention to phenomena of the digital world such as Web 2.0. In »YouTube Trilogy« (2011), Benning organised found material around three thematic clusters which apparently have little in common. The first section focuses on children of various religious affiliations singing: »Agnus Dei« in the crystal-clear voice of a boy from the Vienna Boys’ Choir, two girls singing a »Shalom« song, a teenager belting out into Leonard Cohen’s »Hallelujah« and a solo of an Arabic song by a young girl. These young people making music in a range of formats produce different types of intimacy. Whilst the Vienna Boys Choir piece is clearly taken from a television recording and exudes a sense of the official nature of the event, most of the other videos bear the hallmarks of youthful (YouTube-style) self-staging. These tensions function in a sense as a prelude to Benning’s attempt to give shape to a kind of concealed artistic autobiography by compiling and processing found video clips. He describes this part of the film as »my own sketchy tongue-in-cheek history«2 and thus establishes an arc of narrative tension underpinning what at first sight seem to be unconnected snippets – a man describes how a pistol works, President Eisenhower gives a speech, someone tries on a blue dress in a yellow window frame. Nonetheless the clips, filmed directly from the computer screen, function not so much in terms of what nonetheless remains an arbitrary combination but rather through the prism of the unique character of each scene. That makes the autonomy asserted by Benning even more questionable; while he claims authorial sovereignty over the digital found pieces, this ultimately gives rise to an idiosyncratic cryptograph. In the third section – with the deliberately attention-grabbing title »Asian Girls« – Benning picks up on the issue of the Internet’s typical categorisations, yet struggles to shift these categories away from the terrain of stereotype. "