A 135-minute staring contest with cinema history. Bring snacks and emotional stamina.
James Benning’s "remake" of John Cassavetes’s Faces (1968) is an unexpected venture into the world of found footage filmmaking. As Benning explains, he’s reconstructed Cassavetes’s Faces in such a way that it’s comprised entirely of shots of single faces, each actor and actress is on screen as long as he or she is in the original and each scene is exactly as long as it is in the original. This reconstruction, he notes, remains steadfastly true to its title
Editing
Temporal precision: every second of the original, reimagined as pure visage.
Direction
Benning's structuralist rigor meets Cassavetes's emotional chaos.
Director
James Benning
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Benning used the exact runtime of each shot from Cassavetes's 1968 original, down to the frame.
This 'remake' belongs to a wave of structuralist cinema that treats found footage as raw material for temporal archaeology.
US
