Deseret
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Broadly speaking, Deseret–whose title refers to the name the territory of Utah originally proposed for itself when campaigning for statehood in the 1860s (it joined the union as Utah in 1896)–consists of the subtle, artful, and complex interface of the condensed news stories, the recorded sounds, and several hundred stationary shots. Each shot generally corresponds to a sentence in the narration, the only exception being that each of the film’s 93 segments begins without narration; the narration of a news story always begins with the second shot, on the lower portion of which is superimposed the story’s date.
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At first one might assume that Benning is simply showing us the sites today where the events being described took place, but it soon becomes apparent that he’s doing no such thing. He’s noted that each segment contains at least one shot that refers in some fashion to the news story, but how is frequently unclear; indeed, the relevance of image to text is often so tenuous that a rift between them is created–a rift each viewer is obliged to fill.
Benning has summarized his Utah landscape shots as follows: “desert, mountains, and red rock country with Anasazi petroglyphs [Indian rock carvings that clearly predate the news stories] and Mormon pioneer ruins.” This list summarizes most of what we see in the film, though it leaves out a great deal, including occasional urban landscapes, a good many churches, a couple of government buildings, one parked airplane, two waterfalls, some industrial plants and toxic dumps, quarries and cemeteries, a huge convenience store and parking lot, a filling station, a cluster of fast-food outlets, highways, a few lakes, sheep and cows (as well as a deer and a zoo elephant), Robert Smithson’s celebrated Spiral Jetty (a vast 1970 sculpture that’s accorded a news story of its own, albeit two segments later), and several signs (designating Dugwat, private property, Brigham, Deseret, a curve in the road, a safety slogan, and, in the final shot, Utah). I even recall two shots featuring people, both clearly posed: a family in a farm setting (accompanied by an 1862 story about congressional amendments to a bill prohibiting polygamy and annulling the laws of Utah on that subject) and two little girls (accompanied by a 1963 story about the effect of radioactive iodine on Utah children).
Neither apolitical like Snow nor Marxist like Straub-Huillet, Benning stands somewhere in between these two extremes. He solicits the spectator’s active collaboration, as Straub-Huillet and Snow do in their separate fashions, but he also gives the spectator a much wider range of materials to work with–a database known variously as Deseret and Utah that’s neither as materialist as Straub-Huillet’s French and Egyptian countrysides nor as abstract as Snow’s Quebecois mountain range.
To get a proper sense of all it’s doing and setting in motion, Deseret should probably be considered in relation to Norman Mailer’s best novel, The Executioner’s Song–a narrative about Utah and Mormons and violence and the potential emptiness in all three–as well as other experimental films like Too Early, Too Late, La region centrale, and Frampton’s Zorns Lemma and Nostalgia (neither of which is much concerned with landscape, but both of which have serial constructions that suggest Deseret). Ideally, such a film should be seen and discussed not only by film critics but by historians and people concerned with literature and the fine arts, because it’s saying things about aspects of American culture that in the mainstream only corny, simpleminded demagogues like Oliver Stone are being allowed to hold forth on. Benning has much more to say about the vastness, complexity, and terror of American life than Stone (or Ron Howard, for that matter) has ever dreamed of. But because he’s saying it in cold auditoriums, in 16-millimeter–without even the “benefit” of preview copies on video–and without big-studio approval, most of our tastemakers who adhere to the cultural agenda set by banks aren’t even going to think of listening.
