Sun in Your Head #4: Two Films by James Benning
Date & Time
Sat, 04 Jul, 2026 at 08:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
2218 S Jefferson Ave, St. Louis, MO | St. Louis, MO
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Details
Join us on July 4 for a new installment of SUN IN YOUR HEAD as part of Dissonant Works' Sound+Form festival.We will be playing a special Fourth of July program featuring two quintessential American experimental films by filmmaker James Benning, "The United States of America" (1975), co-directed by Bette Gordon, and "American Dreams: Lost and Found" (1984). The former is a unique structural road movie, depicting a trip from NYC to LA, presented in a sequence of stationary shots from the back of Benning’s car, with a tapestry of audio featuring contemporaneous radio pop songs and news bulletins as the bicentennial looms. The latter is an experimental chronological slide show of Hank Aaron ephemera paired with scrolling text from Arthur Bremer’s diary, with the two elements eventually converging with Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record and Bremer unsuccessfully attempting to take George Wallace’s life. Aaron and Bremer are two figures associated with Benning’s home town of Milwaukee (Bremer was Benning’s neighbor at one point), one heroic and one infamous, representing two divergent possible paths in American life.
Thank you to James Benning and Dylan Lustrin for making this screening possible.
Program:
The United States of America (1975) - 27 minutes
American Dreams: Lost and Found (1984) - 56 minutes
8PM
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Event Location
2218 S Jefferson Ave, St. Louis, MO, United StatesEvent Host
Dissonant Works
