Benh Zeitlin has only directed shorts in the past, but he went into the bayous with a sixteen-millimetre camera (Ben Richardson did the cinematography) and the support of a filmmaking collective called Court 13 and came out with a vibrant feature.
All 20 of his subjects were left alone with the camera after Mr. Benning had framed the shot, and asked simply to smoke a cigarette.
"I got my first VHS camera in eighth grade and made 'Ben the Bagel,' a killer bagel that attacked my dad," said Mr. Herzlinger, whose romantic comedy/documentary, "My Date With Drew," opened nationally this weekend.
Instead of hyperkinetic time-lapse vistas of human activity, Benning opts for stationary camera shots, 35 in each film, each lasting two and a half minutes, meticulously capturing the landscape of California's Central Valley.
Ms. Benning uses a PixelVision camera, originally marketed as a toy, to create grainy, jerky, black-and-white compositions that are meant to stand as the polar opposite of Hollywood's smooth, brightly colored, easily digestible images.
We screened the film and met with first time filmmaker Dana Ben-Ari, whose unflinching camera followed a diverse group of New York City mothers from pregnancy through the first year of their child's life.
A friend at the march, displaying typical Algerian hospitality, ran to the Rue Hassiba ben Bouali to buy me a replacement disposable camera.
In 1990 Sadie Benning, then 17, made her 11-minute "Jollies," also about sexual discovery, with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera.
Sidewalks of New York Using a hand-held 35-millimeter Leica camera, Ben Shahn (1898-1969) roamed the streets of New York in the 1930's, capturing images of places like Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side and the Bowery.
BEN MCGRATH: Chance, mostly.
