Fire & Rain

Created at the Viennale's invitation, James Benning's short film is both a simple and subtle piece of cinema. Benning shot the work process in a steelworks in the Ruhr area. On a kind of conveyor belt, a glowing piece of steel flits across the screen and disappears only to reappear again as a blazing, shining material. Finally, artificial rain falls onto the glowing metal, shrouding the whole image in a cloud of steam and making it disappear. The finished film is a fascinating cinematic poem about time and motion, and it would not be James Benning had he not taken the name of an old hippie song by James Taylor for his title: Fire and Rain.