Landscape Suicide

Prior to the release of Landscape Suicide, Benning had already built a reputation for his exceedingly long, stationary camera shots of landscapes and industrial scenes. Landscape Suicide merged the mesmerizing monotony of these structuralist film approaches with the fact-finding ethos of documentary filmmaking.[6]

The film recounts, and parallels, two murders that took place thirty years apart. The Murder of Kirsten Costas, who was stabbed by her high school friend Bernadette Protti in Northern California in early 1984. The second half is devoted to the infamous homicides and taxidermies committed by Ed Gein in Northern Wisconsin three decades prior.

In the words of Chicago Tribune film critic Dave Kehr, "It`s part of Benning`s project in Landscape Suicide to reclaim these deaths from the realm of popular fiction and place them again in a real world. His method is, alternatively, both to refuse to look (the killings, made familiar and even banal by their endless cinematic representation, are not depicted) and to look harder than anyone else."[7] By focusing his camera on the sunny tennis courts and barren fields of each setting, Benning indicts the psychological role that each environment (and its inhabitants) might have played in the murders as much as he might the murderers themselves.

• Rhonda Bell as Bernadette Protti[8]
• Elion Sucher as Ed Gein[9][10]

• Landscape Suicide on IMDb
• Landscape Suicide at Rotten Tomatoes