‘Evers’ Launches Filmforum Series

James Benning’s new 87-minute American odyssey, “North on Evers,” which launches Filmforum’s winter season tonight at 8 p.m. at LACE, forces an immediate choice: to focus on the rich flow of images that Benning shot during a motorcycle journey around the country or to place primary attention on his diary-like writing that travels across the bottom of the screen.

Since Benning is an acute and compassionate observer of the world around him and since his words are no less involving, with their underlying concern mid-life anxiety, his dividing of our attention can be frustrating. (How easy, you think, it would be for him to speak the same thoughts on a soundtrack instead of writing them on the film.) Yet in time we realize he seems to be making a point, and that is that we’re constantly shifting between looking outward and inward, whether we’re aware of it or not.

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