Chicago International Film Fest 2026: Ambient Echoes in 'Eight Bridges'
In the liner notes for his quite literally genre-defining album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brian Eno, described ambient music as “intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
I couldn’t help but think of this definition as I watched Eight Bridges, the latest documentary in a loose series by James Benning. The film comes 22 years after his 2004 outings, 13 Lakes and the renowned Ten Skies, which I had the pleasure of seeing earlier this year at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center.
To describe these films to someone who hasn’t seen them or who is unfamiliar with Benning’s work, you have to be willing to sound a little stupid. When I got home after watching Ten Skies, my roommate asked me what it was about, and all I could say was:
“It’s 10 ten-minute shots of the sky.”
You, dear reader, might laugh like he did, but that simple synopsis belies the actual viewing experience. Like its predecessors in this informal series, Eight Bridges is a series of ten-minute static shots, this time of eight bridges across the continental United States (the list can be found here). In each shot, you see the bridge and its accompanying traffic, with the sky above and the water below, along with the bits of landscape surrounding the bridge. The shot compositions vary, but the bridges generally split the shot in half. In this way, the film feels like a natural progression from Ten Skies (ten shots of just the sky) and 13 Lakes (each shot containing half lake and half sky/land). The skies and the water are divided – or connected, depending on your interpretation – by the bridges.
These slow, patient, nearly static films of Benning’s, both in their construction and in their viewing experience, are very much aligned with Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music; I’d go so far as to call these ambient films. There’s certainly overlap with the slow cinema genre, but I think the important distinction here is that you can drift in and out of an ambient movie without detriment to your experience or understanding of the film. If we were to apply one of Eno’s maxims to this, an ambient movie must be able to accommodate many levels of viewing attention without enforcing one in particular.
As you’re watching these ten-minute static shots where there’s very little actually happening, you find your attention moving across these various levels. When a shot is first introduced, you take it all in. You note the bridge and its unique architecture, its surface and its underside, what the sky and the water look like, the landscape surrounding it. Once you’ve got the lay of the land, you start focusing on little things like the flow of traffic, ripples and currents in the water, how the composition of this shot differs from the previous one, how this bridge ranks among the other ones so far. And all of these thoughts and musings are soundtracked by the natural ambience of the surroundings: the wind, the water, the cars, the birds and so on.
After your mind wanders a bit, having been lulled by digressions, rhythms and discrete elements, you take in the composition as a whole yet again, and before you know it it’s time for the next bridge. Between each shot is a brief black screen with no sound, and that silence functions as something of a reprieve from the shot’s drone (I use this word in a non-derogatory way – drone is another music genre with which you could compare Benning’s work). It’s a cliche to say that silence is loud, but in this case the abruptness is stimulating and primes you to take in the next shot.
An ambient piece might sustain a chord for ten minutes before that chord changes, and that change, or really any variance or progression in such a song, is one of the many sublime and satisfying pleasures of ambient music. You’ll find these minute pleasures in Eight Bridges as well. The shot of the final bridge – the resplendent Astoria-Megler Bridge in Astoria, Oregon – is interrupted partway through by a large barge that slowly coasts from the right to the left side of the screen, and for the duration of its presence your attention is fixed on it. During the post-film Q&A, Benning talked about how lucky he was to capture it on camera – a serendipitous surprise for both filmmaker and audience.
My favorite bridge of the film was the second-to-last one, the High Bridge in Valley City, North Dakota. That shot is (SPOILER ALERT) punctuated by the sound of a train horn, which got a laugh from an audience member. It’s wonderful how these small moments that break up the monotony feel so significant while still feeling integrated into the ambience of the shot. If Benning were a musician, these occurrences would be engineered by him, but the fact that they are pure chance makes their fitting in all the more impressive (Benning also mentioned in his Q&A that he didn’t shoot much coverage on either side of the ten minute shots, another indicator of his level of craft and intention).
The appearance of the train is fun, but I actually love the High Bridge shot for deeper and more intelligent reasons besides a little choo-choo toy. Because it’s one of the tallest railroad bridges in the US, the bridge itself is towards the top of the frame, the steel support towers take up the middle, and the bottom consists of the marshy grass with the Sheyenne River flowing below. It was shot on an overcast day, and the texture of the clouds and the sky look like brushstrokes. You can see the wind work its way through the grass, which has a verdant dullness to it. The river, reflecting the grey sky, flows from right to left. The burgundy hue of the bridge already differentiates it from the other bridges in the film, and it’s a subdued pop in the shot’s color palette. After my mind swam through the various levels of attention, I resurfaced to find that the sky had cleared up, which rendered the frame totally different from top to bottom. It felt like the apotheosis of the film and a culmination of Ten Skies and 13 Lakes.
At the Berlinale earlier this year, Benning stated that “It seems to be the time to consider bridges.” Bridges do feel like a natural progression after skies and lakes. During the Q&A, he talked about how he saw bridges as a metaphor for connection in an era where people are disconnected across so many strata (which is why I’d guess he sees the bridges as uniting the sky and water instead of dividing). As you watch the film and observe the flow of traffic, you do wonder where all these cars are headed, where this bridge might be and why (there are no intertitles; the bridges are listed in order at the end of the film).
His other, perhaps more potent, reason for considering bridges is the way they contribute to capitalism’s chaos. The traffic on the bridges consists of cars and larger trucks and freight vehicles, often moving at a quick pace. So many vehicles cross over ten minutes. What does a whole day look like? A year? The outsize presence of the barge and train prompt the viewer to wonder what they might be carrying. Delivery of goods and services, fuel costs, maintenance of infrastructure (or lack thereof), all of these things come to the viewer’s mind as it wanders throughout the film and as they reflect on it after the fact. To feel so removed from these flows of commerce from behind the camera or in one’s daily life is a privilege.
Reflecting on the experience of watching the film and my attentive process made me think of the widespread production of media created explicitly for passive consumption. Characters in Netflix shows announce what they’re doing to accommodate the increasing number of people who put on TV as background noise while they scroll. Lo-fi hip-hop “radio” streams have been popular on YouTube since 2013, feeding bland instrumental music into the ears of studious students. Brian Eno, in his definition of ambient music, criticizes this passive approach to music creation and consumption:
“Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think… it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
The film is very successful at inducing calm and prompting thought. The mind wanders in a productive fashion. The line between ignorable and interesting is hard to toe, both in music and in film. I think Benning would agree that passive overconsumption is something that dulls the senses and the world around you. You can’t appreciate the serenity with which a barge moves across a river, the gradual changing of the sky, or a chord change in a piece of ambient music if you’re not giving it the attention it deserves. Allowing your mind to wander and react naturally to what’s around you is what life is all about.
-Nick
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