James Benning’s first feature-length film announced the arrival of a radical new voice in the evolution of moving image art, and remains a landmark of the American avant-garde.

Looking to the past while investigating the present, the mathematician-turned-filmmaker condenses three distinct Californian landscapes into a total of 105 shots, each exactly 2½ minutes long.

Writer/artist Dennis Cooper & filmmaker Zac Farley: “We love James Benning’s films and thought about them when imagining our film’s possibilities. What makes his great 1987 documentary LANDSCAPE SUICIDE feel particularly like an elder kin to Permanent Green Light is how it eschews the psychological rhetoric that usually accompanies filmic accounts of crime, caring only about the mysterious vacancy of the film’s people and locations, and their relationships to each other.”