静态自杀

　　1986美国剧情犯罪片《静态自杀》由詹姆斯·班宁导演，Rhonda Bell主演，影片讲述的是：
Like his earlier work it concentrates on the sights and sounds of backroads America but it places those images in a different and disturbing context
Landscape Suicides is centered on two murder cases the story of Bernadette Protti a teenager who stabbed a high school classmate to death in a California suburb in 1984 and the story of Ed Ge...[显示全部]in a Wisconsin farmer who killed and grotesquely mutilated a number of victims in the late 1950s
Each half of the film follows the same structure the camera looking through the windshield of a moving car crosses the locales where the crimes took place in California it is spring and it is raining in Wisconsin it is winter and snow is falling an actor playing the killer reads excerpts from the court records while the camera looks on impassively Rhonda Bell plays Protti Elion Sacker appears as Gein and finally the camera returns to the landscape as Benning strings together static wideangle shots of streets and buildings fields and hills that emphasize a perfect calm and an awful immensity of space The shift from moving to still camera has been made through the medium of the killerthe film is a movement toward death
Both these cases have obvious cinematic references The Protti case with its cheerleader victim and placid suburban setting could be the stuff of any of several dozen teen slasher films from Halloween on the Gein case directly inspired Psycho as well as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and any number of lesser exploitation movies
Its part of Bennings 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
Looking straight into the murderers faces as they describe their crimes in flat methodical terms Benning evokes the tremendous pain of a teenager disliked because she was different as well as the pathetic helplessness of Gein trapped by forces beyond his control or consciousness The pain of the victims is evoked too in extended shots that show a 1984 teenager talking animatedly on her bedroom phone while a song from Cats plays on the soundtrack and a 1957 housewife dancing by herself to Patsy Clines Tennessee Waltz
But Bennings deepest interest lies in the way the crimes have imprinted themselves on the landscape and the no less powerful way the landscapes have imprinted themselves on the crimes The prosperous California suburb is linked to the depressed Midwestern farm town through a shared sense of isolation desolation and quiet despair
We finally come to understand that both of these towns are located in the same place somewhere in the dark recesses of the American Dream