May 8, 2025

This week we’re presenting AUTO || EROTO: Road Trip Film Diary Dyads on Thursday, May 8nd at 8pm.

Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10!

Having just returned from an 8 day, 1,550 mile road trip across the west coast and southwest with my own partner, these two experimental films, which capture a pair of male-female filmmakers traversing the American landscape, were very present in mind. These two films excellently capture and interrogate the specific affective position that one finds themselves in when spending several hours or days sitting alongside another person, often in silence, staring out into the endlessly replenishing reel of landscape ahead of them.

First up, we’ll screen The United States of America from 1975, directed by James Benning and Bette Gordon. Appropriately and authoritatively titled, this short film depicts the two directors, graduate students in Madison, WI at the time, traveling to New York and Los Angeles, filming these road trips from the back seat of the car. While they don’t speak throughout the 27 minute runtime, the work is not silent, but peppered throughout by the hypnotic repetitions and tempos of the radio stations they listen to along the way. Often cited as a masterpiece of structuralist filmmaking, this is a great gateway into an often formidable form of cinema. As such, it is often discussed as James Benning’s work, being a foremost auteur of structural film, but I would credit Bette Gordon’s collaboration as providing a fascinating counterbalance. Perhaps it’s a bit of an auteurist overreach, but Gordon, who would go on to direct the fantastic indie film Variety (1983), is so skillful as a director of incisive character analysis, that it’s hard not to watch the two figures silhouetted against the windshield and not try to interpret the silences between them for specific qualities of tension and comfort.

After that, we’ll show No Sex Last Night (1992), also known as Double Blind, a shot-on-VHS collaborative film diary between French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and her then–partner, American artist and aspiring director Greg Shepherd, as they travel from the east coast to Las Vegas to—ostensibly—get married, as well as pay tribute to Calle’s recently deceased friend, the writer Hervé Guibert. As they experience the highs and lows of roadside Americana from their ailing Cadillac, the fractures and figments holding their relationship somewhat together are put on stark display. Calle’s work, subject to a retrospective Morgan and I had the chance to see at the Walker Art Center this past winter, delves deep into self-exposure and the ways in which we both construct our own identities and are relentlessly exposed to the perception of others, whether we know it or not. For example, her photo series The Hotel, in which she worked as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel and photographed the objects, clothes, and detritus left in the rooms she was cleaning during the day. At turns both infuriating and tender, No Sex Last Night replaces the silences of the Benning/Gordon short with overdetermination, the dedication to getting to a specific destination both in a road trip and in a relationship.

We can’t wait to take this trip with you on Thursday!