By Dennis Harvey

THE DESERT- island game that applies well enough to music or books doesn't work very well with movies. Because while there are certainly records one could imagine never getting tired of, and volumes close to inexhaustible, what conventional films wouldn't eventually drive you mad with their narrative contrivance, emotional cues, and limited acting? A movie is a process of elimination, excising spontaneity toward singular, highly selective effects.

If you'd prefer audiovisual entertainment that suggested rather than narrowed the outside world's wide-open scenarios, there is at least one library candidate for the bored shipwreckee. James Benning's 14 or so features to date (including shorts, his résumé goes back to 1972) are moving pictures in the purest sense, in that they fill the frame with indelible images that stir deep, barely guided responses. His work has been compared to Antonioni's and to the painters Hopper's and De Chirico's. If anything, his work is even more monastic and meditative than theirs. Patience is a fundamental requirement for viewing, but once you get past the initial shock of Benning's technique – stock-still shots that can go on as long as a camera allows – the experience is anything but boring. Forget "watching paint dry." Paint is dead, while these films are full of life, as bottomlessly detailed as a two-dimensional medium can manage.

Some of Benning's earlier efforts experimented with narrative, audio text (Che Guevara's recited Bolivian journals in 1998's Utopia), cryptic crime-drama reenactment (Landscape Suicide, 1986, traced the transgressions of Eisenhower-era monster Ed Gein, who was from Benning's home state of Wisconsin, and Bernadette Protti, an Orinda teen who murdered her classmates in 1984), even Nick Broomfield-like autobiography in progress (his obsessive correspondence with Playboy bunny turned killing cop "Bambi" Bembenek fueled 1989's Used Innocence). But these factors barely compromised or explained away the rigorous minimalism of his aesthetic, which is less investigative than it is a form of surveying – taking in whole settings, with or (mostly) without human inhabitants, to absorb their larger truths.

The "California Trilogy" that Benning has now completed is even more stripped down. El Valley Centro, Los, and Sogobi (shot between 1998 and 2001) are each composed of 35 2.5 minute-long shots, totaling 90 minutes, or 4.5 hours for the whole cycle – which can be yours in one sitting this Sunday, courtesy of the San Francisco Cinematheque. There is no audio save ambient sounds recorded on-site, no text beyond the list of locations (and, in some cases, corporate owners) that end each feature like an index. Politics are implicit here: Benning relucantly admits the term "Marxist critique" can apply as well as any "if you look at my films and ask the question 'Who does the work, and who gets the profits?' " But the picture here is so big it views environment and human populace in more evolutionary terms. And even that intellectual subtext is subordinate to the immediate, breathtaking beauty of his 16mm color compositions.

El Valley Centro takes awed stock of the state's great agricultural midsection, which provides ¼ of the nation's food and retains approximately 1/20 of its original wilderness. There's little here that hasn't been paved, scraped, flooded, or harvested to the max. Beyond the toil of immigrant laborers, human activity is just inferred, and ominously – in the scale of a massive, privatized prison complex, or a roadside billboard that warns, "Where meth goes, violence goes."

Los is Los Angeles (where Benning has taught at the California Institute of the Arts in recent years), albeit with none of the obvious glamour, clutter, or drama. Instead, the filmmaker chooses to view this longest-running test case for the new American megalopolis – its essence as fickle as the ever shifting winds of commerce – from the rear, so to speak, as one might better gauge what a refrigerator is by viewing the coils, grunge, sockets, and dust bunnies behind it. Ergo these 35 public spaces are all blandly functional ones (though still strikingly framed): a dump, a refining plant, joggers on a traffic island, a strip mall, an intersection outside a county jail – always road, road everywhere. These are Habitrails and industrial maintenance spots that make "resource consumption" seem a very graspable concept indeed.