NOW BASED IN Southern California, James Benning started his way-under-the-radar career in Milwaukee, Wis., where the two movies on this unique double bill were shot. His second feature, 1977's One Way Boogie Woogie, is perhaps his funniest – not a quality you might normally associate with an oeuvre of ultra-austere landscape films, but oh well. It's a series of (as is his custom) one-minute static shots exquisitely composed. The subjects themselves are hardly exquisite and are sometimes even decomposing: junkyards, warehouses, dilapidated homes, alleys, gravel pits, and granaries with peeling paint are accompanied by the clank of machinery or the roar of highway traffic. Through these frames of Midwestern industrial depression, humans sometimes wander in prankish fashion. There are perspective and editing tricks, and occasional soundtrack absurdities (as when a factory smokestack churns out air pollution to Tammy Wynette wailing "Stand by Your Man"). This may not sound like much, or play like much either – tolerance for the definitively deadpan is required – but it strikes me as equally gorgeous and hilarious. For perversity's sake, Benning went back to Wisconsin a year ago and shot 27 Years Later, which is exactly what it says: the same movie shot in the same locations with the same people (except those who'd died, of course) almost three decades later. Time has been good to Milwaukee, it seems, at least in the prosperity department. Views once decrepit and/or empty are now filled with traffic, parking lots, sports fields, spiffed-up storefronts, etc. The prominence of security fencing everywhere is a notable new wrinkle. Yet only a chamber of commerce appointee would be cheered. Trading funkiness for characterlessness, these new "improved" landscapes somehow seem the perfect metaphor for how American life has gotten bigger but not necessarily better in recent decades. Benning appears in person at this San Francisco Cinematheque-presented screening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)