Tanguy Benoit

Sandbox

Tanguy Benoit — 2025-01-15T13:34:16Z

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox is a short film about a digital wander through Monument Valley, a territory located at the border between the states of Utah and Arizona. Produced using Google Earth software, it examines some of the political and cultural dynamics that developed in the region in the twentieth century, exploring their effects on the landscape and local communities.

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Foreword: Monument Valley

The Monument Valley territory is under the administration of the Diné Nation, a people native to the southwestern United States and whose members are usually referred to as Navajos. For them, this valley is a sacred place, contributing to the founding myths of their beliefs. Images of Monument Valley were popularized as early as 1925, when Hollywood production companies came to the area to make westerns. These were movies that portrayed certain legends born during the conquest of the West.

Project Genesis

Map-making

Sandbox was born of a desire to develop a map of Monument Valley marking the locations where John FORD's westerns were filmed. Through rigorous observation, Tanguy BENOIT was able to locate over four hundred places where the director and his crews set up their cameras to film classics such as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). This map reveals a carefully structured space, made up of significant locations that film lovers have the pleasure to rediscover movie after movie. Besides being a tool for reinterpreting FORD's work, this cartography also inspired Tanguy BENOIT to generate new fictional and/or documentary narratives and to present them in a short film.

The Short Movie

Sandbox is a docu-drama that explores the journey of the early men, who roamed a vast no-man's-land in search of a gateway to new worlds. The story is a composition of narrative fragments borrowed from Navajo mythology as well as from the mining and filmmaking histories of Monument Valley. The images that make up the short film are collected from western movies produced in the region, whose filming locations have been relocated and whose framing and camera movements have been reproduced via Google Earth.

The Great Flood

In the opening, the narrator tells the story of how the first men were forced to abandon their village due to the sudden appearance of an immense tidal wave. This sequence focuses on the flood as depicted in the Diné Bahane', the original Navajo story. This myth is then recontextualised in relation to an event experienced by John FORD in 1915 when he was an assistant director for a Hollywood production company. At this moment, the short film's diegesis becomes blurred by the overlapping of narrative elements constituting works with various political and cultural concerns. Consequently, the first men face situations from for example FORD's The Searchers (1956). During their exodus, the characters discover the reasons why their country has been massively flooded. To escape the tumultuous waters, the protagonists have dug a hole in the shell formed by the sky. According to the Diné Bahane', the tunnel led the characters into a new world. This is the world in which the Navajo lives nowadays.

The desert: a Radioactive No-Man's Land

Within the Navajo nation, there are a significant number of caves, including one that was twice used as a film location by John FORD's film crews. Most of these caves, which are now completely sealed off, are former mines that were in activity in the middle of the twentieth century. They were secretly used to extract ores containing vanadium and uranium: two materials essentials to the development of nuclear weapons. Throughout the American West, thousands of marginalised people were duped by the mining industry's promises of fortune. In Monument Valley, the Navajo miners were uninformed of the dangers associated with being exposed to radioactive ores. Years later, thousands of workers and their families would suffer from cancer. The ending sequence of Sandbox reconsiders FORD's choice to film several fragments of his westerns in and around a cave of Monument Valley in order to suggest a curious hypothesis: what if the American director suspected what was happening below the surface? If so, when he sets the action of his movies near the local mines, FORD is associating the exterminations of the natives during the conquest of the West with a more contemporary and silent genocide led for the development of American atomic weapons.

technical specifications

year of production
2024

runtime
20:27

languages
french, english (subtitled)

color
color

aspect ratio
16:9 (UHD)

credits

written and directed by
Tanguy BENOIT

produced by
Villa du Parc - Annemasse

narrated by
Tanguy BENOIT

with the voices of
Marie FRANCEY
René HIÉRONIMUS
Georges HUBERT
Raymond LOYER
Pierre MORIN
Lita RECIO
Jacques THÉBAULT

edited and calibrated by
Tanguy BENOIT

music and sound design composed by
Tanguy BENOIT

Tumbling Tumbleweed

Tanguy Benoit — 2023-02-13T10:27:40Z

What is Tumbling Tumbleweed?

Tumbling Tumbleweed, Quieter Than Silence is a virtual universe designed with computer software. It stages the migration of a "Russian thistle" or "tumbleweed", an invasive plant that colonized the American continent during the conquest of the West. Presented as a video game and a short film, this digital environment explores the concept of territorial appropriation and reexamines its Hollywood representations.

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Genesis of the Project

Colonization of the Territory

In the mid-1870s, a plant from the Central Asian steppes was introduced by mistake into South Dakota, probably via the transport of flax seed from the Russian Empire. As it grows, the Russian thistle becomes a thorny bush that dries out until its roots break. Freed from its attachments, it is carried by the winds and disperses hundreds of thousands of seeds in its choreography. This wild grass grows spontaneously in soils loosened by human activities. The achievement of the American transcontinental, the expansion of communication axes and the development of tourism, have contributed to the dissemination of Russian thistle seeds throughout the territory. As early as 1885, tumbleweeds proliferated west of the Rockies, as well as in certain regions of Mexico and Canada. In an almost symbolic way, this invasive plant manages to achieve its colonization of the New World before the end of the conquest of the West.

Hollywood Colonization

The collective knowledge of the tumbleweed is related to the Hollywood productions that featured these dry bushes in the first western movies. By solving the problem of visual representation of the absence, these tumbleweeds have become a cultural prop of Hollywoodian cinema.

Project Components

The Virtual Universe

The digital environment of Tumbling Tumbleweed consists of an island designed in 3D using topographic data from the film locations of The Searchers (1956) directed by John Ford, Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola and Interstellar (2014) of Christopher Nolan. This open-world host diverse ecosystems, such as: deserts, rainforests, mountains, glaciers and beaches. These biotopes merge in border areas that offer the singular vision of a landscape (re)composed of climatically conflicting environments.

The Video Game

By incarnating a tumbleweed, the audience is led by their own curiosity and imagination to freely explore the island. The inexistence of a predefined scenario or character to interact with confronts the player to a feeling of solitude. The island reveals the absence of humans through the persistence of ruins, tools and footprints. Empty of the American pioneers featured in Hollywood productions, the iconic landscapes of the video game express the paradox related to the cinematographic representation of tumbleweed. Indeed, by emphasizing the absence of humans through its presence and its movements, the Russian thistle expresses the idea of a virgin territory. This cinematic prop implicitly evokes the emptiness concept often used to legitimise territorial appropriation.

technical specifications

required os
Windows 64 bits, 8 Go RAM, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz

credits

developed and produced by
Tanguy BENOIT

3d models
Quixel

sound design
Tanguy BENOIT

advisor
Noam TORAN

photographed by
Tanguy BENOIT

Trade Winds and Westerlies

Tanguy Benoit — 2021-09-29T15:00:12Z

What is Trade Winds and Westerlies?

Trade Winds and Westerlies explore how representations of space and landscape in the mainstream media transmit and construct narratives based on our conceptions of the unknown, the distant and the otherness. This project involves cinematographic archetypes developed through the Western genre since 1939 in Hollywood, such as: the indispensable use of landscape in the narrative, the importance of the horizon line in the composition of images or the particular colorimetric rendering resulting from the Technicolor process.

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Components of the project

The Tumbleweed's Simulation

Around 1870, at the high point of the conquest of the West, American pioneers mistakenly introduced a plant called "Russian thistle" into South Dakota. It takes the form of a bush which, once dry, rolls with the wind. In a few decades, this invasive plant, renamed "tumbleweed", conquered all the territories from Mexico to Alaska. This film projected on a screen taking the form of a billboard is a simulation generated in real time by a computer program that autonomizes the wind production. This climatic phenomenon allows a tumbleweed to move randomly through different ecosystems. These are created from topographic data of filming locations of the movies The Searchers (1956) directed by John Ford, Apocalypse Now (1979) directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Interstellar (2014) directed by Christopher Nolan. Tumbleweeds grow in anthropized spaces, meaning places that have been modified by human activity. This simulation proposes to symbolize and reinterpret the human colonization of various spaces through the migration and conquest of a ruderal plant species.

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The Diorama

A structure includes a camera system arranged in order to film, from above, a diorama representing the terrain of the previous simulation. This system can be operated by the spectator with ropes. This installation allows to experiment in a ludic way the vertical shooting of the landscape so representative of aerial surveillance technologies. These have become a certain scientific, tactical and documentary standard to represent blurred and inaccessible territories in conflicts, embargoes or wars.

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The Triple Camera Device

Video streams of the diorama are captured by a camera that has been tinkered to reproduce the Technicolor process: the first technology that allows the stable production of color cinematographic images. The internal system of the triple camera is composed of a prism which separates the image in three colorimetric versions: cyan, magenta and yellow. The superposition of these three colored layers allows the creation of a color film by adapting the trichromatic process developed by Technicolor, from 1928, to the standards of the digital domain.

technical specifications

installation size
≈ 9 meters²

materials
wood, cinder blocks, foam, aluminum, plexiglas, ropes, etc.

audiovisual equipment
video projector, computer, monitor, cameras and speakers

credits

developed and produced by
Tanguy BENOIT

3d models
Tanguy BENOIT
Epic Games
Sascha HENRICHS

sound design
Tanguy BENOIT

advisor
Noam TORAN

photographed and filmed by
Tanguy BENOIT
Baptiste COULON

The Hidden Story

Tanguy Benoit — 2021-09-29T14:54:46Z

What is The Hidden Story?

The Hidden Story is an essay that proposes a complete rethinking of the political role of the Western based on an analysis of John Ford's talking westerns. This research analyzes the narrative elements that the director exploits from 1939 onwards to denounce the violence of colonization that is usually overlooked in the narratives of the founding of the American nation.

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In his classic post-war westerns, John Ford depicts a fractured America that is infected by racism, misogyny and opportunism. He describes a schizophrenic nation where minorities are scorned. By examining the ways in which Ford manipulates the depiction of Monument Valley's landscape, this essay explores the filmmaker's engagement in revealing a hidden dimension of the falsified history of the conquest of the West.

technical specifications

size
20,5 x 28 cm

pages
101

credits

written by
Tanguy BENOIT

supervised by
Alexandra MIDAL

photographed by
Tanguy BENOIT

Forty-Niners

Tanguy Benoit — 2021-09-29T14:48:21Z

What is Forty-Niners?

Forty-Niners is a western composed of five sequences that illustrate stories of the conquest of the West. The movie considers dust as the only character in his stories. The narrative is suggested by the shapes of the clouds of particles and by the sounds.

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Project Genesis

In the Wild West, dust is omnipresent: it rises when convoys pass, it swirls in the wind, and it gets inside adobe buildings. In the 1910s, filmmakers employed tricks to reduce the amount of dust blowing around on film sets. Less dusty, these new westerns looked stripped of the authenticity of western weather conditions, the same conditions that had motivated production studios to move to California as early as 1907.

technical specifications

year of production
2021

runtime
15:50

language
silent

color
black and white, color

aspect ratio
16:9

credits

written by
Tanguy BENOIT
Julia PELICHET

realised by
Tanguy BENOIT

produced by
MA Space and Communication, HEAD - Geneva

advisors
Alexandra MIDAL
Emma PFLIEGER
Mathias ZIEBA

edited and calibrated by
Tanguy BENOIT

music and sound design composed by
Tanguy BENOIT

special effects
Tanguy BENOIT

graphic design
Thomas LOPES
Julia PELICHET