Documentaries

Stemple Pass

James Benning
USA 2012
121 min
V'13

Stemple Pass Road is gravel and runs south out of Lincoln, Montana. Five miles down, on the left, was Ted Kaczynski’s mailbox, and about a hundred yards in, his cabin that he began building in June 1971. That same year he began a journal. When he was arrested on 3 April 1996, suspected of being the unabomber, the journal was found in the cabin, along with 257 books, hand written and typed copies of his manifesto, some concealed notes, and a few coded notebooks filled with numbers. In June 2011 the FBI auctioned off Kaczynski’s belongings, and through circumstance, the journal, concealed notes, and coded notebooks came into my possession. I read all that I could, and then wrote a computer programme to decode the notebooks. These are the texts used (without permission) in STEMPLE PASS. Five years earlier I built a replica of the Walden Pond cabin Henry David Thoreau built in 1845. Then in the spring of 2008 I built a copy of another cabin, Kaczynski’s. This was the beginning of the TWO CABINS Project. (James Benning)

In the presence of James Benning.

Credits
  • James Benning
  • James Benning
  • James Benning
  • James Benning
  • James Benning
James Benning

James Benning

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