James Benning U.S. 2011 99m
color sound HD

Filmmaker in person!

Twenty Cigarettes is a game with its own rules and a game with film history In Benning s Screentests we watch 20 individuals, each of them smoking a cigarette. Some of them are familiar, like Sharon Lockhart. Others we ve never seen before. But they all give us time to read their body language. We embark on a journey across foreign facial landscapes, through long inhalations into the inside of their bodies, and into the invisible world of their thoughts as we imagine them to be. James Benning is well known as the structuralist and documentarist who introduced the dimension of cinematic time into the landscape. One take lasts exactly three minutes, or the time it takes for a train to pass through a Californian landscape. This time round it s people who determine the length of the takes by smoking a cigarette. They stand among walls and shelves and only their movements, which they try to control, and the movement of the smoke, which they can t control, stipulate the coordinates of the filmic space. Benning makes a screenplay out of this and surprises us by once again creating something entirely new out of little more than smoke. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Venue New York Film Festival

Casaa: fda regulation of e-cigarettes: huge costs, little or no benefit, says casaa

Howstuffworks “how electronic cigarettes work”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, April 28, 2014 /PRNewswire USNewswire/ Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its long awaited draft regulations for electronic cigarettes (e cigarettes) and other low risk alternatives to smoking. The regulations offer little benefit, according to The Consumer Advocates for Smoke free Alternatives Association (CASAA), the leading advocate for the current and future consumers of low risk alternatives to smoking. However, CASAA believes that should the FDA finalize the rule in its current form, it will inflict devastating harm on consumers.

“This is a classic case of government imposing a ‘solution’ and then looking for a problem,” said CASAA President Julie Woessner, J.D. “The regulations do nothing to address real concerns, and instead are a slow motion ban of the high quality e cigarettes that have helped so many smokers quit. The rules would mostly require busy work filings that impose huge costs with little apparent benefit.”

The proposed regulations are based on a faulty understanding of the science, reports CASAA Scientific Director, Dr. Carl V. Phillips. “FDA has cherry picked the available evidence,” says Phillips, “blindly accepting any assertion that favors aggressive regulation and ignoring the overwhelming evidence about the harms that these regulations would cause.”

Although the regulations do not openly ban the refillable devices that are preferred by experienced users, they impose a costly registration and approval process that would effectively eliminate them. Such registrations offer minimal benefits, but ensure that only a few large companies who mass produce small and disposable products would be able to afford the necessary filings. Additionally, while the regulations do not immediately ban the variety of popular flavors for e cigarette liquid, they signal an intention to do so in the future.

“Our research and others’ shows that higher quality hardware and appealing flavors are important for smoking cessation,” says Phillips. “Many former smokers report that they were always tempted to go back to smoking while using the smaller devices with imitation tobacco flavoring, but they quit smoking for good when they found better hardware and flavors that no longer reminded them of smoking.”

It is estimated that as many as a million American smokers have quit or substantially reduced their smoking thanks to e cigarettes, and many are already making plans for a black market if these regulations take effect. Those smokers who are using e cigarettes in a transition stage could easily return to smoking and future potential switchers may never be able to make the transition if the restrictions on high quality products are imposed. Woessner, who quit smoking thanks to e cigarettes, fears such impacts. “If I had been limited to only those products that would exist under this regulation, I would probably still be smoking.”

CASAA is preparing a response that will point out the flaws in the proposed regulations and is organizing its members and hundreds of thousand of other e cigarette users in an attempt to persuade FDA about the harms this regulation would cause. Should that fail, it plans to fight the regulations in court.

CASAA is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, public health, membership NGO. It does not represent the interests of industry. Donations are not tax deductible as a charitable contribution.

Contact Carl V Phillips, CASAA Scientific Director, 651 503 6746, cphillips

CASAA Members Please email this press release to your local newspapers and news stations.