The film's title stems from the carton of cigarettes Lucy buys Kevin that night, a present on a holiday he loathes, which is also his birthday
When you smoke a cigarette, a fire must be involved to create the smoke
However, those receptors play an essential role in brain development
In the mid-1990s, the number of younger female smokers in particular had risen substantially
/Namerican Magazine Advertisement For Chesterfield Cigarettes, 1962
Indeed, the extent of one's familiarity with the Benning oeuvre is a crucial element in any approach to Twenty Cigarettes which at 97 minutes forms a rather more accessible and straightforward introduction to Benning than the forbiddingly challenging and structurally lopsided Ruhr (its sixty-minute second half comprising a single static shot of coke-works chimneys going through a fume-belching cycle that indirectly prefigures the rather more small-scale smoke-exhalations captured here.) To "innocent" eyes, Twenty Cigarettes functions as a coherent and intriguing, playful formal exercise
