One of his trademarks is a keen delight in movement, often with the camera poked out a car or train window. Another is a willingness to stop the action dead, for minutes at a stretch, and absorb the ambiance of some everyday place. Taken together, these habits give his work a mixture of fluidity and solidity - always at odds with each other, yet somehow sharing the screen peacefully. Although he considers himself a storyteller as well as a traveler, Mr. Benning is less successful at weaving sparse, cryptic narratives into his peripatetic movies. This weakness stood out during the four-week retrospective of his films that opened the latest season of the New American Filmmakers Series, a regular event at the Whitney Museum of American Art here.