RR

(USA, 2007, 111 mins)

16mm

Selected Filmography:  

PROD/CAM/ED: James Benning

James Benning returns with another ineffably transcendent experimental work, this one consisting of 43 fixed shots of trains in the American landscape. Part hypnotic homage to the beauty and importance of the train in history and part critique of the environmental damage trains have promoted, RR (i.e. railroad) is a singular work.

A stretch of celluloid itself is a representation of a train, one almost identical image following the other in rapid succession, connected by essential blocks of black, moving forward in time and space, and, when projected, rotating on a wheel. And of course cinema began with a train entering a station, shot with a fixed camera. Barring a change of mind or circumstance, RR will be the last of James Benning's films shot on 16mm, and how fitting that this ends with the image of a locomotive, pointedly stopped in front of a wind farm outside of Palm Springs, California, scrapped tires lying in the foreground. It's the last in a line of 43 trains shot across the US, a country guilty of over-consumption.

Those familiar with Benning's recent landscape films will be comforted by the fixed camera and the film's continental scope, but in RR the signified (the train) takes over from the signifier (the camera), with each shot lasting as long as it takes for a train to enter and exit the frame; this is both an aesthetic and a political choice. For viewers as well as the filmmaker, each varied shot comes as a surprise. Every one in itself is mesmerizing (yet unspectacular, due to the smaller gauge), yet RR acquires a cumulative power over its running time, as the simplicity of the structure gives way to infinite experiences.

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