RR (2007)
RR (2007)
DVDRip | MKV | 632x482 | x264 @ 1634 Kbps | Ambient AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | 107 min | 1,42 Gb
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
DVDRip | MKV | 632x482 | x264 @ 1634 Kbps | Ambient AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | 107 min | 1,42 Gb
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
Director: James Benning (as JB)
Writer: James Benning
Looping, chugging and barreling by, the trains in Benning’s latest monumental film map a stunning topography and a history of American development. RR comes three decades after Benning and Bette Gordon made The United States of America (1975), a cinematic journey along the country’s interstates that is keenly aware “of superhighways and railroad tracks as American public symbols.” A political essay responding to the economic histories of trains as instruments in a culture of hyper-consumption, RR articulates its concern most explicitly when Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech is heard as a mile long coal train passes through eastern Wyoming. Benning spent two and a half years collecting two hundred and sixteen shots of trains, forty-three of which appear in RR. The locomotives’ varying colors, speeds, vectors, and reverberations are charged with visual thrills, romance and a nostalgia heightened by Benning’s declaration that this will be his last work in 16mm film.
I found this experimental film absorbing, even funny (intentionally) in one spot. The concept is very simple. A series of locked off shots where a train, not visible at first, enters frame, goes all the way through, and leaves frame. What makes it interesting is Benning's wide range of compositions and framings, from extremely wide and distant, to having the train right on top of us, along with the wide range of settings, from snow covered, to desert, to crossing bridges over water. The variations between the trains themselves are fascinating as well, so by the end this becomes a study of the nature of perception as much as anything.
Benning also adds context over a few of the images by adding audio clips from the past; Eisenhower's famed military-industrial complex speech, a snatch of 'This land is your land'. While some have understandably criticized these sound bites as too intrusive and too on the nose, to me, in such a strange context they worked wonders, opening my mind up to the films' possible bigger meanings; trains as an instrument of imperialism, as a symbol of destruction of the environment, as a great equalizer that made long distance travel possible for the masses.
Plus, lets face it, trains are simply cool to look at. Something about their power, size, history makes them almost mythological presences in themselves.
(click to enlarge)
RR (2007)
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