In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted to play with trains.” Trains are a holy symbol for early cinephiles, not just because of the connection to cinema’s first notable hit, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat by the brothers Lumière, but because of the rush from similarly early films that placed the camera just above the coupler of the front locomotive during its journey — films that promised the exciting potential of the new art form. In the United States in particular, the train system promised a finally unified nation after the Civil War, as not only would North and South work on reuniting, but, for the first time, East and West were traversable, communicable, and ultimately controllable by the federal government. For James Benning, too, trains stand in for both America and cinema itself. Much of his work features the variegated landscapes of a diverse nation, as well as the sounds and songs of its history. But the iron horse is his most common symbol (especially in his initialized titles, RR and BNSF), that mechanical beast that stands in not just for a united, shared American history, but the technological progress that has determined America’s place in the 20th century. In a way, Benning, like Renoir, has always wanted to play with trains, and his latest work, little boy, may be his most literal expression of that.
That’s because Benning has switched from showing the landscapes and industrial structures that lay between America’s cities to their mid-century representation in railroad models. The film is structured by segments of disembodied hands painting the first few pieces of a model building, still attached to the plastic wiring (called a “runner”) of its kit, as a pop or folk song with varying degrees of political undertones accompanies the amateur hobbyists’ strokes and daubs. Then, a still image presents the completed model while a truncated version of a famous political speech hits its most familiar notes. Though many of these completed models are anonymous industrial buildings, many are also decorated with explicitly political signs such as “Northrop Grumman,” or “Raytheon,” or even some small Keith Haring-inspired tags. These sequences appear in chronological order of their respective speeches, ranging from Eisenhower’s warning of the military-industrial complex to Cesar Chavez’s speech on unionizing California farm workers to Hillary Clinton’s bragging about the Obama administration’s military policy in the Middle East. The model presented just before a nuclear bomb is a train car.
After keeping up with James Benning’s last decade’s worth of work, I always find myself paying attention to details that likely have very little significance on the structure or content of the film itself. For little boy, after noticing the setup and preparing myself for the pattern of images, my mind wandered to questions such as “Are these the same hands building each of these models? Do they normally build these models, or did Benning just grab them for these scenes? Did he hire them based on their hands alone? Is there a racial element at play with these hands appearing before Stokely Carmichael’s words?” — questions admittedly answered by the end credits. There’s a scene in the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when the narrator notices that students in a writing class are suddenly inspired to write more when presented with a much simpler prompt, like writing about a quarter. Similarly, Benning’s work presents an opportunity for a stream-of-consciousness game of I-Spy to suddenly override the usual critical faculties of the viewer — a different mode of “paying attention” than trying to think deeply about the much more intentional juxtapositions of song, model, and speech.
The other sort of game — trying to find bits of playful meaning in these juxtapositions — becomes a bit less fulfilling than previous Benning features. After all, these are some of the biggest, most important political speeches that either have been used as a cudgel against their speaker’s imperialism (such as Reagan’s admittance of the Iran-Contra scandal here) or are familiar mobilizing messages from the anti-war left (such as Dr. Helen Caldicott’s chastisement of American foreign policy at the end). Though little boy could thus play as a greatest hits collection (of both songs and speeches that congratulate the ideals of the contemporary American left), the accompanying toy imagery never serves to complicate or energize these speeches’ political power. Benning’s program notes suggest that the viewer engages with the film as if they were a little boy listening to American history as they build it in miniature, but these words belong to too meaningful a history to which one can easily listen with a newfound sense of naivety. Meanwhile, our political present has advanced well beyond the speed of mere train tracks, which makes George Wallace and Harry Truman’s speeches here, no matter how relevant they remain, seem like the remnants of a medieval codex rather than radio transmissions from a mere century ago. That said, there’s still a frightful beauty in the final image of the model nuke, likely “Little Boy,” as if all of history is just a plaything made to music.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2025.
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