RR

RR (2007)

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.

Date of release
2007-11-02
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (35)
Runtime
1h 55m
Genres
Documentary
Director
James Benning

Interesting facts

RR is a 2007 American experimental documentary feature by James Benning.

Production

Shot on 16 mm film, as most of Benning's films are, RR is another in Benning's series of American experimental landscape films; this one focusing on trains and their surroundings. In Railroad, Benning explores themes of American consumerism and overconsumption in what Benning calls a "collaboration" with the trains themselves.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended